Back in the first decade of the 21st century, when an initiative in Toledo to establish communal land rights for the Maya gathered force, Belize’s 3rd prime minister, Said Musa, said he would not preside over the Balkanization of Belize. Last week the present prime minister, John Briceño, said the same thing, and between them, our 4th prime minister, Dean Barrow, sent his lawyers to say that the leaders of the Maya of Toledo had greatly overstepped.

The leaders of the Maya in Toledo were pushed to demand their rights after half a million acres of land in the district had been given out to loggers, the largest concession to a group from Malaysia. Visionary leadership in the district also saw the improved Southern Highway bringing new people to the district, and favored friends of governments getting large acreages to speculate on, so the Maya took their cause to court and won.

It’s important for Belizeans who aren’t familiar with the Toledo District to understand what it’s like on the ground. It’s not nearly as uniform a mix as we find in the north. In a rough sketch, Punta Gorda (PG) Town, the capital, was mainly occupied by Garinagu, with some Kriol, but now it also has a strong mix of Maya and Mestizo, and of course there are Mennonites and Chinese and people with roots in Lebanon and Palestine too. The populations in the closest villages to Punta Gorda Town are East Indian, with some Kriol; the only Garifuna village is Barranco; and there are over 30 Mayan villages, mostly in the western part of the district.

There is much privately owned land in the Mayan villages within 12 miles of PG, some owned by other tribes, many parcels owned by Maya. Mayan villages that are far from PG have not shifted toward private ownership of land.

Mayan villages have two forms of leadership — the village council, and the alcalde system. On paper, village councils have a lot of powers, and the main one is the issuance of lots. A recent development for village councils is that they can pursue collections from business establishments in the village. Village councils have a direct line to the Ministry of Local Government in respect to any concern.

A country profile of Belize found at the website http://www.clgf.org.uk says that village councils in Belize began in the 1950s, they are formed by ministerial decree, and you can be recognized as a village if you have 200 voters.

The country profile says the Alcalde, who is assisted by a deputy and voluntary police, is empowered as a local magistrate. He has the power to deal with petty crimes in the village, he decides who can live in the village, and he has the power to call a fajina. (When the Alcalde calls fajina, all the village men have to come out with their machetes and rakes for a village cleanup.)

Our Mayan brothers and sisters in villages that practice the communal land ownership system must wince when they hear of individuals in other parts of the country getting windfalls when private land is expropriated or utilized for a public purpose.

Recently, there was the massive million-dollar award that was made to a family for cay land they bought for a few thousand dollars a couple weeks before a general election. Because a subsequent government thought poorly of the transaction and took back the land, the favored family went to court and was awarded millions.

Recently communal Maya got in on the game. All Belizeans were driven backward when millions of dollars was awarded after a Belize government built a road through an area that had been farmed by villagers in Jalacte. That did not go down well with most Belizeans, neither did the case with the cay land, but the fault is in our laws. Fantastically, our GOB sells land cheap, as rural land, and if our GOB needs to reacquire it, it pays urban prices.

In the Jalacte case, the fact is that, had the Maya of Toledo been followers of the system employed across the country, private ownership, an individual or family would have “owned” the land, and as per law they would have derived as fat a payment as any other Belizean for the government utilizing their land for a public purpose.

If it came down to a vote, I would support the Toledo villages getting compensated for use of their land at the same rate private owners get, but something really has to be done countrywide about these fantastic awards!

I want for our Toledo Maya to have everything they need to preserve their culture and increase their standard of living. I think all the villages should have sacred communal land with full share of mineral rights, but as I said from the get go, from way back when I first gave my opinion on the matter, it should not be contiguous. The story here is in the demarcation. For the good of the beautiful fabric of Belize, the villages shouldn’t form a solid block.

Bitcoins 2

I’m looking at a $50 bill. It has the face of our Queen, the Swing Bridge, a sailboat, tapir, toucan, the Coat of Arms, some important signatures, the name “Belize”, the inscription “legal tender”, and a number of other features on it. Money is just paper, but this piece of paper with all those features AND $50 inscribed on it can be, by government decree/guarantee, used to purchase goods (flour, chikin, jam, fish) or services (someone to cut your yard, bus fare, telephone) that in total are not priced over $50.

We all know why people all over the world, in Belize too, prefer US bucks. That’s because their government has the biggest bomb and the biggest economy. Their paper money comes with a far more powerful guarantee than paper money issued by our government.

Bitcoin is different from paper money, because it doesn’t come with any government guarantee. Bitcoin was created by an anonymous group, and only 21 million of them are allowed to be made. In contrast, governments can print any amount of money they want. All the government’s paper money comes with its guarantee.

Bitcoin is digital currency, made in a computer, and it is safeguarded by numerous security features. The simple game in this complicated digital currency “mined” on a computer is to bypass the people who make money when it changes hands.

In the story “El Salvador becomes first country to use bitcoin as legal tender”, which I found at the website livemint.com, one of President Bukele’s main reasons for going Bitcoin was to “give more people access to banking services and shave millions off commission fees for crucial remittances sent home from abroad.”

There’s a story (I think on Bloomberg) with the absorbing title, “Banks Tried to Kill Crypto and Failed. Now They’re Embracing It (Slowly).” The story is by a lady named Emily Flitter and in it she said that in 2014 Wall Street executives were fretting because “regulators in New York were exploring ways to control Bitcoin”, the danger there being that “regulating cryptocurrencies would also legitimize them — and that could threaten the finance industry. So they tried to sow doubt.”

From the livemint story, El Salvador’s digital wallet (aha, our banks are now into digital wallets too) is called “Chivo” (cool); it is law in El Salvador that “any economic agent must accept bitcoin as a form of payment when it is offered by the person who acquires a good or service”. The Chivo wallet can handle both dollar and bitcoin transactions; all across El Salvador you can draw cash from Chivo automatic teller machines.

Don’t waste any brain cells on this last bit, but there is a special “brass coin” bitcoin with super special security features too. But there are some legitimacy issues around its use.