Belize: it does not deserve a bad name

Press, 9 November 1984, Page 13

Belize: it does not deserve a bad name

OWEN CADDICK,

who worked for radio and television in

Christchurch for 30 years before retiring, has sprung to the defence of a small country he believes was unfairly criticised in “The Press” recently. He spent a holiday in Belize following up his great interest in Mayan ruins.

Some weeks ago Belize celebrated its third anniversary of independence from Britain. Not a world shaking event perhaps, for Belize never hits the headlines and is rarely mentioned in the news. But it has claim to our occasional attention.

It is the only Central American country to have free speech, a free press, a literacy rate of over 90 per cent (double that of any other country in the area with the possible recent exception of Nicaragua), and no armed forces interference in the political life of the State.

In a recent article by Michael Davie of the London “Observer,” printed in “The Press” on October 27, there were several dubious statements made about this oasis of democracy in a desert of oligarchies, in a jungle of internecine civil wars.

A private in the British Army unit stationed in Belize to train and supplement the newly .formed Belize Self Defence Force is quoted as saying there are no railways because “they are too technologically advanced for the Belizeans.”

Why Mr Davie saw fit to give prominence to this unsubstantiated bit of European arrogance I do not know. Give a Belizean a spanner and a screwdriver and he will work miracles similar to those a Kiwi will with a pair of pliers and a length of No. 8 fencing wire.

West-to-east rivers were the main lanes of transport and communication for mahogany and people from the upland-inland to the coast for the first two or three centuries, and only in recent times has north-south land transport played much part in connecting the eight towns.

Belize is a poor country, not in spirit but in monetary wealth. (Even so, our recent devaluation has put the New Zealand dollar on a parity with the Belizean.) It has little to spend on what we regard as essential services, such as reading. Not much of the 132 km road west to the Guatemalan border or

the 166 km north to the Mexican border is sealed, but both are allweather roads connecting Belize City (and the capital Belmopan) with its only two land neighbours. There may be no air connection with these two countries (of this I am not sure) but several airlines, including TACA, TAN, AIR FLORIDA, and SAHSA fly in and out of Belize City to all the other Central American Republics, as well as to New Orleans and Miami. If, as I read it, Mr Davie was disgruntled at not being able to fly in from wherever he was in Mexico then he did not appreciate the compensating opportunity to view the changing countryside from Santa Elena on the Rio Hondo through the Corozal and Orange Walk districts (which are heavily Spanish speaking and very different from the Belize, Cayo, Stann Creek, and Toledo districts) to Belize City. Mr Davie’s article may be correct when he writes about defence matters but his rather snide comments on the country and its people are inaccurate; they are those of an in-and-outer who stayed briefly at a luxury hotel and spoke only to British Forces personnel. This is not the best way to understand a country.

Belize is polyglot in racial mixture as well as language. Creoles, centred around Belize City, form about half the population. Another 18 per cent are Amerindian, mainly Maya but also Miskito; 10 per cent Black-Carib; 10 per cent European, including a German-speaking Mennonite community. The remainder includes Lebanese, Chine, and Indian.

The main language is English and its Creole variant (spoken by about 75 per cent of the population). Fifteen per cent speak Spanish, 10 per cent Black-Carib, and

there are several Mayan languages as well. A third of the population is bilingual and one in 10 can speak three languages. There is some suspicion between some of the racial groups but little in the way of discrimination,. and certainly none of the “Ladino v. Indio” strife that bedevils “macho” Guatemala, Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua.

Women seem to have equal rights and positions. I talked to several teachers and the Programme Director fdr Radio Belize, all of whom were women.

Belize has produced one writer of high quality, Zee Edgell, also a woman, whose partly autobiographical novel “Beka Lamb” has been published in Heineman’s Caribbean Writers Series. Nor can the writing of Evan X. Hyde be overlooked. In his “North Amerikkkari Blues” he gives some insight into how Belizeans regard their culture:

"Notice how I write. I don’t allow the white man’s concept of proper English and grammatical structures to dominate my writing. I’m free, baby and I know if you are black, you understanding more where I’m coming from this way than if I tried to relate to you of ay style.”

The diverse elements that constitute Belizean society are vital, alive, and united in that loose way that only a free democratic society can allow. There is no radical LeftRight polarisation which rips its Spanish-speaking neighbours apart. The local press, of varying quality, is hawked up and down the streets on publication days. “The Voice,” “Exposure,” “The Beacon,” “Belize Tribune,” “Cayo Times,” “The Reporter,” and “Amandala” are some of them, each with its

own political view. The 150,000 population (with of course the exception of the Mennonites) is highly politicised, and of an evening in the triangular square (sic) across the road from the riverside produce market, politicians leave you in no doubt about their freedom of speech.

One passage in Edgell’s “Beka Lamb” typifies many of those uninhibited speeches I myself heard:

"The Governor, my friends, and some of our own misguided people, are saying we are communists, that we are selling the country down the river to Guatemala. In the past few days, the Governor has accused us of disloyalty because we refused to hang the portrait of the King in the only place we can demonstrate how we feel.” (The place, by the way, was the public lavatory.) "In a blatant misuse of his power, the Governor has dissolved our council, nominating nine people of his choosing to concentrate on street and drain issues until he sees fit to refer the matter back to the electorate. What have we got left? Let us present a united front to the world. We must show, as was said in the memorial, that a poor, suffering, homeless, undernourished people can stand together until our not unjust de-

mands are met. National unity, shoulder to shoulder . . . ”

National unity, shoulder to shoulder — could be King Dick’s days in New Zealand. This theme of unity which was so strong in Ms Edgell’s girlhood days is still there in independence times. And there is no more unifying force in Belize than the belligerent posturings of whatever military dictator holds powet.in Guatemala. Belize shares about two-thirds of its land border with that country, whose maps show Belize as a province of Guatemala. The repudiation of the detested “Guats” claim is especially shared by those refugees, both Maya and Spanish speaking, from Guatemala who have become, or are becoming, Belizean citizens. Mexico now makes no claim on Belizean territory and refugees from its Yucatan provinces are quite happy to stay Belizean.

In all newspapers, warnings about Guatemalan pretensions are evident and not without reason. While I was there a Belizean police patrol captured one Lieutenant Jose de Leon Flores and three squaddies from the Guatemalan border garrison town of Melchor. The “Belize Tribune” reported: “Guatemala has been caught redhanded sending over military agents in civilian clothes armed with explosives over the Belize border. The Guatemalans tried to get rid of two live hand-grenades when the Belize search party moved in on them.”

With magnificent diplomacy the Belize Government charged the “Guats” but then released them on bail to which, of course, they never answered — as the Government expected. Belize is not only anti-Right

wing dictatorships but also anticommunist. Indeed, when the Belizean contingent went to the 1982 Central American and Caribbean Games in Havana the team “left last week by way of the Northern Highway to Mexico by bus, then was picked up by a Cuban airplane and flown . . . Somebody . . . fearing public opinion did not want a plane with the registration of communist Cuba landing here.” (“The Beacon,” 14/8/1982.) So what, I wonder, did Mr Davie mean to imply by his cryptic remark, “A slightly curved line drawn between Cuba and El Salvador goes straight through Belize”? His “straight curved line” also covers hundreds of kilometres of Guatemalan and Honduran territory before it arrives in El Salvador.

Mr Davie stayed at the Chateau Caribbean, one of the three luxury hotels in Belize City, and complained about the food. Into such hotels the true tide of Belizean life does not penetrate. To experience that one must stay at one of the cheaper posadas or local hotels and eat, as the Belizeans do, fried conch with rice, cow’s foot soup, liver and onions on rice. Consorting with British troops, being waited on by hotel staff, is not the way to understand Belize as she is.

I was fortunate during my stay to make friends with ordinary Belizeans, including a family farming a few acres up the Sibun River. There, after a long bumpy bus ride, a walk of several kilometres, a shaky crossing by dugout canoe of the broad slow-flowing river, I lunched outside a ramshackle house on chicken, beans, and rice; played water basketball with a host of Creole kids in the river, and helped hold a heifer in a makeshift corral while it was being dosed. That was part of the real Belize.

Belize of the Belizeans is not found in air-conditioned hotels, nor even on the magnificent Barrier reef Cays (second only in extent and beauty to Australia’s Great Barrier Reep, nor in the aweinspiring ruins .of the ancient Mayan cities of Altun Ha and Xunantunich — and certainly not

in the messes and orderly rooms of the British armed forces.

Belize City may be “misnamed a city”; its cramped, two-storey houses unpajnted, its shores visited by hurricanes (so is Galveston in Texas); it may be built on a mangrove swamp (how about Christchurch); and if you do get to a windy spot to avoid the mosquitos, find their place taken by sharp-toothed fire-ants crawling up your legs. Belize, (City, District, and Country) may be all these things, but although it is poor in capital and overseas earnings, it is rich in everything else that makes life worth living — its people and their freedom to express themselves. In a preface to his book, Evan X.

Hyde reflects on his country after three years at Dartmouth College in the United States:

"This is my home. It will always be. In life it is important that you have a home. Somewhere you can go when you’re down and out, somewhere you can run when you want to hide, but more important somewhere you can love and be loved in, where people live whom you would give your life for because of reasons only God knows." In its way this is really an expansion of an old Creole proverb — “Daag wid too much owner no get no bone.” Translated, it means, “It’s not so smart to have divided loyalties.” I doubt if there is a Belizean who would disagree.

Little racial

discrimination

‘United front to the world’