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Of honorables as barracudas

EditorialOf honorables as barracudas

There is a fish called the barracuda which is a very clever customer indeed. When hooked on the troll, the barracuda has a trick where he suddenly swims along with the line which the fisherman is reeling or hauling in, thus giving the fisherman the impression that he has lost the fish. Swimming along with the line creates opportunity for the barracuda to try to shake the hook out of his mouth, because he has eased the drag.

The behavior of the barracuda is in marked contrast to that of the cubali, say, a cubali being a bull-headed character who will fight you all out from beginning to end, mindlessly when compared to the barracuda. In the fight, the cubali will give you everything he’s got, but there are no tricks in his game. There is also a fish called the kingfish, and the kingfish behaves quite differently from both the barracuda and the cubali when he is in a fight with a fisherman. But this is not a fishing story. So, we will tell you about the kingfish some other time. For now, the only thing we will say about the mighty kingfish is that there is a good reason why he is called, “kingfish.”

We are minded of the barracuda when we watch specific individuals in the ruling party behave as if they have not heard of the FBI Goldson files, or as if there is no need for them to comment. Two United Democratic Party (UDP) Cabinet Ministers who will definitely have to comment at some point are Housing Minister Michael Finnegan (formerly Myvett) and Foreign Minister Wilfred Elrington, because it is known that they trace their family political lineage directly back to the heyday of the Hon. Philip Goldson. Mr. Finnegan’s mother, Ms. Esme Diaz, was a fervent campaigner for Mr. Goldson’s National Independence Party (NIP) in the old Collet constituency (which included most of what is now Lake Independence, Collet, and Queen’s Square).  Mr. Elrington’s father, Peter Elrington, for his part, was known as an inveterate opponent of Rt. Hon. George Price and the People’s United Party (PUP). Although Mr. Goldson was originally a leader of the PUP, which was founded in 1950, he left the PUP in 1956, whereupon he led the Honduran Independence Party (HIP), which he founded in 1957 along with Leigh Richardson, into a 1958 alliance with the National Party (NP) to form the NIP, of which he became Leader in late 1961. Mr. Peter Elrington was known to all and sundry as a staunch supporter of the post-PUP Mr. Philip.

Where Prime Minister Dean Barrow is concerned, his family political history can be traced back to one of the founders of the NP in 1951, Mr. Ebenezer Oliver Buntin (E. O. B.) Barrow, who was Mr. Barrow’s grandfather. The Barrows were not high profile NIP supporters, although they definitely were, but Mr. Barrow’s maternal uncle, Dean Russell Lindo, became linked with the NIP after studying economics in New York and law in England. It was Mr. Barrow’s uncle, Dean Russell Lindo, who launched the surprising attack on Mr. Goldson’s leadership in 1969, just before Mr. Dean Oliver Barrow left Belize to begin the study of law at the University of the West Indies.

Messrs. Barrow, Elrington, and Finnegan have decided to swim along with the FBI Goldson files line, but there is no doubt that the files represent a hook in their mouths. The fact of the matter is that big people in the UDP did Mr. Goldson wrong in 1969, they did him wrong in 1971, and they did him wrong in 1973. Eventually, Mr. Goldson walked away from the UDP in 1991 and formed the National Alliance for Belizean Rights (NABR), of which he remained Leader until his death in 2001.

Suppose, just for argument’s sake, that Mr. Goldson was still alive and active in Belizean politics. With the Belizean media having proliferated as much as it has in the last quarter century, and with our young journalists having become as informed and aggressive as they have, there is no doubt in our mind that some one of our journalists would ask Mr. Goldson to explain the differences between the PUP and the NIP, and to tell the Belizean people how he compared his time in the PUP with his time in the NIP, what were his core ideological beliefs, and how he reconciled his personal beliefs with the different programs  and cultures of the PUP and the NIP. For starters, you should know that the PUP was very anti-British while Mr. Goldson was in its leadership from 1950 to 1956, whereas the NIP was considered very sympathetic to the British and must be viewed as the precursor to today’s “Baymen’s clan” in the UDP.

With this said, you should know that Mr.  Philip was an incredibly interesting personality. His appearance was bookish, scholarly, perhaps even nerdy, but his record in Belize’s politics was that of a courageous warrior. The Hon. Philip Goldson was like a pit bull. When he grabbed your political neck or seized on an issue, he would not let go. His personal integrity was absolute. Because of all his positive attributes, Mr. Philip became a living legend, and then, after his death, he is always spoken of with reverence. His name comes up very frequently, especially when Belize runs into problems with Guatemala.

At the height of his fame and NIP power, Mr. Goldson was challenged for leadership of the party. It didn’t make sense at the time. Over the years in these pages, we have never remarked on the fact that Richard Nixon ascended to the American presidency in January of 1969, just two or three weeks before the UBAD organization was formed. Nixon was a right-wing Republican who was militantly anti-communist. He succeeded a Democratic President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and what we are suggesting here is that if Nixon,  along with Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, met the January 1968 FBI Goldson files on their table, they would have been more likely to rough up Goldson, politically speaking, than the Democrats. We have in mind the attempt to replace Goldson as NIP Leader which took place around May of 1969, just a few months after Nixon assumed the U.S. Presidency.

There are political historians who have said that the NIP was a one issue party – No Guatemala. There is no doubt that the UDP, which immediately replaced the “No Guatemala” focus with an “economic development” mantra, was, very quickly, much more successful than the NIP had ever been. Still, after all these years and five different terms of UDP office since 1984, the Guatemala issue is as critical as it ever was. Belize achieved the Holy Grail of sovereign political independence, with all our territory intact, in September of 1981. Belize reached a hallelujah moment in the early 1990s when a Guatemalan President, Jorge Antonio Serrano Elias, recognized our independence, but the Guatemalan oligarchy immediately ran him out of town.  No matter what, the Guatemalan issue never goes away. Sometimes, it flares up.  Always, the Belizean people remember Goldson: “The time to save your country is before you lose it.”

It may be, you know, that the UDP under the leadership of Dean Lindo gambled that the Belizean people were more pro-American that we were anti-Guatemalan. The UDP gamble essentially worked from 1974 until the 1979 general election. The fact of American support for the racist Guatemalan claim to Belize presents a dilemma for Belizeans, who have migrated to the United States in huge numbers since 1961 and have basically done well financially in America. For Belizeans in the diaspora, the FBI Goldson files will force them to ask the question: did Mr. Philip become so hostile to the Americans and the British that he felt compelled to seek Cuban support? If that was so, then it means that the man who proved with his deeds that he loved Belize more than anyone else, sought a solution outside of Washington and Washington’s wishes and preferences.

Remember now, that when three political parties came together to form the UDP in September of 1973, it was Mr. Goldson’s NIP which was, by far, the largest and most popular of the Opposition parties. No Guatemala, we would argue, for sure had a core support. It may well be that the feeling of the Belizean people is still No Guatemala. If this is so, the UDP may find itself on the wrong side of the people’s gut feeling in March of 2018. If this happens, there are UDP Cabinet Ministers who will ask themselves whether the UDP should have looked the FBI Goldson files in the eye and told it like it was, as we would say.

Power to the people.

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