Should Belize ever have taken independence, the forbidden question, argued both ways

By Horace Palacio:

There is a sentence some Belizeans only say after the third drink, or the third blackout, and lately they have begun saying it in daylight, on timelines, under news posts.

Belize should never have taken independence.

It usually arrives with company. That the whole affair was a scheme by politicians to inherit a territory as their private milking cow. That a nation this small can never staff a real army, a real police force, a real fire service, or tax itself into greatness. That anyone comparing us to El Salvador understands neither history nor demographics.

The usual response is outrage, a lecture about the flag, and the conversation dies. Today this column will do something different, because a country that cannot examine its own founding is fragile, and readers know my rule. I have argued that Belizeans should examine what they inherit, whether creeds or constitutions. The founding itself cannot be exempt. So, as with the Speednet deal and the minimum wage, here is the full ledger, both cases argued at their strongest, and the verdict left where it belongs, with you.

First, the case against independence, and let me argue it properly, because it is not stupid.

Begin with the arithmetic. In September 1981 this territory held roughly 145,000 souls, fewer people than a single district of the nations around us. The skeptic asks a fair question. Can a tax base that size, even grown to today’s 430,000, genuinely fund a modern army, a proper police service, fire coverage, hospitals, pensions, and roads? And he does not need to invent his evidence. This column supplied it all year. A government budget where seventy cents of every dollar is spoken for before a single wire is bought. A Prime Minister flying to ask a neighbor not to cut our electricity. Ten dollars imported for every one exported. Our brightest boarding planes. The skeptic simply gathers my own receipts and asks, is this what nationhood was for?

Then his counterfactual. Look, he says, at the territories that declined the flag. Cayman, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, still under the Crown, today rank among the wealthiest places in this hemisphere, with British passports, British courts, and a superpower’s treasury behind them when hurricanes or volcanoes strike, ask Montserrat. We chose the anthem, he says, they chose the safety net, and compare the results.

And then his sharpest blade, the milking cow. Independence, on this argument, did not end extraction. It localized it. The flag changed, and a domestic political class inherited the machinery, the ministerial contracts, the politicized public service created in 2000 and lovingly preserved by both parties, the procurement darkness that finally exploded into scandal this year. From London’s milking, the skeptic says, to Belmopan’s. That is his case, and stated honestly, parts of it draw blood.

Now the case for independence, argued with equal strength, and it begins by demolishing a myth hiding inside the skeptic’s counterfactual.

The comfortable-colony option was never truly on the menu. By the 1970s Britain was closing its empire with both hands, and the United Nations voted repeatedly for Belize’s independence. The micro-territories that remained are special cases, offshore finance islands of a few tens of thousands, a model no farming mainland territory of 150,000 could copy. And staying under London carried a danger the nostalgic forget. Colonies do not control their own fate, and in 1968 mediated proposals would have handed Guatemala sweeping influence over this territory. It was Belizeans in the streets who killed that bargain. The lesson is brutal and clear. A colony can be negotiated away over its own head. A nation cannot. Independence, with its UN seat and its access to the world court, is precisely the armor that kept every inch of Belize Belizean, Guatemala’s recognition in 1991, the claim now before the ICJ, not one acre lost in 45 years. Sovereignty’s hardest test, passed without a single tank division, which brings us to the army question. Costa Rica abolished its military entirely in 1948 and became the most stable country in Central America. Iceland, our size, keeps no standing army at all. Small nations are defended by law, legitimacy and alliances, not by battalions they cannot afford, and Belize’s borders are the proof.

As for the milking cow, the ledger must record a documented fact. George Price died in the same modest family home he had always lived in, famously austere, daily mass, no mansion, no fortune, nothing offshore. If independence was his scheme for personal enrichment, he forgot, across sixty years of opportunity, to collect. The extraction critique is real, this column has spent a year documenting it, but it indicts the political culture that followed, not the founder’s bank account. Judging independence by its worst administrators is judging marriage by its worst husbands.

And weigh what the young nation did buy. While El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua drowned those very decades in civil wars and coups, this improbable little country held peaceful elections and handed power back and forth without a shot, again and again, a regional rarity worth more than its size. It used its small voice on principle at the United Nations. It clawed its debt down from the cliff. And above all it bought the right to make its own mistakes, and therefore the right to fix them. A colony’s errors are made for it, forever.

There is the ledger, both columns full. And now notice something remarkable before you vote.

Strip the anger from the skeptic’s post and what remains is a demand, for services that work, taxes that build, a state that serves rather than milks. Strip the romance from the patriot’s reply and what remains is the identical demand. Both sides of this forbidden question want exactly one thing, a Belize worthy of its flag. The quarrel was never really about 1981, which no verdict can reverse. It is about whether we have used what 1981 gave us, and that question, unlike the first, still has a living answer, being written by this generation, in scorecards and megawatts and classrooms, right now.

So decide for yourselves, Belizeans, what you believe about that September morning. This column, for once, casts no vote.

But it does offer one closing observation, free of charge.

You are reading a Belizean newspaper, freely questioning the founding of Belize, under the byline of a Belizean, judged by Belizean readers, with no governor’s censor in sight.

Colonies do not get to hold this debate.

Only free people audit their own birth.

Whatever your verdict, you just exercised the inheritance.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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