Email

Print

Do you know what story made the headlines the most in 2008? Belize City Mayor Zenaida Moya-Flowers! She was at the center of close to 100 news stories! The Swine Flu scare also made a lot of headlines! Indeed the last year of the first decade of 2010 had its share of big stories and while thankfully none of those stories were about hurricanes, a good man of them were about an earthquake. And also none of the stories were about mass civil unrests but the seeds of discontent are clearly beginning to take root as there was civil disobedience at the KHMH, unified student resistance at UB and of course Charlie and Hirian Goode. Indeed 2009 was a time of change and the biggest change came in the ownership of the biggest company – BTL. Here’s our look back at that bombshell and others.

Jules Vasquez Reporting,
The BTL takeover in August was probably the biggest story of the year because it was more than news, it was historic.

[August 27th, 2009]
Hon. Dean Barrow, Prime Minister
This is our House, this is our country. Here we are masters. Here we are sovereign. And with the full weight of that sovereignty, we must now put an end to this disrespect, to this chance taking, to this new age slavery. There will thus be no more Telemedia awards against us, no more Telemedia court battles, no more debilitating waste of government’s energy and resources, and there will be no more suffering of this one man’s campaign to subjugate an entire nation to his will.”

But the ensuing war on multiple fronts with Michael Ashcroft makes it history at a steep cost.

An ugly kind of history was made in Orange Walk in February when riots erupted after a week long standoff over that notorious core sampler at the BSI factory. The violence left one cane farmer dead after he was shot by police as the truck he was in blew past the police barricade. The desperate moments after he was shot were caught on camera, a landmark moment in the republic of the image,

And the worse kind of political history was also made when criminal charges were brought against Mayor Zenaida Moya in October. She became the first public official to be charged criminally while in office – all the more remarkable because the ones who set the trap for her were from her own party. And she lashed out at them:

[October, 2009]
Zenaida Moya, Mayor of Belize City
“I feel that somebody doesn’t have balls when they are going to come after me when I am on my bed delivering a child. That is how foolish it is. When I am delivering a child, they think I am…that weak that I wouldn’t have come up. Well you know what, I am a strong woman, everybody knows I am a strong woman, and they will see. This will play out and they will see that I have done nothing wrong but be a strong woman who would have anybody dictate to her and have her like a little girl. I am not nobody’s lee gial. I am nobody lee gial.”

And while one politician was getting into trouble, another was getting out...in June former Prime Minister Said Musa was cleared of the charge of theft of $20 million in Venezuelan grant funds. Musa’s former Cabinet colleague Ralph Fonseca was also cleared of those charges in March.

But the swine flu scare was bigger than politics; it had everyone in a panic – with masks on the ready, causing the cancellation of all public gatherings from school to the agricultural show but still up to this date, there are no recorded deaths from the H1N1.

And health met politics and when corruption was alleged at the KHMH where doctors broke their long held code of silence and alleged that the administration was corrupt – and the administration counter-alleged the same of the doctors – in a drawn out, public soap opera of dizzying accusations...

And while that back and forth went on for weeks, the earthquake that rocked southern Belize in May only lasted for a few seconds, but it forever re-shaped our thinking as to what natural disasters we are prone to as the earth opened up in Monkey River.

Protestors like these ones at UB in October also sent out shockwaves – as did these sanitation workers at city hall in November. Both got their way as the students fought back a fee increase and sanitation workers got back their jobs for a time at least.

One protestor who did not get back her job was fired school warden Hirian Good – she and her husband Charlie Good took to the picket line dramatically in August and held it for months – standing on a firm principle of non discrimination base don political affiliation. It is a principle the ailing Charlie Good died defending in November.

The perilous state of the roadways was graphically underscored in March when former Prime Minister Manuel Esquivel was in a dangerous wreck as his vehicle slipped off the western highway and was catapulted into the air. Esquivel suffered a number of broken bones and took 5 months to recover.

And while road traffic fatalities were a recurring theme in the news – it could not have been more so than crime and violence. New Commissioner Crispin Jeffries was sworn in April and though he boasted of lower crime figures, the society feels more unsafe than ever before with murders executed in the open street and the plain view of day, targeting gang members, businessmen and now...again, a grenade killing another teenager in December. In March one was thrown atop the home of the Comptroller of Customs – fortunately no one was hurt – but there are an estimated 18 more like this out there....and the taste of fear of urban terror is what most Belize city residents carry with them at the end of this first decade of the 21st century....

But it wasn’t all bad in 2009 – there were celebrity weddings, the PM got married – making him the first prime minister to tie the knot in office – and speaking of celebrities, his son Shyne was shipped back home.

It was a year when a creature as frail as a lionfish and a vessel as hulking as the Westerhaven both threatened the reef. When a boy who says he’s a girl captured the nation’s imagination or its perverse sense of a spectacle. When Said Musa said in his book that his ministers were sending me state secrets in text from the Cabinet room. When the dump burned for a whole month, belching out mushrooms of toxic smoke.

And if all that didn’t cause depression, then there was the recession, and those crushing interest rates that Government cannot seem to bring down. Those rates aren’t artificial, they’re real you can ask Wilfred Elrington he knows the difference – but of all these things – what we learned the most from this year is Chiquibul, a majestic place decimated and desecrated by Guatemalan poachers – the staging ground for the silent invasion.

According to our records – 2009 generated the most hours of pure news content minus advertising in our almost 16 year history of doing the evening news.