And while parents wrestle with how to keep their children safe once the airport reopens, Manzanero said that the greatest threats are, first, from border jumpers, and second, from the Belizeans who return once the airport opens, since they won't have to go into mandatory quarantine.
But that is a month away, right now, the jumpers are driving the COVID numbers up - especially, as you heard earlier, through the La Union border crossing in Blue Creek.
These jumpers are a major problem for the police and this morning Commissioner Chester Williams told us that plugging every blindspot in a large and porous border would require an impossible amount of manpower.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"Sine the beginning of the week we have not caught much, I don't think any at all for this week. The border jumping is a serious issue, a serious concern for us, you would know that we have stepped up our presence along the border areas and we are seeing where people are saying that why is it that we have not been able to really put a stop to the border jumping issue, but I want one to understand that th border is very wide and very porous and there are many blind spots and so even though we have been able to plugged some of those blind spots there are still many that are left open and we try to do patrols within the different areas, but if we were to focus on every blind spot along the border then believe you me would have no police to police the interior part of the country, because it will require that much man power, so we have to find other ways by which we can do our best with a view to minimize as much as possible the occurrences of these activities and so we put in additional patrols. The B.D.F. have four boats in the Rio Hondo patrolling from Douglas to Santa Cruz to San Felipe looking for contrabandists and border jumpers. I am pleased to say here that we have obtained two toll free hot lines from SMART and we are getting three toll-free hot lines from BTL. So, we are going to have five toll-free hotlines and they will be installed at the Raccoon Street Police Station camera room. Those hotlines are going to be manned on a twenty-four hour basis. We are also working on two infomercials; one to deal with border jumping and one to deal with contrabandists. Those infomercials are going to be in English and Spanish. In the infomercials we are going to put the number for the hotlines as well because these hotlines are being set up for persons to report any suspected activity of border jumping or persons smuggling contraband in the country. We are hoping that with this new initiative we are going to put a sever damper on the occurrences of these two activities that continue to threaten the well-being of our Belizean citizens."
Both Smart hotlines have already been installed with the BTL hotlines expected to have been installed today. The police department is working on infomercials to sensitize the public against the dangers of border jumpers as well as a social media page where the movements and whereabouts of these persons will be able to be reported.
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