But, the Government says it's not that simple. For example, today alone more than 60 Haitians arrived at the PGIA. Reports say some of them had money in their passports.
Yesterday at a press conference the Minister of Immigration pointed to this and said the smuggling situation is fraught with difficulty:
Eamon Courtenay, Minister of Foreign Affairs
"We are satisfied that the vast majority of them and again, I don't want to get into details, because there is a lot of intelligence that we pick up on these things, certain hotels, certain people picking them up etc. tell us exactly. There is a lot more information we have so we know. There are websites in Haiti and the Dominican Republic which is what I was speaking to Minister Alvarez about advertising flights and how to get to Belize and how easy it is once you reach Belize to go north. We have good reason to believe they are leaving through the northern border, not the point of exit. Last week Friday 60% of the passengers arriving in Belize from south. From that I mean Panama and Copa, Salvador, Tropic - 60% of them were Haitians. We have no evidence of any of those Haitians coming in are applying to work permit, special permit, permanent residence or anything. The number of them leaving by official points of exit is less than 10%. So the question is are they here or have they left? We are actively reviewing the question of what measures we are going to put in place to stem the flow of Haitians into Belize. We have to be careful. We have treaty obligations, but I am satisfied from the evidence that I have seen that there is an elaborate international network that are smuggling Haitians through Belize and we intend to as best we can to stop that. So that is something we are going to discuss with the Haitians at the Caricom heads."
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