Yesterday you heard the Commissioner of Police reassure the public that the Corozal Free Zone was safe from cartels after a photo of a banner went viral on social media. The banner, written in Spanish, said that the Belize Free Zone belonged to a cartel. Since then, the police have met and are strengthening their operations in the north. In the interview the ComPol said that the officers, along with the BDF soldiers, were prepared and unafraid.
But ever the social media lurker, Williams was disappointed at the Facebook comments posted under his interview. He told us that various persons said that he didn't know what he was talking about, and that the BPD is no match for the cartels.
Well this morning on Sunup on 7, the ComPol criticized those comments. He said that the members of the BPD and the BDF should not be underestimated.
Chester Williams, Commissioner of Police
"If David would have felt defeat before even confronting Goliath, he would not have defeated him. We can't go into a situation feeling defeated because certainly, we will be defeated. I think that as much as one may say that the cartels are well equipped and well trained, we cannot allow ourselves to be intimidated by that. We can proudly say as well that our military are well trained. When our military go and do jungle warfare training in other parts of the world or when other military come to Belize to do jungle warfare. You would normally hear that Belizean military personnel normally excel because we know how to maneuver the jungle. Belize is for us and our personnel knows the jungle more than anybody who would come from across the border and so it would be difficult for cartels to come to Belize and believe that they can run Belize as they do in part of Mexico. And as a security force that is tasked to ensure the safety and security of our people, we are not going to be perturbed by what we have heard of the cartels and many of the things being shared on social media right now where the cartels are concerned are old things, things that have been posted long long time before but again you find that the media, certain media in Chetumal are bringing up these things to spread propaganda and to spread fear in people. While we do understand and recognize that we're still not going to take anything for granted and that the reason why we met yesterday with the Minister of Home Affairs as well as the Minister of Defense to look at what we're doing up in the north and re-strategize to some extent, strengthen our presence to make sure that in the event the cartels may decide that they want to move to Belize to seek refuge from what is taking place in Chetumal, that we will be in position to prevent them from doing so. Another important thing that we must do is to make sure that those persons in Belize who we know are operatives of the cartel, we have to ensure that we maintain constant presence on them in the sense of doing operations, searching and these sort of things to make them not be comfortable to want to bring anybody over to Belize and so those are things that we're doing as a part of our operational plan to ensure that we can deal with any eventuality should that arise."
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