THE PROBLEMS OF BELIZE ARE GOOD PROBLEMS, THOSE OF GROWTH AND DEVELOPMENT!
The news media tend to concentrate on the BAD things that happen, as those make the NEWS. In reality, Belize continues to grow and expand and development in categories like EDUCATION, AGRICULTURE DIVERSIFICATION, PRODUCTS FOR EXPORTS, LIVING STANDARDS, SOCIAL PROGRAMS FOR THE POOR, all these things have vastly improved and continue to do so, year by year, in small but steady increments. Belize is actually a wonderful place to live and local born people consider Belize to be a PARADISE. There is many a debate on shutting the borders to immigrants, to preserve our wonderful way of life.
One gets swamped by all the terrible things that happen normally in any society around the world, as these sell newspapers and television advertising. This can create a misunderstanding both locally and from foreign observers. The NEWS MEDIA presents a lopsided biased view of things. All the BAD THINGS that can happen. In reality, sports and living standards, roads and utility services are constantly improving.
It is a shame that this slant to BAD NEWS becoming headlines frames the attitudes of many observers. For the reality is otherwise.
Right now, we are quarrelling about OVERPRODUCING - CATTLE, RICE AND ONIONS, which have not yet developed foreign export markets. The over production is a set of newer problems of course, but certainly not the end of the world. Just another incremental step, a problem of growth that must be met and solved. It will be, the society of Belize is dynamic and intelligent. While we are not the USA, in manufacturing capacity, what we do for our very small 313,000 population, scattered over 6000 square miles of territory is HUGELY SUCCESSFUL, considering 58% of our population are under 18 years of age. There are no weeds and barnacles growing on this boat that is Belize. We are doing very well as a society and a nation thank you. May all our problems remain development problems, deciding how to get richer, live more comfortable, equalize income levels throughout our society, quarreling about the best way to export more things. OPPORTUNITY is the name for BELIZE. With such a small population things could hardly be any better.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Saturday, May 7, 2011
BELIZE AGRICULTURE REVIEWS FOR MAY, 2011.
Big commercial chicken farmers are mostly Mennonites though there are some smaller Creole farmers. Big industry for size of Belize.
Commercial corn crops are two per year in tropical Belize, staggered with bean production alternately. You can grow year round here.
Belize citrus orchids and export industry for juices and concentrates.
Belize Cheeses sold in local stores and markets. Produced by immigrant Salvadoreans and Mennonite farmers.
Papaya export industry of BelizeMay Agricultural Review
We get our summary ideas from local expert John Carr in the Belize Agriculture Report magazine and local newspaper articles.
MOST COMMODITIES ARE HIGHER ON THE LOCAL SCENE
Onions went into oversupply and some growers lost their shirts, due to not having a system of storing onions yet. The government will give them assistance for the next onion crop as we develop this new industry agricultural crop, using drip irrigation.
Rice is now in oversupply for the local market around 8 million pounds, up from 2 million pounds of a few years ago. The price is dropping, but the government is buying all the rice and working on an export market in El Salvador through a partial scope agreement by our Foreign Ministry. Local countries in our area neighborhood, have cheaper rice they produce. Talk indicates disatisfaction with the ability to suitably clean the rice before packaging.
This season sugar crop seems like it is going to be a good one. The sugar cane farmers are getting it together and the deliveries are being spaced out properly for the mill, while the amount of mud they were delivering with cane is now being inspected voluntarily and controlled, helping the expected season to be better than previous years. The amount of sugar to cane ratio has improved so far. Government is working on a program to improve yields on a person to person basis. The sugar cane farmers still have a lot of difficult farmers though, stuck in bad habits.
Hogs are higher priced, but with a surge in fuel costs, corn feed is also higher and not much gain is expected here in prices.
We cannot yet export cattle legally, and this is hampering the cattle industry. The regulations are being worked on. Our local cattle prices are only half the US prices. On the bright side, local processors of value added meat products are now producing for the local market, excellent, comparable, finished, table ready processed meats. It remains to be seen how soon this will become an export deal, by the container load.
Citrus has turned from whole fruit and concentrate exports, to value added finished carton juice products. Everything is already sold in the export market, though citrus growers are arguing about their delivery prices.
Chicken industry is live and well, and comparable with any other in our geographical export region.
Milk continues to be in short supply and the cheese business in the local market is full. We have not yet progressed to export type specialty cheeses, due to lack of milk and dairy herds.
Shrimp continues at a modest level from farm production. The shrimp trawling industry has been banned, due to GREEN environmental pressures and outside sources have bought the two remaining shrimp trawlers for our small seasonal mud bottom grounds, eliminating a small $800,000 a year industry. Farm produced shrimp continue to be available though.
Egg production remains good and prices are stable and affordable.
Bananas continue to be a productive small scale export enterprise and the rejects are sold cheaply all over the nation on the local market. One of the cheapest nicest foods to be found.
Papaya are continuing to be exported. Believe there are two or three exporters and those smaller rejects are still available in all town markets at cheap reasonable prices.
Tomatoes continue to improve as to supply and variety. Central Farm vegetable expert is now working on providing local seeds, as many of the more successful seeds are coming in from abroad, genetically improved and expensive to buy in seed packages. The next step is developing local seed capability.
Spiny lobster exports have been steadily declining through lack of size catch controls by our Fisheries regulations.
Cobia seems to be doing well on a small scale and the various problems are being licked. The open water fish net industry is expected to expand modestly. This is a total foreign investment in Belize.
Fish farming of Tilapia still is working. What is lacking are research studies and experimentation in controlled tilapia acqua culture. Currently the method is by guess and by golly. We have no data to improve this tilapia industry as of yet. Tilapia do though, provide lots of fish for all the towns in the country. Whether it is a viable profitable enterprise for export fish products remains to be seen. Local investment is reluctant due to lack of scientific production data. Our bureaucracy is too small and underfunded and unable to do many of the things we need to get done, to change the dynamics for exporting.
Foreign markets are opening up. The outlook by the controlling government bureaucracies is very slowly adapting and changing. They seem to only respond to private sector led, research developments and are not leading adequately with information and speed needed to boost economic growth. Currently the private sector look upon the government departments as just another set of obstacles to be overcome.
Friday, May 6, 2011
BELIZE NEEDS FOREIGN VOLUNTEERS TO BUILD PRIMARY SCHOOLS.
Belize has roughly 4000 children of primary school age out of a population of 313,000 people, who have no school to attend.
YOU DON´T HAVE TO BE A RELIGION, OR MISSIONARY TO BUILD AND DONATE A SCHOOL IN BELIZE. YOU CAN DO IT PRIVATELY. IT TAKES ABOUT $500,000 USA TO GET A PRIMARY SCHOOL GOING, INCLUDING BUYING THE LAND, CONSTRUCTING THE BUILDING AND HIRING TEACHERS AND MANAGING IT FOR THE REQUIRED 3 YEARS GOVERNMENT QUALIFICATION, TO GET THE TEACHERS SALARIES PAID FOR. IF YOU DESIRE TO HELP BELIZE, AM CONSIDERING ORGANIZING AN NGO TO DO THIS, WITH THE PROVISION OF THE DONATED CAPITAL. NOT REALLY MY THING, BUT I WAS A PRIMARY SCHOOL TEACHER IN BELIZE RURAL PARTS IN MY YOUTH AND SOMETIME PRINCIPAL. PREFER YOU DO IT AND ORGANIZE IT YOURSELF.
Primary school education is the biggest educational problem facing the small nation OF BELIZE. The government lacks the money to buy the land and build the schools. The government does though, pay 100% of privately owned primary schools, teachers salaries. What the nation needs is some charitable groups in more advanced countries to come in and build a primary school and manage it. There is always maintainance and oversite required. Some local and foreign entrepreneurs have actually built schools and are doing that, mostly to give themselves a job at government expense and those of their relatives, in the case of locals. Still the NATION OF BELIZE has a deep crying need for primary schools. Every year the population grows and schools with classrooms are quickly filled. It is a real challenge just to keep building classrooms to stay up with population growth. At the moment, the small country of Belize are short about 500 classrooms.if not more. Our local family have been planning to start a Charitable Trust to fund educational grants, but the actual building and maintaining and supervising a primary school has crossed our mind. Not that we want to do that, and our own resources are very limited, but the need is so great and Belize is so wonderful and given us so much joy and happiness.
What we have in Belize is an unrealized potential of human capital. The country seems rather backward to many foreign tourists, but compared to what it was 50 years ago, the standard of living has risen tremendously. Education has improved by leaps and bounds, particularly at the tertiary level. Unfortunately we still have officially a 50% poverty level and being tropical most people struggle to simply feed themselves, but as standard of living rises, the financial difficulties for people are growing as living conditions also improve. The nation of Belize has an official population of 313,000 people scattered over 6000 square miles. Some of it very rugged terrain. Roads are going in and people are moving into what was previously jungle lands and are now being developed. We have about 9 towns of modest small size and hundreds of villages and scattered small homesteads. There is actually a very highly motivated population and given the limited resources of a small population and a minimal government bureaucracy to maintain, Belize is doing much better than some of our neighboring Central American countries, or Caribbean island countries. Considering the modest tax base of a raw commodity exporting small nation, we do very well for the small tax base available. Living here is to live in paradise though. Much better than in European, or North American countries, I think. If you like rural and warm weather, it is perfect.
The CRIME situation in BELIZE.
SOCIOLOGY OF CRIME IN BELIZE
PM Barrow´s comments on crime and social conditions in Belize.
"The point is, while we must attack the social conditions that breed this kind of mentality, we have to go at that particular element hard and it's not just with respect to the on-the- ground efforts of the GSU, it is as well to broaden and deepen the legal infrastructure so that the sort of penal catchment area can be widened," he said.
______________________________________
Minister of Education, Patrick Faber, while discussing a new building to open a poverty type, uneducated school training system made a comment on social conditions found in the South Side of Belize City, the port town.
The survey showed that the congested part of the city for living conditions, produced a lot of young males without schooling. Most had quit school before even finishing elementary levels. Standard 6 in the Belize educational system. The survey showed that young males refused to go to school. They did not want to and they were supported by their parent ( mostly single mothers ) in this idea.
The areas in this country that have this problem are primarily CREOLE culture. Found in the port Belize City, Esperanza, Roaring Creek and often Dangriga. The people of these areas still communicate verbally with very limited vocabularies, they speak a BROAD DIALECT called CREOLE, sort of a bastardized English of the 17 th century. 50 years ago this was the main language of the country, with the then much smaller population. Black Creole culture dominated and the Creole dialect or language was the dominant varient of English. The population has grown a lot since those 50 years and nowadays the idea of having a plantation and doing some subsistance fishing is no longer viable as a port town life style. To find a paying job you have to have some education. Those that speak CREOLE as a first language, or dialect, mostly are nowadays relegated to manual labor. They get the poorest paid jobs when they can find a salaried job. Education has been on the mend for several decades now and we have many people with advanced degrees and most young people with ambition have either High School, or Associate Degree. The tertiary education by product has meant that for CREOLE ONLY speakers, has produced a lot of job applicants who are, you could say, bi-lingual, they can speak the CREOLE dialect, not understood by foreigners, and International quality English, though most Belizeans understand Creole, though it is dying out in the Western and Northern part of the country. From their higher education viewpoint, they have also learned to express themselves in International English. Gradually, except for pockets, International English has become the norm. Teachers and civil servants were once always CREOLE speakers, but nowadays the transformation to a higher educated paid workforce, with more labor competition, has meant the CREOLE speakers no longer have much choices as to employment. Certainly nothing in higher paid employment. Not to forget that the population has grown to be mostly Spanish speakers of the Mestizo class. Creoles have shrunk from 97% of the population to 20% of the population.
The result has been a drift toward professional career criminals, born and bred in the slums, gravitating toward the easier work and higher pay of crime. Crime itself over fifty years, has progressed from career thieves and cat burglars, to violent crime, murder of victims to get rid of witness and evidence, while leading a life that is a career of itself, of robbing people in street robberies, home invasions and certainly targeting stores, payrolls and selling of addictive crack cocaine to people enduced into trying crack, which enslaves them without originally being aware. The gangs dealing in crime actually GLOAT over stupid addicts, and there is always a percentage of a population, genetically disposed to addictive things, like alcohol, marijuana and crack smoking. The criminal forces have learned to hook youngsters early in life and once addicted they are a source of money for the rest of their lives.
In essence, while there will always be occasional crimes of opportunity, crimes of passion and those lacking anger management and peer pressure in any civil society, of any country. A whole industry has expanded and grown up now fueled mostly by CREOLES who never finished primary school, have no intention too and they have learned that CRIME PAYS and is a worthwhile substitute for going fishing, or growing food on a plantation. With the rise of living standards, the easy going life of yesteryear, with kerosene lamps, buckets for toilets is gone. The cost of a higher standard of living and material costs that go along with it, means that these CREOLE enclaves of uneducated, poorly speaking CREOLE speakers, can only find the money to live and match their peers with material goodies, through a life of career crime. They are the recent survey showed, choosing this course of life, deliberately.
Sad to say this class of youths and adults have learned by an inadequate justice system, that violence pays, murder pays and the crime wave experienced in the port town is the result. It does not seem to be a sociological problem so much, as an inadequate justice system. Most policemen are their peers and come from the streets themselves and understand them well. In essence, we have a situation, where a small segment of our greater society is in a CIVIL WAR with the greater population. Deliberately so, because they can get away with it. Some of course are pre-disposed. It is a life style choice. There is not much compassion in me for criminals enslaving young people for life, to addiction by crack cocaine sales.
As the universe shows and also our own planet Earth, life is about EAT or be EATEN and this segment of our society have turned into predators and we the greater population have become their prey, by their own choice. Not by force of circumstance. In a civilized society, it is the role of our taxes, to pay for security to protect us masses of citizens from the vicious predators, the sharks, the crocodiles and snakes among our human population. We are like a school of anchovies swirling around, trying to confuse the sharks, the whales, the marlin and sailfish that prey on us. We have chosen to pay taxes and hire mercenaries to protect us. Unfortunately this is not working very well. Since it is a WAR, not made from us the prey, or greater population of our civilized society, then it seems we need to be more aggressive in this war and meet fear and terror, with fear and terror in self defence. Make no mistake about it, the predators are in human terms and of civil organized society, EVIL persons. Wild animals that need to be put down.
The subject has more complexities than this. For instance first time offenders, or those youngsters coaxed into taking free crack cocaine and becoming unwittingly addicted, against those who are career criminal persons, who laugh and jeer at civil society, viewing us and our group life style, of peaceful work, education and family raising. It is still CIVIL WAR and if you are going to go to war against the predators, then perhaps we should change the current rules that have evolved from a more peaceful colonial time, when compassion, understanding, addiction to rum or marijuana was tolerated and the petty crimes that were the result in a small segment of our society. Today, a much larger segment of our society the survey shows, are deliberately making war on our civilized society and we need to understand that we are in this war and need to get more serious about it.
______________________________________________
Jamaica Observer: ( newspaper )
Belmopan, Belize - (CMC) Prime Minister Dean Barrow said his administration will introduce tougher legislation to deal with crime at next Friday's sitting of Parliament after a grenade was thrown at a group of people in the old capital of St Martin on Tuesday.
Police were continuing their search for suspects and Barrow told reporters that he was thankful that the devise, which landed in front of a group of women and children, did not explode.
"Thank God the grenade did not explode. Generally, I believe that the GSU (Gang Suppression Unit) has been doing extremely well. I believe that unit has been able to bring some slight sense of reassurance to the public especially here in Belize City.
"We, in government, have committed to in fact provide to the unit all the wherewithal, all the material that it needs and we're in the process of procuring additional weaponry, additional bullet proof vests and additional vehicles," Barrow said.
Police said that one person is assisting their investigations into the incident that could have resulted in a major disaster had the grenade exploded.
Barrow said that the Government would soon be opening a building that would provide "a second chance facility in terms of people who have not had an opportunity to complete school".
"And this allows me to say that the enforcement efforts of the police and of the security forces general; while extremely critical, have to be complimented by the attempts at social amelioration. So I do want to make clear that in that context we signed the loan for $US10 million from the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) which will help with the training of young people, which will help with community involvement, which will help us to try even harder to beat back this phenomenon of urban violence."
The prime minister acknowledged that the security forces now had to deal with criminals who are showing that they have no regard for life or property.
But he sought to assure citizens that his administration would be taking stronger measures to deal with the situation.
"The point is, while we must attack the social conditions that breed this kind of mentality, we have to go at that particular element hard and it's not just with respect to the on-the- ground efforts of the GSU, it is as well to broaden and deepen the legal infrastructure so that the sort of penal catchment area can be widened," he said.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Belize-promises-tougher-laws-as-rival-gang-crime-worsens_8762125#ixzz1LaRJn04b
PM Barrow´s comments on crime and social conditions in Belize.
"The point is, while we must attack the social conditions that breed this kind of mentality, we have to go at that particular element hard and it's not just with respect to the on-the- ground efforts of the GSU, it is as well to broaden and deepen the legal infrastructure so that the sort of penal catchment area can be widened," he said.
______________________________________
Minister of Education, Patrick Faber, while discussing a new building to open a poverty type, uneducated school training system made a comment on social conditions found in the South Side of Belize City, the port town.
The survey showed that the congested part of the city for living conditions, produced a lot of young males without schooling. Most had quit school before even finishing elementary levels. Standard 6 in the Belize educational system. The survey showed that young males refused to go to school. They did not want to and they were supported by their parent ( mostly single mothers ) in this idea.
The areas in this country that have this problem are primarily CREOLE culture. Found in the port Belize City, Esperanza, Roaring Creek and often Dangriga. The people of these areas still communicate verbally with very limited vocabularies, they speak a BROAD DIALECT called CREOLE, sort of a bastardized English of the 17 th century. 50 years ago this was the main language of the country, with the then much smaller population. Black Creole culture dominated and the Creole dialect or language was the dominant varient of English. The population has grown a lot since those 50 years and nowadays the idea of having a plantation and doing some subsistance fishing is no longer viable as a port town life style. To find a paying job you have to have some education. Those that speak CREOLE as a first language, or dialect, mostly are nowadays relegated to manual labor. They get the poorest paid jobs when they can find a salaried job. Education has been on the mend for several decades now and we have many people with advanced degrees and most young people with ambition have either High School, or Associate Degree. The tertiary education by product has meant that for CREOLE ONLY speakers, has produced a lot of job applicants who are, you could say, bi-lingual, they can speak the CREOLE dialect, not understood by foreigners, and International quality English, though most Belizeans understand Creole, though it is dying out in the Western and Northern part of the country. From their higher education viewpoint, they have also learned to express themselves in International English. Gradually, except for pockets, International English has become the norm. Teachers and civil servants were once always CREOLE speakers, but nowadays the transformation to a higher educated paid workforce, with more labor competition, has meant the CREOLE speakers no longer have much choices as to employment. Certainly nothing in higher paid employment. Not to forget that the population has grown to be mostly Spanish speakers of the Mestizo class. Creoles have shrunk from 97% of the population to 20% of the population.
The result has been a drift toward professional career criminals, born and bred in the slums, gravitating toward the easier work and higher pay of crime. Crime itself over fifty years, has progressed from career thieves and cat burglars, to violent crime, murder of victims to get rid of witness and evidence, while leading a life that is a career of itself, of robbing people in street robberies, home invasions and certainly targeting stores, payrolls and selling of addictive crack cocaine to people enduced into trying crack, which enslaves them without originally being aware. The gangs dealing in crime actually GLOAT over stupid addicts, and there is always a percentage of a population, genetically disposed to addictive things, like alcohol, marijuana and crack smoking. The criminal forces have learned to hook youngsters early in life and once addicted they are a source of money for the rest of their lives.
In essence, while there will always be occasional crimes of opportunity, crimes of passion and those lacking anger management and peer pressure in any civil society, of any country. A whole industry has expanded and grown up now fueled mostly by CREOLES who never finished primary school, have no intention too and they have learned that CRIME PAYS and is a worthwhile substitute for going fishing, or growing food on a plantation. With the rise of living standards, the easy going life of yesteryear, with kerosene lamps, buckets for toilets is gone. The cost of a higher standard of living and material costs that go along with it, means that these CREOLE enclaves of uneducated, poorly speaking CREOLE speakers, can only find the money to live and match their peers with material goodies, through a life of career crime. They are the recent survey showed, choosing this course of life, deliberately.
Sad to say this class of youths and adults have learned by an inadequate justice system, that violence pays, murder pays and the crime wave experienced in the port town is the result. It does not seem to be a sociological problem so much, as an inadequate justice system. Most policemen are their peers and come from the streets themselves and understand them well. In essence, we have a situation, where a small segment of our greater society is in a CIVIL WAR with the greater population. Deliberately so, because they can get away with it. Some of course are pre-disposed. It is a life style choice. There is not much compassion in me for criminals enslaving young people for life, to addiction by crack cocaine sales.
As the universe shows and also our own planet Earth, life is about EAT or be EATEN and this segment of our society have turned into predators and we the greater population have become their prey, by their own choice. Not by force of circumstance. In a civilized society, it is the role of our taxes, to pay for security to protect us masses of citizens from the vicious predators, the sharks, the crocodiles and snakes among our human population. We are like a school of anchovies swirling around, trying to confuse the sharks, the whales, the marlin and sailfish that prey on us. We have chosen to pay taxes and hire mercenaries to protect us. Unfortunately this is not working very well. Since it is a WAR, not made from us the prey, or greater population of our civilized society, then it seems we need to be more aggressive in this war and meet fear and terror, with fear and terror in self defence. Make no mistake about it, the predators are in human terms and of civil organized society, EVIL persons. Wild animals that need to be put down.
The subject has more complexities than this. For instance first time offenders, or those youngsters coaxed into taking free crack cocaine and becoming unwittingly addicted, against those who are career criminal persons, who laugh and jeer at civil society, viewing us and our group life style, of peaceful work, education and family raising. It is still CIVIL WAR and if you are going to go to war against the predators, then perhaps we should change the current rules that have evolved from a more peaceful colonial time, when compassion, understanding, addiction to rum or marijuana was tolerated and the petty crimes that were the result in a small segment of our society. Today, a much larger segment of our society the survey shows, are deliberately making war on our civilized society and we need to understand that we are in this war and need to get more serious about it.
______________________________________________
Jamaica Observer: ( newspaper )
Belmopan, Belize - (CMC) Prime Minister Dean Barrow said his administration will introduce tougher legislation to deal with crime at next Friday's sitting of Parliament after a grenade was thrown at a group of people in the old capital of St Martin on Tuesday.
Police were continuing their search for suspects and Barrow told reporters that he was thankful that the devise, which landed in front of a group of women and children, did not explode.
"Thank God the grenade did not explode. Generally, I believe that the GSU (Gang Suppression Unit) has been doing extremely well. I believe that unit has been able to bring some slight sense of reassurance to the public especially here in Belize City.
"We, in government, have committed to in fact provide to the unit all the wherewithal, all the material that it needs and we're in the process of procuring additional weaponry, additional bullet proof vests and additional vehicles," Barrow said.
Police said that one person is assisting their investigations into the incident that could have resulted in a major disaster had the grenade exploded.
Barrow said that the Government would soon be opening a building that would provide "a second chance facility in terms of people who have not had an opportunity to complete school".
"And this allows me to say that the enforcement efforts of the police and of the security forces general; while extremely critical, have to be complimented by the attempts at social amelioration. So I do want to make clear that in that context we signed the loan for $US10 million from the IDB (Inter-American Development Bank) which will help with the training of young people, which will help with community involvement, which will help us to try even harder to beat back this phenomenon of urban violence."
The prime minister acknowledged that the security forces now had to deal with criminals who are showing that they have no regard for life or property.
But he sought to assure citizens that his administration would be taking stronger measures to deal with the situation.
"The point is, while we must attack the social conditions that breed this kind of mentality, we have to go at that particular element hard and it's not just with respect to the on-the- ground efforts of the GSU, it is as well to broaden and deepen the legal infrastructure so that the sort of penal catchment area can be widened," he said.
Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/Belize-promises-tougher-laws-as-rival-gang-crime-worsens_8762125#ixzz1LaRJn04b
our NEIGHBOR HONDURAS CONTINUES TO BE MESSED UP AS A BEHIND THE SCENES MILITARY DICTATORSHIP
OUR NEIGHBOR HONDURAS CONTINUES TO BE MESSED UP AS A BEHIND THE SCENES, MILITARY DICTATORSHIP.
Honduras: Teargassed Open, for Business
Dana Frank
May 5, 2011
In Honduras, it's come to this: when 90 percent of the city's 68,000 public schoolteachers went out on strike in March to protest the privatization of the entire public school system, the government teargassed their demonstrations for almost three solid weeks, then suspended 305 teachers for two to six months as punishment for demonstrating, and then, when negotiations broke down, threatened to suspend another five thousand public schoolteachers. The level of repression in Honduras, after a nationwide wave of attacks on the opposition in March and early April, now exceeds that of the weeks immediately following the June 28, 2009 military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as current President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa wages war on entire swaths of the Honduran population.
Ilse Ivania Velásquez Rodríguez was one of those striking teachers. A 59-year old elementary school teacher and former principal in Tegucigalpa, she rushed to the Presidential Palace to defend Zelaya the morning of the coup. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans took to the streets for weeks to protest the new coup government of de facto President Roberto Micheletti--who Honduras' oligarchs hoped would roll back Zelaya's mild leftward moves and resistance to further neoliberal privatization. Last summer she was one of thousands in the Honduran opposition who circulated petitions--eventually signed by 1.25 million people, roughly one in three adults--demanding a Constitutional Convention to re-found the country from below. "My sister wanted to retire this year," her sister, Zenaida, who lives in San José, California, told me. "But they told her she needed to be on a waiting list," behind two thousand others, because the teachers'
government-managed retirement fund was bankrupt--looted by Micheletti’s post-coup government.
The morning of March 18, 2011, the second day of the strike, Ilse joined other teachers at a demonstration in front of the Tegucigalpa office of their state-run retirement agency, to demand her pension and protest the privatization plan. As police and soldiers stormed down the streets and aimed tear gas at the demonstrators, the teachers, to signal their nonviolence, raised their hands up high. The police started rapidly launching tear gas anyway. At 10:44 a.m., as Ilse tried to run away, one of them deliberately shot a tear gas canister directly in her face at close range. She fell to the ground, unconscious, into an asphyxiating cloud of gas. The driver of a passing television truck, himself affected by the fumes, ran over her right side. She lay face down in a pool of blood seeping out from her body. Three hours later, she died in a hospital.
Teachers like Ilse have been the shock troops of resistance to the coup. During the 1990s and 2000s, teachers deployed regular mass mobilizations to increase their salaries and pensions under legislation that granted them special labor protections at a national level. With the military coup, they were the first to take to the streets. "From the beginning, we felt obliged to defend democracy against a government imposed by force," emphasizes Jaime Rodriguez, president of COPEMH (Colegio de Profesores de Educación Media de Honduras), the Honduran middle-school teachers' association. "That united almost all the teachers, apart from what the government did to the teachers themselves."
By this past March the teachers' grievances had become enormous. Not only was their pension fund gone, but they are also owed six months' back pay. At least twelve teachers in the opposition have been killed or disappeared since the coup. Last August, the government of Pepe Lobo--himself placed in office during Micheletti’s reign, in a fraudulent November 2009 election boycotted by international observers and most of the opposition--promised to pay them back. But the money is still nowhere to be seen.
On March 31, despite the protests, the Honduran congress approved a law opening the door for privatization of the entire country's public school system. The legislation passes control of education to municipalities, who are free to organize for-profit enterprises or work with nonprofits modeled on a pilot program developed during the presidency of neoliberal Ricardo Maduro (2002-2006). Maduro will now head a new nationwide program in which teachers, instead of being hired through their professional associations, will work on yearly ten-month contracts with no job security, be paid as much as one-third their current salaries (placing them below the minimum wage), and receive no pensions.
The day before the bill passed, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, or the National Front of Popular Resistance), in solidarity unleashed a nationwide paro civico or "civic strike" to oppose the law, protest the repression, and demand a new minimum wage, lower prices of food, fuel, and public utilities, and, above all, a constitutional convention to re-found the nation from below. The FNRP unites the broad national coalition that came together right after the coup, embracing the labor, campesino, women's, gay, indigenous, and Afro-indigenous movements.
By this point the Honduran resistance has hardened into a steely wall of defiance. It continues to oppose what it considers the "ongoing coup regime" of Pepe Lobo. It has no official avenues for political input at this point: Congress, chosen in the same bogus election as Lobo, is in the pocket of the oligarchs and ignores popular sentiment; since Lobo dismissed five judges and magistrates who oppose the coup government, the judiciary almost entirely supports it. The judicial system is largely nonfunctional. To this day no one has been prosecuted or convicted for any of the politically-motivated killings of 34 members of the opposition and 10 journalists since Lobo took office, let alone for the over 300 killings by state security forces since the coup, according to COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras), the leading independent human rights group.
The FNRP knows if it chooses to run candidates in the 2014 elections--a topic of fierce internal debate--the electoral process will be controlled by the very same military that is occupying the country. Thinking long term, the Frente has spent much of the last year carefully constructing a system of national representation, community by community, building to a national assembly with 1,500 delegates this past February in Tegucigalpa that is laying the foundation for a new constitution, that it hopes to force Lobo and the oligarchs to accept.
Meanwhile, Hondurans in the opposition are using one of the few remaining weapons they have: their own unarmed bodies, placing themselves in the path of the regime, quite literally. In response, the regime is now using lethal force over and over and over again, all over the country, hoping to tear gas its own citizens into submission.
In Nacaome, in the country's south, the morning of the big civic strike police suddenly launched tear gas at teachers and their allies as they gathered in the street, getting ready to blockade it. When a group of protesters fled into a nearby house, police shot several canisters of gas inside it, where at least five children were present, asphyxiating a two-month-old baby, Christopher de Jesús Bonilla García. When the baby stopped breathing, his father gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The police continued to blast tear gas canisters as the father tried to run away with the baby. Finally he finally climbed over a wall to pass the baby to its grandfather, who escaped on a motorcycle and reached a medical facility. The baby survived, but the long-term damage to his lungs is unknown.
At 6:30 a.m. that same morning, in Triunfo de la Cruz, a community of Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people on the North Coast, police selectively grabbed Miriam Miranda, Coordinator of OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña) and the most prominent resistance leader in the Garifuna community, out of a demonstration. Spitting racist insults, they hit her, shot tear gas at her abdomen at close range, and threw her onto the asphalt and then into jail, where, her lungs burning, she was refused medical attention and not read her rights for over for two hours--then charged with sedition. "Despite state functionaries' plastic smiles and eagerness to obtain international recognition," Miranda declared the next day, after an international outcry freed her, "under the regime of Porfirio Lobo the criminalization of dissent has sharpened."
The campesinos have been the most defiant, and paid the highest price. Since December 2009, over 5,000 campesinos and their children, largely in the Aguán Valley, have used their bodies to occupy lands they argue were illegally stolen by Honduran elites, especially Miguel Facussé, the richest man in the country and key backer of the coup. Over 34 campesinos involved in these land occupations have been killed since the coup, according to COFADEH, most of them picked off in ones and twos by paramilitaries. The morning of the civic strike, campesinos and their allies blocked traffic in Planes, at the entrance to the Aguán Valley, beginning at 7:00 in the morning. At 12:20, as they were about to disperse, police fired tear gas and live ammunition at them injuring at least twelve and killing a campesino, whose body was so quickly grabbed away by the authorities that he or she couldn't be identified.
Honduran security forces are now using tear gas canisters as a deadly weapon, not just against protesters but also against journalists identified with the opposition. That same day in Tegucigalpa police surrounded and closed in on reporter Lydia Diaz and started jerking the cable to her microphone, with its clear blue, red, and yellow logo of TV Globo, an opposition station. When she objected, they shot a tear gas canister straight at her feet. Two days later, police shot a tear gas canister directly in the face of Salvador Sandoval, a cameraman for the same station, fracturing his septum. "The police have all the media identified as `resistance' or `not resistance,'" he charged from his hospital bed.
All this state-sponsored repression of demonstrations in March and April comes on top of an unrelenting daily bombardment of death threats, harassment, and assaults by paramilitaries and other extralegal agents, directed against all sectors of the opposition. In the capital, rocks rain down on cars in the parking of the union hall where many opposition meetings take place. In San Pedro Sula, an unmarked car routinely lurks daily outside the office of the Centro de Derecho de Mujeres (Center for Women’s Rights) shadowing Maria Elena Sabillón, an attorney who represents victims of domestic violence. Transgender women show up dead in alleyways and garbage dumps.
Through all of this, the Obama administration's response has been to blame the victim. In response to queries from U.S. human rights activists when Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda was seized, Jeremy Spector, the U.S. Embassy's Human Rights and Labor Attaché in Tegucigalpa, wrote back with an extended attack on the teachers for being violent, called on them to return to the classroom, and insisted that Ilse Velásquez was merely "run over by a press vehicle." And the State Department enthusiastically backs not only Lobo but the neoliberal economic agenda behind the coup, which the Honduran congress is swiftly trying to enact. "Since the first day President Lobo took office he has focused on...the creation of investment to generate employment with the support of the national congress by establishing the legal framework to gain the confidence of domestic and international investors," Eduardo Atala, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Honduras,
summarized coyly on April 14. The privatization of education and simultaneous destruction of the teachers' unions are just one piece of that agenda, which also includes a proposed labor law reform that would convert full-time jobs to part time, making workers ineligible for unionization; astonishingly, it would allow many employers to pay 30% of their employees' paychecks in company-issue scrip, rather than real money. The oligarchs also plan rapid privatization of the country's ports and publicly-owned water, telephone, and electrical systems.
Biofuels are also central to the oligarchs' agenda. Miguel Facussé, the Aguán Valley oligarch, has planted much his vast acreage with African palms for biofuel. Not coincidentally by any stretch, the United States just named as its next Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske, an expert on biofuels.
From May 4 through 6 an array of megafigures will converge in San Pedro Sula, the country's second largest city, for a promotional extravaganza celebrating the new agenda, entitled "Honduras is Open for Business." Alvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia, Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and the world, and Francisco J. Sánchez, Undersecretary for International Trade at the U.S. Department of Commerce, are all coming to town. Bill Clinton was originally scheduled to speak but recently pulled out. Asked to comment on the conference, current Ambassador Hugo Llorens crowed: "The country is once again politically stable, and President Porfirio Lobo's government of national unity is working to heal the divisions caused by the coup"--days after the recent wave of resistance and repression.
Meanwhile, on March 23, precisely as the riot police were teargassing Hondurans, across the border in El Salvador, President Obama visited the grave of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 and remains the most important symbol of resistance to the repressive Salvadoran government during the 1970s and 80s backed by the United States. Despite Obama's baldly hypocritical gesture, we should have no illusions that his policies in Honduras--and beyond--now match those of Ronald Reagan and the long history of extended U.S. support for repressive regimes in Latin America.
The State Department is obsessed with getting Honduras readmitted to the Organization of American States, so that the Lobo's regime can regain international legitimacy. The sticking point, though, is Zelaya's safe return to the country. Although the Honduran courts just dropped the last of their trumped-up charges against Zelaya, it's unclear whether it will ever be safe for Lobo's illegitimate government to have Zelaya, an immensely popular symbol of the resistance, speaking freely within in Honduras--or whether Zelaya could safely step on Honduran soil without being killed by paramilitaries.
In the face of ongoing assaults from both their own government and the U.S., Hondurans in the opposition have two choices: either continue to resist the oligarchs’ agenda with the clear knowledge they could be killed, or watch as their country is rapidly turned into a model extractive zone for global capital. They themselves have a quite different vision of the Honduran future, based on democracy, ordinary people's rights, and social justice. To support their vision, Latin American solidarity activists demand an immediate stop to all U.S. funding for the Honduran military and police, and a halt to US pressure on the Organization of American States to admit Honduras.
Dana Frank
May 5, 2011
Honduras: Teargassed Open, for Business
Dana Frank
May 5, 2011
In Honduras, it's come to this: when 90 percent of the city's 68,000 public schoolteachers went out on strike in March to protest the privatization of the entire public school system, the government teargassed their demonstrations for almost three solid weeks, then suspended 305 teachers for two to six months as punishment for demonstrating, and then, when negotiations broke down, threatened to suspend another five thousand public schoolteachers. The level of repression in Honduras, after a nationwide wave of attacks on the opposition in March and early April, now exceeds that of the weeks immediately following the June 28, 2009 military coup that deposed President Manuel Zelaya, as current President Porfirio "Pepe" Lobo Sosa wages war on entire swaths of the Honduran population.
Ilse Ivania Velásquez Rodríguez was one of those striking teachers. A 59-year old elementary school teacher and former principal in Tegucigalpa, she rushed to the Presidential Palace to defend Zelaya the morning of the coup. She was one of hundreds of thousands of Hondurans took to the streets for weeks to protest the new coup government of de facto President Roberto Micheletti--who Honduras' oligarchs hoped would roll back Zelaya's mild leftward moves and resistance to further neoliberal privatization. Last summer she was one of thousands in the Honduran opposition who circulated petitions--eventually signed by 1.25 million people, roughly one in three adults--demanding a Constitutional Convention to re-found the country from below. "My sister wanted to retire this year," her sister, Zenaida, who lives in San José, California, told me. "But they told her she needed to be on a waiting list," behind two thousand others, because the teachers'
government-managed retirement fund was bankrupt--looted by Micheletti’s post-coup government.
The morning of March 18, 2011, the second day of the strike, Ilse joined other teachers at a demonstration in front of the Tegucigalpa office of their state-run retirement agency, to demand her pension and protest the privatization plan. As police and soldiers stormed down the streets and aimed tear gas at the demonstrators, the teachers, to signal their nonviolence, raised their hands up high. The police started rapidly launching tear gas anyway. At 10:44 a.m., as Ilse tried to run away, one of them deliberately shot a tear gas canister directly in her face at close range. She fell to the ground, unconscious, into an asphyxiating cloud of gas. The driver of a passing television truck, himself affected by the fumes, ran over her right side. She lay face down in a pool of blood seeping out from her body. Three hours later, she died in a hospital.
Teachers like Ilse have been the shock troops of resistance to the coup. During the 1990s and 2000s, teachers deployed regular mass mobilizations to increase their salaries and pensions under legislation that granted them special labor protections at a national level. With the military coup, they were the first to take to the streets. "From the beginning, we felt obliged to defend democracy against a government imposed by force," emphasizes Jaime Rodriguez, president of COPEMH (Colegio de Profesores de Educación Media de Honduras), the Honduran middle-school teachers' association. "That united almost all the teachers, apart from what the government did to the teachers themselves."
By this past March the teachers' grievances had become enormous. Not only was their pension fund gone, but they are also owed six months' back pay. At least twelve teachers in the opposition have been killed or disappeared since the coup. Last August, the government of Pepe Lobo--himself placed in office during Micheletti’s reign, in a fraudulent November 2009 election boycotted by international observers and most of the opposition--promised to pay them back. But the money is still nowhere to be seen.
On March 31, despite the protests, the Honduran congress approved a law opening the door for privatization of the entire country's public school system. The legislation passes control of education to municipalities, who are free to organize for-profit enterprises or work with nonprofits modeled on a pilot program developed during the presidency of neoliberal Ricardo Maduro (2002-2006). Maduro will now head a new nationwide program in which teachers, instead of being hired through their professional associations, will work on yearly ten-month contracts with no job security, be paid as much as one-third their current salaries (placing them below the minimum wage), and receive no pensions.
The day before the bill passed, the Frente Nacional de Resistencia Popular (FNRP, or the National Front of Popular Resistance), in solidarity unleashed a nationwide paro civico or "civic strike" to oppose the law, protest the repression, and demand a new minimum wage, lower prices of food, fuel, and public utilities, and, above all, a constitutional convention to re-found the nation from below. The FNRP unites the broad national coalition that came together right after the coup, embracing the labor, campesino, women's, gay, indigenous, and Afro-indigenous movements.
By this point the Honduran resistance has hardened into a steely wall of defiance. It continues to oppose what it considers the "ongoing coup regime" of Pepe Lobo. It has no official avenues for political input at this point: Congress, chosen in the same bogus election as Lobo, is in the pocket of the oligarchs and ignores popular sentiment; since Lobo dismissed five judges and magistrates who oppose the coup government, the judiciary almost entirely supports it. The judicial system is largely nonfunctional. To this day no one has been prosecuted or convicted for any of the politically-motivated killings of 34 members of the opposition and 10 journalists since Lobo took office, let alone for the over 300 killings by state security forces since the coup, according to COFADEH (Comité de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos en Honduras), the leading independent human rights group.
The FNRP knows if it chooses to run candidates in the 2014 elections--a topic of fierce internal debate--the electoral process will be controlled by the very same military that is occupying the country. Thinking long term, the Frente has spent much of the last year carefully constructing a system of national representation, community by community, building to a national assembly with 1,500 delegates this past February in Tegucigalpa that is laying the foundation for a new constitution, that it hopes to force Lobo and the oligarchs to accept.
Meanwhile, Hondurans in the opposition are using one of the few remaining weapons they have: their own unarmed bodies, placing themselves in the path of the regime, quite literally. In response, the regime is now using lethal force over and over and over again, all over the country, hoping to tear gas its own citizens into submission.
In Nacaome, in the country's south, the morning of the big civic strike police suddenly launched tear gas at teachers and their allies as they gathered in the street, getting ready to blockade it. When a group of protesters fled into a nearby house, police shot several canisters of gas inside it, where at least five children were present, asphyxiating a two-month-old baby, Christopher de Jesús Bonilla García. When the baby stopped breathing, his father gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. The police continued to blast tear gas canisters as the father tried to run away with the baby. Finally he finally climbed over a wall to pass the baby to its grandfather, who escaped on a motorcycle and reached a medical facility. The baby survived, but the long-term damage to his lungs is unknown.
At 6:30 a.m. that same morning, in Triunfo de la Cruz, a community of Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people on the North Coast, police selectively grabbed Miriam Miranda, Coordinator of OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña) and the most prominent resistance leader in the Garifuna community, out of a demonstration. Spitting racist insults, they hit her, shot tear gas at her abdomen at close range, and threw her onto the asphalt and then into jail, where, her lungs burning, she was refused medical attention and not read her rights for over for two hours--then charged with sedition. "Despite state functionaries' plastic smiles and eagerness to obtain international recognition," Miranda declared the next day, after an international outcry freed her, "under the regime of Porfirio Lobo the criminalization of dissent has sharpened."
The campesinos have been the most defiant, and paid the highest price. Since December 2009, over 5,000 campesinos and their children, largely in the Aguán Valley, have used their bodies to occupy lands they argue were illegally stolen by Honduran elites, especially Miguel Facussé, the richest man in the country and key backer of the coup. Over 34 campesinos involved in these land occupations have been killed since the coup, according to COFADEH, most of them picked off in ones and twos by paramilitaries. The morning of the civic strike, campesinos and their allies blocked traffic in Planes, at the entrance to the Aguán Valley, beginning at 7:00 in the morning. At 12:20, as they were about to disperse, police fired tear gas and live ammunition at them injuring at least twelve and killing a campesino, whose body was so quickly grabbed away by the authorities that he or she couldn't be identified.
Honduran security forces are now using tear gas canisters as a deadly weapon, not just against protesters but also against journalists identified with the opposition. That same day in Tegucigalpa police surrounded and closed in on reporter Lydia Diaz and started jerking the cable to her microphone, with its clear blue, red, and yellow logo of TV Globo, an opposition station. When she objected, they shot a tear gas canister straight at her feet. Two days later, police shot a tear gas canister directly in the face of Salvador Sandoval, a cameraman for the same station, fracturing his septum. "The police have all the media identified as `resistance' or `not resistance,'" he charged from his hospital bed.
All this state-sponsored repression of demonstrations in March and April comes on top of an unrelenting daily bombardment of death threats, harassment, and assaults by paramilitaries and other extralegal agents, directed against all sectors of the opposition. In the capital, rocks rain down on cars in the parking of the union hall where many opposition meetings take place. In San Pedro Sula, an unmarked car routinely lurks daily outside the office of the Centro de Derecho de Mujeres (Center for Women’s Rights) shadowing Maria Elena Sabillón, an attorney who represents victims of domestic violence. Transgender women show up dead in alleyways and garbage dumps.
Through all of this, the Obama administration's response has been to blame the victim. In response to queries from U.S. human rights activists when Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda was seized, Jeremy Spector, the U.S. Embassy's Human Rights and Labor Attaché in Tegucigalpa, wrote back with an extended attack on the teachers for being violent, called on them to return to the classroom, and insisted that Ilse Velásquez was merely "run over by a press vehicle." And the State Department enthusiastically backs not only Lobo but the neoliberal economic agenda behind the coup, which the Honduran congress is swiftly trying to enact. "Since the first day President Lobo took office he has focused on...the creation of investment to generate employment with the support of the national congress by establishing the legal framework to gain the confidence of domestic and international investors," Eduardo Atala, President of the American Chamber of Commerce in Honduras,
summarized coyly on April 14. The privatization of education and simultaneous destruction of the teachers' unions are just one piece of that agenda, which also includes a proposed labor law reform that would convert full-time jobs to part time, making workers ineligible for unionization; astonishingly, it would allow many employers to pay 30% of their employees' paychecks in company-issue scrip, rather than real money. The oligarchs also plan rapid privatization of the country's ports and publicly-owned water, telephone, and electrical systems.
Biofuels are also central to the oligarchs' agenda. Miguel Facussé, the Aguán Valley oligarch, has planted much his vast acreage with African palms for biofuel. Not coincidentally by any stretch, the United States just named as its next Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske, an expert on biofuels.
From May 4 through 6 an array of megafigures will converge in San Pedro Sula, the country's second largest city, for a promotional extravaganza celebrating the new agenda, entitled "Honduras is Open for Business." Alvaro Uribe, the former president of Colombia, Carlos Slim, the richest man in Mexico and the world, and Francisco J. Sánchez, Undersecretary for International Trade at the U.S. Department of Commerce, are all coming to town. Bill Clinton was originally scheduled to speak but recently pulled out. Asked to comment on the conference, current Ambassador Hugo Llorens crowed: "The country is once again politically stable, and President Porfirio Lobo's government of national unity is working to heal the divisions caused by the coup"--days after the recent wave of resistance and repression.
Meanwhile, on March 23, precisely as the riot police were teargassing Hondurans, across the border in El Salvador, President Obama visited the grave of Archbishop Óscar Romero, who was assassinated in 1980 and remains the most important symbol of resistance to the repressive Salvadoran government during the 1970s and 80s backed by the United States. Despite Obama's baldly hypocritical gesture, we should have no illusions that his policies in Honduras--and beyond--now match those of Ronald Reagan and the long history of extended U.S. support for repressive regimes in Latin America.
The State Department is obsessed with getting Honduras readmitted to the Organization of American States, so that the Lobo's regime can regain international legitimacy. The sticking point, though, is Zelaya's safe return to the country. Although the Honduran courts just dropped the last of their trumped-up charges against Zelaya, it's unclear whether it will ever be safe for Lobo's illegitimate government to have Zelaya, an immensely popular symbol of the resistance, speaking freely within in Honduras--or whether Zelaya could safely step on Honduran soil without being killed by paramilitaries.
In the face of ongoing assaults from both their own government and the U.S., Hondurans in the opposition have two choices: either continue to resist the oligarchs’ agenda with the clear knowledge they could be killed, or watch as their country is rapidly turned into a model extractive zone for global capital. They themselves have a quite different vision of the Honduran future, based on democracy, ordinary people's rights, and social justice. To support their vision, Latin American solidarity activists demand an immediate stop to all U.S. funding for the Honduran military and police, and a halt to US pressure on the Organization of American States to admit Honduras.
Dana Frank
May 5, 2011
Western Belize new library inaugurated
New Benque Viejo Library inaugurated, has 5000 visitors a month.The Guardian:
Written by Administrator
Thursday, 05 May 2011 00:00
The new Benque Viejo Library.The new Benque Viejo Library.Residents and Students of Benque Viejo del Carmen and surrounding communities will now be able to enhance their knowledge in a spacious and pleasant environment as a result of a new public library, which will be officially inaugurated on Thursday morning by Hon. Erwin Contreras, Minister of Economic Development, Commerce, Industry and Consumer Protection and Area Representative for Cayo West.
The new library is housed in a ferro-concrete building with approximately 4,000 sq feet of space. It has a store room, a computer room, an office, a male and female bathroom block, a circulation desk, a kitchenette and ramp for persons with disabilities. The library also has a reference, fiction and non-fiction and Spanish sections for adults, a national collection of local publications, and a children’s section.
Construction of the library was financed by the Government of Belize at an estimated cost of $400,000. The Canada Fund for Local Initiatives also contributed some funds towards the furniture and bookshelves.
Prior to construction, the Benque Viejo Public Library was housed in a crowded area at the Benque Viejo Town Council building. However, since moving to its new location, the library now operates in a spacious and welcoming environment and the facility is now able to offer a number of educational programs, such as story reading especially for school children. In addition to its educational programs, the library also offers computer, internet, photo copying and document scanning services to the general public. Since becoming operational earlier this year, the new Library is visited by an average of 5,000 persons per month.
The project became a reality through the efforts of Hon Erwin Contreras, working closely with the Benque Viejo Town Council, Central Government, the Benque Viejo Library Advisory Committee and the Belize National Library Service and Information System.
The main address at the official opening ceremony will be delivered by Hon Erwin Contreras, Minister of Economic Development, who will also present nine new computers to the staff of the Benque Viejo Public Library. Other speakers will include Mr Nicholas Ruiz, Mayor of Benque Viejo del Carmen Town, Mrs Brenda Armstrong, Chairlady of the Belize National Library Service and Information System as well as library personnel.
A cultural presentation by Grupo Euforia will also be made and the local marimba will play the national anthem during the ceremony, which will also be attended by numerous school children in the area.
Thursday, May 5, 2011
CITRUS GREENING SOLUTION FOR BELIZE CITRUS
CITRUS GREENING CURES FOR BELIZE
Maruja Vargas gives us the summation of the only real treatment long term for citrus greening in Belize. That is COMPANION PLANTING! Maruja is doing a two part series in the Belize Agriculture Report Magazine on the subject. Both growers and bureaucrats need to learn what works elsewhere in the world, if we are to save our citrus industry.
Maruja Vargas gives us the summation of the only real treatment long term for citrus greening in Belize. That is COMPANION PLANTING! Maruja is doing a two part series in the Belize Agriculture Report Magazine on the subject. Both growers and bureaucrats need to learn what works elsewhere in the world, if we are to save our citrus industry.
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