Caribbean & Central America - April 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Recently there had been signs that Belize and Guatemala could be heading towards a resolution of their territorial dispute via the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague. But the two have yet to agree a referral to the ICJ (which would be dependent on first successfully holding enabling referendums in each country), and now the dispute about where the boundary runs along the Sarstoon River in the south of Belize has flared up again.

Guatemala, which gained independence from Spain in 1821, recognised Belize in a treaty signed with Great Britain in 1859. But, in 1946, Guatemala declared that the treaty was void because Britain had not fulfilled various obligations to provide economic assistance.

The current Belizean prime minister, Dean Barrow, declared in June 2008 that his highest political priority was to solve the dispute with Guatemala, and he proposed that both countries should hold referendums enabling them to refer the issue to the ICJ for adjudication.

An agreement between the two countries was duly signed, committing both to holding simultaneous referendums in October 2013, but the agreement was suspended before the polls were held. Guatemala then indicated that it would go ahead with its referendum at the same time as the second round of voting in the 2015 presidential election, but again it did not happen.

The latest flare-up came on 12 March when there was a confrontation along the Sarstoon River between the Guatemalan Armed Forces (GAF) and the Belize Defence Force (BDF). The BDF has been building a Forward Operating Base (FOB) in the area in order to combat illicit cross-border activities by Guatemalans, and on 12 March a GAF vessel apparently approached the FOB “in an extremely hostile and threatening manner”, according to a Belize government statement.

The statement said that the GAF troops “insisted that our troops should not be at the Sarstoon”. However, the Belize forces stood their ground, and after a message was sent by Prime Minister Barrow to Guatemala’s President Jimmy Morales the Guatemalan forces withdrew.

The seriousness of the incident was underlined by the Belize government’s statement on 13 March, which warned: “Despite the ultimately peaceful end to the standoff, it is clear that tension with Guatemala over the Sarstoon and Belize’s insistence on its sovereignty rights in accordance with the 1859 Treaty demarcation of the river is at an all-time high.”

That there has been an increase in tensions along the border may be related to the election in October 2015 of Morales as the new president of Guatemala. Morales is known for his conservative views, and in a radio interview in the lead-up to the election he was asked what he considered to be the “most deplorable” event in Guatemala’s history. His reply was that it was happening now because “we are about to lose Belize”.

The situation along the Sarstoon River is complicated by the activities of the Belize Territorial Volunteers (BTV) who have attempted to clear border markers and have made expeditions to Sarstoon Island. The Belize government has tried to limit the activities of the BTV, seeing them as unnecessarily provocative.

Shortly after the latest incident, for instance, the prime minister told a press conference: “There is no doubt in my mind that the stepping up in Guatemalan rhetoric, the ratcheting up of their position, is directly related to all that has taken place with respect to the Sarstoon and the visits and expeditions and excursions [by the civilian BTV]…designed to assist the military which needs no assistance in terms of Belize’s position.”

But the BTV and others fear the government is too ready to appease Guatemala and Amandala, Belize’s largest circulation newspaper, reflected this view in an editorial on 19 March. It noted that universal adult suffrage had been introduced into British Honduras, as pre-independence Belize was known, in 1954 while in the same year Guatemala drove out reformist politician Jacobo Arbenz (who took office in 1951) to establish “the rule of brutal military dictatorship”.

The paper went on to argue that “Guatemala’s socio-political system has been defined by racist, oligarchical injustice for centuries”; that the country is dominated by “a small, neo-European upper class”; and that it “has sought to bend Belize to Guatemala’s racist, neoliberal will”. And it added: “The reason that you can hear some Belizean voices expressing appeasement in the face of Guatemalan aggression is because those voices belong to Belizeans who espouse the neoliberal economic philosophy and desire a pro-Washington future for Belizeans.”

For Amandala, “the Belizean people are a confused and divided people” because they are being misled by the United Democratic Party (UDP) government which maintains that “those Belizeans who insist on demanding Belizean sovereign rights at the Sarstoon River are seeking to promote war and bloodshed”. This, the paper adds, “is a ridiculous line”.

But it is not just the anti-government press that is concerned. Late last year a BDF memorandum was leaked which documented increased Guatemalan military activity along the river. It noted that there had been encounters of varying degrees of seriousness between 2003 and 2005 but that the aggressive nature of the GAF’s behavior towards the BDF reached new levels in 2006.

In May 2007, the GAF blocked the BDF from using the channel to the south of Sarstoon Island, and this led to political efforts to defuse the situation and a “gentleman’s agreement” that there would be no more blocking of the river by the GAF. However, the memo noted, while there were no incidents in 2008, in 2009 Guatemala’s “aggressive behavior towards members of the BDF resumed”. By 2010, the GAF was again insisting that the BDF should not use the southern channel. The memo, written in October 2015, concludes: “Of concern to Belize’s security forces is the aggressive approach that they have taken arguably with the intent to lure our forces into conflict.”

Since the 12 March incident, Belize has received strong support from the Caribbean Community (Caricom), which issued a statement on 18 March criticizing the GAF for entering “Belizean internal waters”. It said that although Guatemala claimed that the river belonged to it, the “settled and agreed” border between Guatemala and Belize was the mid-channel of the river.

Guatemala’s response to this was to issue its own statement on 21 March saying that “the Sarstoon River is Guatemalan territory” and that it intended to continue exercising sovereignty over the whole river until the issue was settled by the ICJ.