Two cruise ships docked in Belize today which made it the perfect day for the tourism police and personnel from the Traffic Department to crack down on unlicensed drivers and tour operators working in and around the Fort Street Tourism Village. If you were in the area, chances are you encountered a police checkpoint. But they weren’t looking for traffic violators, their focus was on unlicensed tour operators. Witnesses tell us tourists in vehicles with unlicensed drivers were ordered out. One of those drivers who had his tourists taken out is Sydney Collins who accepts that indeed he doesn’t have a license but he does have a certificate which he showed us.
Sydney Collins,
“This morning the tourist police they stopped me. I have been working out here for more than 6 or 7 years now and I have never bothered anyone and they are harassing me for my past and I have stopped giving trouble for 15 years now. Right now I went and took a ten week course and I got my certificate.
I have to go through the rest of the process to get my passport pictures, birth certificate, police record, and medical stuff like that. The only thing left for me to do is to get my police records and my medical thing and then I will get my tour guide license but I think they are just harassing me for my past.”
Keith Swift,
But until you get those things you cannot do tours because you don’t have a license?
Sydney Collins,
“Right. Well I don’t see the reason because many other people are dsoing the same thing and everybnody has to eat. Right becuayse when we do nothing right they will come and harass us and i don’t tyhjink that is right.”
The officers on the scene told us they were simply doing their job and that the traffic checks will continue. Another operator picked up all the tourists who were taken out of the vehicles with unlicensed operators.
