But while Belize City strives to drive down its Covid numbers, it's also being faced with a serious spate of gang violence that's filling up the morgue and the ICU.
And last week when things reached a tipping point, PUP minister of Home Affairs Kareem Musa caved in, backtracked on his criticism of the Southside state of emergency, and instituted one of his own.
He stopped by the Sunup couch this morning to explain the change in tactics and told the hosts about the final straw that forced his hand.
Hon. Kareem Musa - Minister of Home Affairs
"And it's been something that I have been critical of, but at the same time we have to understand where we are at this particular moment in time.; When you look at this year, in terms of the crime statistics, the first quarter of the year looked wonderful on paper. We had a huge reduction on crime leading up to March/April of this year. However, as you recall May was mayhem. We had 19 murders in May; 10 of which was actually gang related and if you understand the gang culture and the trends as it relates to gang culture, a lot of these murders, once one starts - it is like a domino effect and it's very difficult to contain and get control of, because these young men are hellbent at that point in time - if you kill my friend I will come and retaliate and kill your friend and it just goes on and on and on. Because of the leadership intervention unit and excellent crime fighting efforts the crime numbers went down, but here we are now In August again and we are seeing a spike in gang related murders and now it's getting very extreme, because not only are they killing one another, but they are actually burning down houses. that is the level we are getting at now; burning down houses and killing innocent people. We saw where young Kassman Gill, a third former that attends St. John College was shot just last week - very sad state of affairs and that is why while I have been reluctant as minister, while the cabinet and the government has been reluctant to invoke this state of public emergency, I believe the time has come, because we see the trends, we see the patterns and we have intelligence to know that there would have been greater bloodshed. Now, myself, coming from a human rights background, you have to balance it, you have to weigh these things, because you cannot be a human rights advocate, but at the same time allow humans to kill themselves, so you cannot sit by and allow that to happen. We had to hit the pause button, we have to get them in a controlled environment to speak with them, to actually intervene in a positive manner and that is where Mr. William Dawson and his team are going to intervene and are going to speak to these young men, because we have to get to the bottom of it. So again, it's not something that we've been eager to impose, we are not in any way happy about this and no government should ever be that you have to declare a state of emergency, but at the same time we have to save these young men from themselves."
The southside State of emergency is meant to last 30 days in the first instance.
