Belize's Mayor Darrell Bradley is all about building sister city relations. But every Belizean's favourite sister city has to be Chetumal – in fact, if you go there on a long weekend right after a payday, you might think that's actually a Belizean City! But the City of Chetumal is very Mexican and within the wider municipality of Othon P. Blanco. Its new mayor, Eduardo Espinosa Abuxapqui visited Belize City today. by Mayor Darrell Bradley and his council warmly welcomed him and held a press conference to highlight the purpose of his visit to Belize. Mayor Bradley also uses the visit as an opportunity to discuss recent projects of his council.
Mayor Darrell Bradley - Mayor of Belize City
"We wanted to exchange relations and greetings - of course you know that Belize City and Chetumal have a sister city relationship, this is the oldest and most productive sister-city relationship that we have and it yields a lot of potential benefits being that Chetumal is so close. Of course even without a formal relationship between the municipalities, Belizean and Mexicans already share a close kinship and of course you know Belizeans go to Chetumal - it's their favorite vacation spot. When the Mayor Abuxapqui was elected, we extended an invitation for him to come to Belize City so that we could just renew gestures of friendship. We already have a formal sister-city relationship but we wanted to extend greetings to him, congratulatory remarks on his recent elections and we also wanted to express our commitments to really working with him in the hand of friendship so that we could discuss very specific ways that we could promote more relations. We have had a very good historical relationship with Chetumal - every time there's our independence there's always entertainment that comes, whenever it's their independence or fairs take place - we always send delegations; so there's a good cultural exchange. What we want to do is to see if we can deepen that relationship in the area of promoting business which is in line with our strategic plan. Of course you know we're dealing with CARILED and we're dealing with all type of job initiatives and we see our friend in the north, Othon P. Blanco as a strategic partner - probably the most strategic partner there is being that they are so close to us. This ties very intimately with our visit recently to Merida and our wanting strategically to 'court' lower Mexico- that is about 15 million people - and the potential for tourism into Belize, potential for trade relations; it is just explosive and limitless. So the visit today is really just to signal that, they're municipal president Mr. Abuxapqui has not yet been sworn in and so it is very warming to us that he chose to visit Belize even before he was sworn in. That gives an indication from his part that he's very committed to working closely with us even before he has been sworn in. He has said that when he is sworn in that he wants to set up committees specifically to be able to work with some of the very practical challenges that we had - in terms of transportation, access at the border but also some of the broader things that we think that we will be able to work with."
Monica Bodden
"What's next in the agenda for today?"
Mayor Darrell Bradley
"What we will do is that we will have discussions with the municipal president in regards of our projects going on. We were dealing with the Northern Highway project which the city is very actively trying to push - we had discussions with persons in Mexico wanting to do that project. We are looking at doing a tour of some of the other projects that we are working on in Belize City. I'm taking my friend to the Battlefield and BTL Parks - we're looking at a few of the street construction works. We're also going to do a tour of some of the school projects at St. Catherine's and Excelsior that we are doing and we will also have lunch at the House of Culture - so we're going to see some of the cultural aspects of Belize City also."
Email
Print