And while the manifestos took center stage today – the PUP still had the Cayo passport situation bubbling in the background. As we reported last night,
Cayo police retrieved a bag with 7 passports from a San Ignacio business. It had been left there by UDP Cayo Northeast political operator
Charlie Cabral. His story is that he had collected the passports while campaigning, and he was going to get visa extensions for 1 Honduran, 1
Guatemalan, 1 American, 1 Belizean, and 4 Salvadorans. But the PUP say it's highly suspicious so they protested in front of the police station both
yesterday and today demanding an investigation. Today, their party leader told the press that the entire set of circumstances is very suspicious:…
Francis Fonseca - Leader of the Opposition
"It validates a lot of the reports that we've been getting over the past few weeks about UDP operatives who are engaged in trying to bring in foreign
nationals to participate in this election. We are concerned that the binders at the elections and boundaries commission maybe interfered with, that is
a concern. We are getting reports of them taking photos of foreign nationals with these passports; giving them nationality documents and taking their
pictures replacing those pictures in the binders with their pictures. We certainly hope and pray that is not something that is being done by the
government because that is a very very dangerous road for Belize to travel. But we expect answers from the government, we expect answers from the
commissioners of police on this latest matter involving a UDP operative in possession of foreign passports and other documents which we believe were a
part of a wider practice of trying to fraudulently register voters."
We could not ask Cabral's political boss, the UDP's Cayo Northeast Representative John August about the passports today – because he did not come to
the city for the manifeto launch.
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