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On Monday, national security minister John Saldivar unveiled a new plan to fight gang related crime in Belize.  It got overshadowed by the “Pastor Luâ€￾ beheading, but on any other day that plan would have raised many eyebrows.  And that’s because the Saldivar strategy is to put even more boots on the ground, and the give the much-criticized GSU the green light to go even harder after gang targets.  PUP Deputy Leader Cordel Hyde criticized the new approach today:…

Hon. Cordel Hype - PUP Deputy Leader
"If you listen to the minister of national security on Monday it’s the same old solutions to a very serious problem. We're talking about hundreds of lives that has been lost on the Southside and their solution is more boots on the ground. They boast that they've added 850 additional police officers since 2012. Half of those have been deployed to Belize City. All the equipment in the world they boast of in terms of getting for the police. So the police is better equipped but yet still this problem persists."

"It's not that the persons on Southside are some psychotic beings as the prime minister seems to think. It’s not that your son is different from my child or the child on the Northside is different from the child on the Southside or the Mestizo kid that joins a gang in Cayo is different from the Creole or Garifuna kid that joins a gang in Belize City. It’s not a biological difference the problem is of social conditions, of social problems that we're facing; it’s a poverty issue. The minister of national security says he's going to beef up and renew the mandate of the GSU but that's not what we need; what we need is a poverty suppression unit, what we need to ensure that our kids don't go to bed hungry, to ensure they go to school every day. To ensure that no matter where you live, no matter who your parents are, no matter who they voted for that you have an opportunity to go to school, that you have an opportunity to stay in school which would then translate into better opportunities to you."

As we told you earlier, it appears the GSU will now be under new leadership, because Superintendent Mark Flowers is under investigation.