Today, senior officials in the Ministry of Defence met to discuss a National Security Strategy. It was just one of many meetings held around this subject. Now, we weren’t allowed to stay in for the entire session but new CEO in the Ministry of Defence Felix Enriquez gave us a very general outline of what the strategy will address.
Feliz Enrique - CEO, Ministry of Defence
"Today's event is a stakeholder's consultation meeting. It's one in a series of meeting that is taking place to form what will become the national defence and security strategy. So this process has started some time ago and we're today is informing several stakeholders will includes CEOs from different ministries, heads of departments and key stakeholders within the ministry, within the NGOs where they are at this point with the formulation of the strategy and get input most importantly, getting input from everybody else who are the stakeholders to form what is the national defence and security strategy."
Courtney Weatherburne
"Sir are you able to; I know when we are speaking of national security it is such a broad hefty issue or topic. Are you able to give us any details in terms of how the report is set up or is divided and in terms of the focus of the report?"
Feliz Enrique - CEO, Ministry of Defence
"Like any other strategy it starts with the brainstorming of the key stakeholders as to where you are at this point, setting goals and objectives as to where we want to go and then discussing how to get there. And we have a team of facilitators which included members from the US armed forces and the UK armed forces who are stakeholders as well in the defence strategy of Belize; assisting us, facilitating the process along with our heads of our defence and strategy people in order to get to that point."
"We have a wide open mind in the approach to forming the defence and security strategy so there are things that we perhaps aren't considering would be a threat but one of the ministries would consider it a threat. So we have an open mind, there are several as you would agree factors that affect the security of Belize at this point; we're discussing all of them."
Courtney Weatherburne
"One that most or all would agree on especially citizens would be of course the Belize Guatemala issue and looking at the border security, could you delve into that?"
Feliz Enrique - CEO, Ministry of Defence
"Well to be honest with you I haven't been with the process from the beginning. As you know I've just taken over as CEO for the ministry of defence so I wouldn't want to delve into any particular at this point. I will say that everything is being covered thoroughly and that is definitely being covered thoroughly as well."
Representatives of the police department, the Coast Guard, FCD and other agencies were present for the meeting. As we said, there will be several other consultations before the final strategy is submitted to government.
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