At the top of the news, we showed you the back and forth between Foreign Affairs Minister Wilfred Elrington and PUP Senator Eamon Courtenay who strongly disagree on the course of action to be taken with the Maritime Areas Act.
Well before the political hard talk started on that topic, Foreign Minister Elrington was discussing his first bilateral meeting with the new Foreign Minister Sandra Jovel. One other topic which came up in those talks was the possibility of a negotiated protocol for the Sarstoon River.
You’ll remember that back in August of 2015, thanks to the agitation of the Belize Territorial Volunteers, it was revealed that the Guatemalan military stationed at the mouth of the Sarstoon was attempting to stop Belizeans from using Belize’s portion of the River. Things have cooled off since, but all attempts to discuss a formal protocol along that frontier has stalled.
Elrington told us yesterday that the new Foreign Minister is holding the Guatemalan line, and she is not prepared commit to such a protocol at this time. Here’s how he explained it:
Hon. Wilfred Elrington - Minister of Foreign Affairs
"We also discussed a safety protocol in the Sarstoon, and that is something that she also pushed against, pushed against. She was not ready to commit to that, but she did understand appreciate that in fact, so long as we live together, there is going to be incidents, and it is only prudent and sensible that we have a mechanism whereby, we could deal with it. Even if it is simply 1, 2, 3 statements, whereby we say when there was the incident, I call you on the phone. You call me, or my general calls their general, or their general calls. Just - you have to have some kind of protocol. That is natural and normal, and she's, of course, adopting the same position as the last foreign minister. There is the resistance to committing to anything formal, but I think that she understood the need for us to continue to discuss the issue. So that, the ambassadors have a mandate now to see at least to discuss the issue, to see how we could come up with some way of dealing with that in a rational way."
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