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Outside Magazine May 2003

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Last Flight Out (cont.)


	For the birds: Greg Sho, left, and Sharon Matola scout for scarlet macaws. (Xavier Guardans)

"WE MUST HAVE THIS POWER!" Emory King bellows over the rattle of the A/C in his tiny Belize City office. If you are coming to Belize with dreams and schemes, King is the man to see. Fifty years ago, fresh out of college, he set off from Tampa on a world cruise aboard a small yacht, hit a coral reef off English Caye, took it as a sign, and stayed on to become the country's best-selling historian, as well as a PR flack, news columnist, film commissioner, baseball broadcaster, and raconteur. Now the 71-year-old does some consulting work for BEL.

"In order to attract industry, you need two things: cheap labor and cheap power," King explains. "In Belize we offer expensive labor and expensive power. Sometimes we don't even have expensive power! The other night Mexico cut off our power and the lights were off all night. Now all these people from outside say, ÔYou can't have cheap power.' What?! The United States and Canada have developed their industries on hydroelectric power for 75 years. They come down and tell this poor Third World country that we can't have cheap power because of the birds?"

A New Hampshire-sized nation notched between Guatemala

"We must have this power!" Emory King bellows. "Environmentalists have become hysterical, screaming about the land we'll have to give up. One must make sacrifices in this life, no? We'll lose a few trees, but the birds will fly away. They're not going to sit there and drown!"

and the Caribbean Sea, Belize has a population of 253,000, which could fit into four NFL football stadiums—too small for an inferiority complex but just big enough to crave the economic stability of the developed world. When Great Britain cut the colony loose in 1981, it agreed to prop up Belize's orange, sugar, and banana growers with favorable tariffs. But those price supports ended in the nineties, leaving the government desperate for cash. So it turned to the global market's solution du jour: privatization. The national telephone company, water utility, seaport, and power utility (BEL) were sold to the highest bidders. Which is how Fortis, a $1.9 billion utility company based on the cold shores of Newfoundland, came to control Belize's hot subtropical kilowatts.

Emory King doesn't care who owns the power company, as long as it keeps the lights on. He tells me this as we make our way to his standing lunch date at the posh Belize City Radisson. "Some of these environmentalists have become absolutely hysterical, going on with one screaming fit after another about the small amount of land that we're going to have to give up," King says after we've been seated in a dining room whose walls are covered with portraits of dogs dressed as British royalty. "One must make sacrifices in this life, no? We'll lose a few trees back there and maybe a couple of Mayan ruins, but we have thousands of Mayan ruins in Belize. If we lose a couple, that will be too bad. Obviously, some birds and animals will be dislocated, but the birds will fly, the animals will crawl away. They're not going to sit there and drown!"

In King's eyes, Belize's glorious future requires good jobs, solid wages, and electrical outlets pumping continuous juice. The jungle? The jungle, dear boy, will take care of itself. But over the past ten years, Belize has come to depend on a healthy jungle. One in four jobs is in tourism, and fancy eco-resorts like Francis Ford Coppola's Blancaneaux Lodge draw more bird-watchers and wildlife enthusiasts each year: 134,000 tourists visited Belize in 1997; in 2001 that figure topped 185,000.

Mick Fleming, 54, a meaty Englishman who owns The Lodge at Chaa Creek with his wife, Lucy, came to Belize in the seventies as a back-to-the-land hippie and turned a ramshackle farm into a luxe 330-acre retreat on the banks of the Macal near the Guatemalan border. "That pristine valley is a huge bank account," Fleming says. "Belize's environment, that's all the country's got going for it. It's like having Fort Knox on your doorstep. We employ 72 Belizeans here—jobs that depend on that river. Now the government feels it's okay for a foreign power like Fortis to come down and take our money and our river."

Who owns a river, anyway? In the United States, each state writes its own river rules and uses a long history of case law to determine what can be done to a waterway. Belize has no case law covering rivers. Belize barely has case law at all. This is the advantage a global corporation enjoys when it buys a Third World monopoly. Fortis saw an economic opportunity: A kilowatt-hour in Belize generates about five times the profit of a kilowatt-hour in Canada. But when it purchased BEL for $25 million in October 1999, Fortis also inherited the utility's right to inundate a rich biological preserve three times the size of New York's Central Park. Not content with merely backing up the river, Fortis demanded more, and got it. According to a secret agreement signed by Prime Minister Said Musa and BEL officials in November 2001 (which BACONGO sued to make public), the government can't take any action on the upper reaches of the Macal without obtaining BEL's written consent. And if there's ever a catastrophe, liability reverts to the government, not BEL.

Who owns the Macal? Right now, the shareholders of Fortis.

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