By Omar Silva I Editor/publisher

📰 NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE BELIZE I Digital 2025

www.nationalperspectivebz.com

Belize City: Wednesday 30th July 2025

Editorial Page – Mid-Week Edition

When a government starts bending over backwards to please a foreign power, the people should start asking what’s being broken in the process.

Prime Minister John Briceño and his Foreign Minister Francis Fonseca have turned Belize’s foreign policy into a bargain-bin clearance sale — selling sovereignty for pennies on the dollar and calling it “diplomacy.”

The signals are everywhere. Fonseca’s unflinching compliance with Washington’s dictates — whether on biometric data sharing, international alignments, or whispered concessions — isn’t statesmanship. It’s subservience. And for what? The faint, fragile hope that the U.S. will resurrect MCC funding and throw Belize a BZ$250 million lifeline.

But lifelines come with leashes.

The PUP’s colonial-era dependency syndrome has never been so exposed. Instead of charting a new course for Belize’s economic independence, they cling to Washington’s approval like a crutch, ignoring the shifting ground beneath their own feet. The U.S. dollar peg trembles. Tariffs loom. The MCC is gone. And yet, the Briceño Administration behaves as if Belize’s future can still be mortgaged to the same old colonial dream.

This is not foreign policy — it’s foreign pleading.

And if there was any doubt about motive, Fonseca himself erased it in Washington just last week. After meeting with senior U.S. lawmakers, he openly confessed:

“I also had meetings with congressmen, the ranking member of the Foreign Affairs House Committee, Congressman Gregory Meeks of New York, and I had a meeting with the Republican chairman of the House Committee for Foreign Affairs, Congressman Mast… we talked about… the MCC issue. Belize, Guatemala… many different areas of support that we could work on and collaborate on together.”

This is not the voice of a sovereign nation speaking with equal footing — this is a man begging for Belize’s future on credit.

Meanwhile, Belizeans pay the price. Every concession, every “agreement,” every bow to Washington trickles down as another cost of living spike, another erosion of dignity, another sign that this government has no exit plan from dependency.

The uncomfortable truth is this: the PUP is not the solution to Belize’s crisis — it is the crisis. It is the last surviving colonial political dinosaur, propping itself up with the same tired tricks and feeding the same extractive few, all while the country drifts deeper into economic and diplomatic quicksand.

Belizeans deserve better. We deserve leaders who negotiate, not kneel. We deserve a foreign policy that defends our rights, not one that sells them off for aid that may never come.

The question every Belizean should be asking today is blunt:

What part of Belize is next on the chopping block? And when will we finally say enough?

About this Editorial:

National Perspective Belize publishes editorials to spark debate on the most pressing issues of governance, democracy, and sovereignty.

This editorial examines the Briceño Administration’s foreign policy missteps, tying recent concessions to Foreign Minister Francis Fonseca’s overt efforts to lobby for the revival of a frozen US$125 million Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) grant.

It is time Belizeans demand Institutional Maturity, and Sovereignty in all our government do in the name of Belize.