Review of 2001 bus owners protest at Tower Hill
If the images of Monday’s protest at BSI and the Tower Hill Bridge look eerily familiar, that is because there was another protest staged at the Tower Hill Bridge back on July thirtieth two thousand and one. Jose Sanchez takes a look at the protests and puts them in perspective.
Jose Sanchez, Reporting
Monday’s protest staged by the caneros from the north has been part of a week long strike. The fight by the hard working people of Orange Walk is about the livelihood of men and women who toil the soil to support their family with the dollars they earn from cane. With the removal of preferential market prices due to pressures of the European Union, the profit from cane juice has been drying up, making every penny worth battling for. The images of rocks being hurled and bottles breaking on the bridge will resonate along with unforgettable memories of uniformed policemen shooting as well as that of a truck breaking through the gates at Belize Sugar Industries.
But this uprising whose battlegrounds were both at BSI and at the Tower Hill Bridge was not the only one of recent memory. It calls back July thirtieth two thousand one when the issue at hand was also one that took dollars from hard working people. It was a transport issue, in which the bus runs were taken away from Tillett and Castillo companies which could no longer take northern passengers into Belize City. Their staging ground was also the Tower Hill Bridge.
On that date, bus employees held a siege by blocking the bridge with buses and their bodies. No one could pass. The images were very similar to the ones we saw yesterday… Soldiers putting on their masks and police officers moving in to take back the bridge. Teargas was deployed but the smoke worked against the lawmen who found themselves covered by it. Then stones which were being collected from earlier in the day came flying down as hailstones would from the Orange Walk side of the bridge and from the river’s side. Perhaps it was frustration that encouraged uniformed police officers to have their guns drawn. It was not a shining moment as discipline was lost and some of the officers threw back rocks at the protestors. The situation got worse for the protestors as the BDF began to shoot. It didn’t take long for the protestors to realize that the rounds were live because the sides of the busses and their windows were riddled with pellet holes. Protestors then took flammable liquid to set tyres on fire, same as the caneros did yesterday. At the day’s end two people were shot in 2001; one in the hand and the other in the leg. They lived and the bus companies were given back their northern routes. But yesterday’s insurrection was different. It marked the first death and hopefully only death. Anastacio Guiterrez’s blood once tilled the soil of his farm to provide for his six children. It now soaks into the soil of all caneros.
