Hubert plays race card in Lake I

And in a story that we were hoping we didn’t have to report, it appears that one candidate in Belize City just couldn’t resist playing the race card, even if he did wait until the last day of the campaign to do it. The billboards, entitled “The national pie: how it is divided up” purport to show that Belize’s wealth is sliced up between the Chinese, Arabs, Mennonites, Indians, Americans, Europeans and their P.U.P. friends, while the so-called indigenous Belize Creoles, Garinagu, Maya and Mestizos have been left without any supper. The signs, located on Mahogany Street and Vernon Street, do not bear the name of their author, but an area landowner reports that he saw Lake I independent candidate Hubert Elrington supervising one sign’s erection. Viewers may recall that prior to the 1998 election Elrington, then a wealthy U.D.P. minister, declared that Said Musa was unfit to be Prime Minister of Belize due to his Palestinian ancestry. The tactic did not work for Hubert in 1998 and it is not expected to do any better in 2003.