UNIBAM’s Caleb Orozco Rebuts Reports of Family Relationship

Caleb Orozco

Prominent LGBT activist Caleb Orozco has, for better or worse, become the face of the fight against discrimination based on sexual orientation in Belize. In 2016, he won a monumental decision in the Supreme Court which decriminalizes consensual sexual acts in private between adults who are capable of consenting.  But Orozco has now been dragged unwillingly into the narrative of Roy “Bullet” Craig’s sex assault case after another media house inaccurately claimed that he was his step-son, and thus should be an ardent lobbyist in his corner. Not so, says Orozco, who told News Five that apart from the pain Craig caused his mother and family, he would never support a man who would, allegedly, willingly take advantage of a child – one, to boot, with an intellectual disability.

Caleb Orozco, Executive Director, UNIBAM

“First, I have no relationship to him whatsoever. He didn’t raise me; he didn’t help me; we didn’t even have a conversation. The rule in my house was to avoid him, and we avoided him for twenty years. All he was was a companion to my mom, and when my mom got tired of living with him, my mom was given the help through her children to walk away. My mom never looked back and has no regrets, looking back, because she knew who she was with. With regard to my communication with him, I don’t consider myself to be his step-son because he was never married to my mom, and he was never helpful, he was more insidious; he was more of an ugly person inside, and in order to avoid that, I preferred not to have a conversation with him. With regards to my support regarding his case, I do not support, either professionally or personally, any attempt to have human relations with someone who has an intellectual disability and who cannot give informed consent. I do not accept any relations or any kind of human contact where the power is advantageous over one person. I believe relationships or any human contact should have informed consent; this was not the case. With regard to the person and people saying the person asked for it, research tells me that a person with an intellectual disability is seven times more likely to experience sexual assault than the general population. And that gives context as to why that individual was able [to be] cajoled to wherever he was taken. Outside of that, I have nothing else to say about a seventy-six-year-old man who made a decision and knew exactly what he was doing.”

Orozco is demanding a formal apology from the media house which made the comments.