Tourism industry hit by bad news
Virtually all of the news coming out of the tourism sector in the last couple of years has been good: what with “Temptation Island”, “After the Storm” and Marion Jones filling the world’s TV screens with pictures of suddenly fashionable Belize, it was no wonder that each month witnessed a seemingly meteoric rise in tourist arrivals. Those numbers are still going strong, but for the first time in a good while, there is word of some problems in paradise. On Monday afternoon a tourist and his taxi driver were injured by gunshots as they drove down a country road in Cayo. Fifty year old Bob Perez and his wife Lee of San Jose, California, along with a friend, Rick Austin, were en route from San Antonio to San Ignacio in a taxi driven by Ermelino Padilla. About two miles from town a man emerged from the roadside bush and pointed a handgun at the vehicle, motioning it to stop. Instead of pulling over, Padilla put the pedal to the metal and accelerated past the assailant. But as the taxi flew by, the gunman got off two shots through the car’s open window. Both found their mark although neither proved fatal. Perez received a flesh wound to the left forearm, while Padilla was grazed on the cheek. Both were treated and released at San Ignacio Hospital. Not ones to be easily frightened, the tourists will continue their vacation through Friday. Police reaction was swift and a B.D.F. squad scoured the surrounding jungle, but without result. The highway robber was not masked and is described as Hispanic in appearance. Police say the crime is similar to others committed in the Cayo area by Guatemalans who routinely move back and forth across the border.
The second piece of bad tourism news occurred at the opposite side of Belizean territory, at Lighthouse Reef. On Sunday morning, forty-three year old Dr. Ruben Delgado of Miami is presumed dead after he failed to surface during a dive into the Blue Hole. Delgado, who was accompanied on the dive by two sons as well as his wife who remained snorkelling on the surface, was last seen ascending at the eighty-foot level. He had completed the one hundred and thirty-foot group dive and all seemed well, but at the twenty-five foot decompression stop, Delgado’s thirteen-year-old son noticed his dad was missing. Despite extensive sea and air searches conducted at the behest of Ramon’s Village, where the Delgados were staying, no trace of the body has been found. It is believed that Delgado may have suffered a medical emergency and did not have a chance to attract attention to his plight. The Blue Hole is over four hundred feet deep, well beyond the depth a SCUBA diver can endure. The bodies of four other divers lost over the last quarter century are believed to also lie at the bottom of the formation. Delgado’s family has remained in Belize and it is believed they are trying to enlist the help of a mini submarine to recover their loved one.
And since bad luck seems to run in threes, the third piece of news involves a magazine article in the August issue of the woman’s magazine, “Cosmopolitan”. It seems that two women who were guests at Captain Morgan’s Retreat on Ambergris Caye in May of last year allege they were brutally assaulted as they slept in their thatched cabana. They further claim that police and the resort’s management did virtually nothing to solve the crime. Whether or not the story is true–at the time authorities and others involved told News 5 that the alleged crime never took place–the point is that the story has been published and no amount of retractions will blunt its impact. With many of Belize’s resorts doing a brisk summer business while at the same time preparing for the much busier winter season, officials hope that the industry’s recent spate of bad luck will quickly fade into the past–much like the hype surrounding “Temptation Island”.
