Tourist Visas to Resume in February 2020, Tentatively

Keith Gilges

As the pandemic rages on in Belize and abroad, one of the hardest hit countries is the United States.  Locally, the embassy had suspended the processing of tourist visas and according to the Chargé d’ Affaires, tourist visas as still not being processed. The tentative date set to resume that process is in February of next year. Keith Gilges says that date is subject to change, but they have made accommodations for emergency visas.

Keith Gilges, Chargé d’ Affaires, U.S. Embassy in Belize

“We are hopeful that by February, that is sort of the tentative date that is out there right now to start doing tourist visas again. We can do some visas on an emergency basis but it is a relatively high bar to be able to do that. But we are anticipating February if it can be sooner, believe me we would like to get up and running again as much as I believe a lot of Belizeans would like to come in and get visas to travel. But as this point we are looking at February as the startup date – again, that is flexible so don’t hold me to that.”

Andrea Polanco

“So, in the meantime student visas and those others are being processed?”

Keith Gilges

“There are some categories of emergency visas that are being processed. There was a group of Belizean students who were going to Taiwan, our other great partner, and a number of them didn’t have transit visas. So, we said absolutely that is the sort of thing we are going to prioritize and say yes for those students if they didn’t go then they were going to lose their program and that was so important so we opened up and said we are going to process those visas so we do emergency visas on a case by case basis as determined by the consular chief.”