Fonseca has harsh words for Grupo TACA
While Johnny Searle is caught in the difficult position of defending both TACA’s interests and his own, the Government of Belize is not so encumbered. Minister of Economic Development Ralph Fonseca, himself a member of the negotiating team that met with TACA officials, was clearly unhappy, both with the airline’s decision and the less than forthright way in which the deed was done.
Ralph Fonseca, Minister of Economic Development
“If it plays out the way that they have planned I think it will affect tourism in a significant way. If it will be a blow or not depends on how we are proactive about it. Obviously TACA made a decision right after Mitch where they apparently got terribly hurt that they would cut down on all their flights. They did not tell us as a government; we did not find out about it until Monday of this week. This is why we asked for a quick meeting with the president.
In fact the very day that we met with him, they had already sent out press releases, which we did not get ourselves. That meeting was, number 1, to express our disappointment that after operating in Belize for almost 65 years, they would have made this decision without sitting down with us. Number 2, to ask them what their problems were to see if we could do anything to help them solve them. And third, to be honest, I looked the president in the face and asked, are you selling out, because the decision you are making is not logically correct; it has nothing to do with business it must have to do with something else. That’s the kind of conversation that we had. I believe that something is happening in the background that we haven’t gotten all the information on.
We will be meeting with him again next week Friday. He is going back to his board; we’re having a Cabinet meeting and we will have to decide how we will move forward. We have told them that we consider this to be a serious breech of the relationship the TACA group has with the people of Belize and we intend to treat it that way. He has got to come up with very specific reasons as to why it occurred and how he intends to resolve it, if any at all and give us the facts of what is happening by next week Friday. In the meantime we will be on the telephones.”
The party most likely to be on the other end of the line is Atlanta based Delta Airlines. Delta has recently inaugurated service from that southern U.S. gateway to both Costa Rica and Guatemala and it is believed that a stop in Belize would be an easy fit with those routes. As for Fonseca’s remarks about TACA “selling out,” they refer to persistent rumors that U.S. giant American Airlines is in the process of purchasing a significant bloc of TACA shares.
