Trade Winds 2022 Comes to a Close

Trade Winds 2022 officially came to a close today. A ceremony was held at Price Barracks in Ladyville to mark the culmination of the two-week exercise. Officers from twenty-two countries are returning home having strengthened relations with regional and international counterparts. Today, we caught up with Captain Elton Bennett, the Commandant of the Belize Coast Guard, and Brigadier General Azriel Loria, the Commander of the Belize Defense Force. They shared how Belizean soldiers benefited from the training.

Captain Elton Bennett

Captain Elton Bennett, Commandant, Belize Coast Guard

“It is a good opportunity to have our personnel involved with the training. Our personnel being instructors, mentors, and just providing that support system for an exercise this big is a huge undertaking for us. We are grateful for that opportunity that we had to do the training. It also allowed us to focus on our interoperability, particularly with Mexico where we had the opportunity to work within a joint exercise with a Caribbean task force, exchanging information, passing information, analyzing, and then deploying on those intelligence operations in order to be effective in our operational design. So it is a huge opportunity and we are grateful for it, to be the host for this year.”

Azriel Loria

Brig. Gen. Azriel Loria, Commander, Belize Defense Force

“The majority of the countries are from the region. They share our same values, our same doctrines, our same drills, how we march, how we parade on the streets. So, that was not that much of a challenge. The challenge is working with larger armies like Mexico, the Colombians that were here, the French, and the great United States of America. But, that is the aim of the, one of the aims of the exercise, to conduct operations so that we know what are we deficient on and what can we improve on. That is called interoperability.”