Charles Wright dies at 82

In other news from the south a man who dedicated much of his life to the improvement of the Toledo District, not to mention the rest of Belize, has died. Charles Wright passed away on Saturday in Punta Gorda only a few days short of his eighty-third birthday. Wright first came to Belize in 1952 as head of the land use survey team sent by the British government. The team’s two years of work resulted in the publication of a book, “Soils of British Honduras,” which over forty years later remains the definitive work on the subject. In 1969 Wright took up residence in Toledo, establishing a botanical park near Big Falls, where he experimented with different species of exotic plants. He also developed a program to breed the rare blue morpho butterfly. More recently he moved to Punta Gorda and became increasingly involved in environmental concerns. He worked closely with a number of conservation groups and helped promote the production of the Maya Atlas. Many of us at Channel Five enjoyed a close relationship with Charles for over twenty-five years. We knew him as a man who drank prodigious amounts of cheap rum, smoked far too many cigarettes and had a tendency to interfere in politics on all sides. In short, he was one of our favorite characters and will be greatly missed by all who knew him. Charles Wright: dead at eighty-two.