National issues to be discussed at O.A.S. Gen. Assembly in June

There is another issue of national importance that is brewing…that is the referendum on taking the territorial dispute to the ICJ this year. News from Washington is that Guatemala has agreed to hold one in the not too distant future.  Foreign Ministers, Wilfred “Sedi” Elrington and Fernando Carrera of Guatemala met this morning along with the O.A.S. Secretary General Miguel Angel Insulza. At the breakfast meeting, Carrera maintained that Guatemala needed to delay the referendum date in order to get a YES vote. The parties agreed to that request and Guatemala then committed to hold the referendum sometime in 2014. There is no scheduled date yet, but another round of discussions is to be held in the margins of the O.A.S. General Assembly in Antigua, Guatemala in June, to deal with the specifics. Both sides also agreed that holding the referendum until 2014 does not breach the 2008 Special Agreement because the compris does not in fact contemplate a specific date.  The public awareness campaign is to continue in Belize, but the matter of the funding of some five million dollars has not been sourced. One more bit of information is that Guatemala also put on the table its request to change Belize’s Referendum Act to remove the sixty percent voter turnout that is required to validate the poll.  The government previously denied that request.