OCEANA VP comes clean on the LGBT factor

Alex Muñoz

OCEANA’s Vice President of Southern and Central America, Alex Muñoz, is in Belize. He’s here to deal with the transition from former VP Audrey Matura-Shepherd to a new, as yet unselected leader for OCEANA’s operations in Belize. That new head of OCEANA will now be a Country Director who will report directly to Muñoz. We’ll get to the logistics of that a little later in our newscast. But first, to one particular issue which came up at a press conference called by Munoz this afternoon, and that issue is the L.G.B.T. factor – or rather, how much of a factor it was in the resignation of Audrey Matura-Shepherd. Muñoz didn’t get into the nitty-gritty, but he outlined Oceana’s policy, which is crystal clear.

Alex Muñoz, V.P., South and Central America, OCEANA

“I must say that OCEANA is an organization that welcomes anybody that wants to respect the oceans. We don’t have time to lose nor can we afford losing support because the oceans need help from everybody. So we don’t make any difference in terms of whether personal preferences. What we do care about is that people that support us do want to protect the oceans. Internally, we have a policy that also welcomes everybody that wants to be a part of the organization. So we will not get into people’s private lives if they want to become part of the organization. We have diversity across the board. We have all kinds of persons; people from different nationalities, people from different religions and I must say that I am pretty proud of being a part of that staff. That’s the only policy that we have which is outside the policy in most of the organizations across the globe. We are an organization that has a clear mission; we want to protect the oceans. And that is the only thing that we are here to do. So if somebody wants the freedom to talk about everything; that’s fine, but the problem is that we would lose some strength when we want to accomplish our mission. So when we choose our staff and leaders, we want those people to be a hundred percent committed to our mission, which is totally reasonable. You think that there are many issues concerning our country but you need to stay focus if you want to make the real change. Our focus is oceans and that is what we are expected to talk about.”