MANTENIMIENTO DE LA INSTALACIÓN .1 Interrupción del servicio

The Role of Persistent Poverty

As illustrated in the review of the scholarship on clientelism, there is nearly unanimous agreement that poverty and inequality are basic supportive conditions for the emergence and expansion of political clientelism in emerging democracies. It is an established fact that high rates of poverty and income disparities have persisted in Belize since independence and there is conclusive evidence that the incidences of both have increased since 1995. The first comprehensive study measured overall poverty at 33 per cent in 1995 (Government of Belize, 1996). Standardised country poverty assessment (CPA) reports in 2002 and 2009 reveal a significant increase in individual (population) poverty from 34 per cent in 2002 to 41.3 per cent in 2009, and an alarming increase in indigent poverty from 11 per cent to 15.8 per cent (Government of Belize, 2010: 53-54).³⁴²The 2009 rate ranks Belize as the third poorest country in the greater Caribbean, with only Haiti and the Dominican Republic showing higher rates (Bulmer-Thomas and Bulmer-Thomas, 2012: 147).

In terms of income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient, poverty assessments show a moderate deterioration from 0.40 in 2002 to 0.42 in 2009—neither among the highest nor lowest in the Caribbean or Central America (Government of Belize: 2010a: 59).³⁴³ However, the disparities in income by 2009 were indicated by a significant expenditure gap: the top quintile accounted for 48.8 per cent of total expenditures, whereas the bottom quintile accounted for only 5.8 per cent (Government of Belize, 2010a: 50). As in the 2002 poverty survey, the 2009 study showed that poverty rates are highest among the Maya of the Toledo District and in pockets of the Creole urban centre of Belize City, but it also pointed to significant poverty increases in agriculturally-based rural areas and in the Corozal district. Overall, rural poverty was measured at 55.3 per cent and urban poverty at 27.9 per cent (Government of Belize, 2010a: 64).

342The 2002 and 2009 CPAs measure poverty based on the ability to purchase a basic basket of food and non-food items. Indigence is measured only by the minimum costs of food requirements and poverty adds the costs of basic non-food items to that.

343For example, the Gini coefficient for 2010 in neighbouring Guatemala was 0.48 and 0.39 for Trinidad and Tobago (Government of Belize, 2010a: 62).

The 2002 and 2009 CPAs confirmed much of what most other social sector reports have indicated about Belize’s social context for some time. For example, Belize’s First Report on the Millennium Development Goals (National Human Development Advisory Committee, 2005), while pointing to isolated achievements, indicated an overall trend of increasing social problems and social vulnerability. The global Human Development Index (HDI) reports show that Belize slipped from number 67 in 2003 to number 93 out of 182 countries in 2009.³⁴⁴ Several other studies and reports have chronicled the deteriorating human security situation, health challenges and excruciatingly slow progress in improving the quality of education.³⁴⁵ Importantly, the increase in persistent poverty and more skewed income distribution coincide with the post-1990 period during which the most rapid expansion of political clientelism occurred.

Nevertheless, how relevant is poverty as a cause of this expansion?

The strongest indication that there is a causal relationship between poverty and inequality, on the one hand, and expanding clientelism, on the other, comes from the experiences of politicians and citizens themselves. The client profile constructed in the previous chapter reveals that even though the clientelist game is played in Belize by all income classes, the poor do indeed make up the vast majority of client numbers across regardless of geography, ethnicity, migratory status or gender. Not surprisingly, there was near unanimous agreement among interviewees that poverty has contributed significantly to the growth of political clientelism. As in the pre-1990s period, the majority of politicians couched their responses in philanthropic and paternalistic tones of

‘helping’ the needy. Indeed, a minority argue that the people and specifically poor people were most responsible for the post-1990s expansion because their demands on politicians for handouts had increased so exponentially. For instance, a former representative contended, “I don’t agree that it is the politicians and the parties that caused this [expansion]. I see it the other way around. It is the people whose needs and demands we reacted to. We have to be there every week reacting to their needs.”³⁴⁶ However, most politicians

344HDI figures are fromhttp: //www.undp.org/hdr2009.shtml.

345See, for example, Caribbean Development Bank (2004).

346Interview with Marin.

conditioned this demand-driven analysis of helping the needy with the concession that politicians, as they did in the 1950s, have also continued to initiate clientelist relationships. As such, the majority of respondents offered more nuanced views on the relative role of poverty. A few examples suffice:

Poverty is key. It is not and should not be an excuse but it is certainly an underlying factor. There is greater need now than before independence, more poverty. The national institutions are not providing the answers in a sustainable way.³⁴⁷

There has been a growing social need. Some people even can’t afford food, much less paying rent. Deficiencies in the state’s social and welfare systems have been filled in part by the politicians, clinics and benefits politics.³⁴⁸

It [the expansion] was not fully the fault of politicians. It was a symbiotic relationship between politician and voter. Yes, politicians started this handout thing but people played along and their interests merged. The fact that people were indeed poorer just made it easier.³⁴⁹

Social vulnerability increased at the same time as partisan competition was increasing...making it easier for politicians to buy support. People were poor before [independence], but they had more options [for making ends meet].³⁵⁰

Overall, the majority of constituents interviewed generally agreed that social need was a major reason for turning to politicians for assistance. A common type of comment was, “The neighbourhood [has] gone down. There are more poor people, more houses falling down, more crime and no help with things like day care. So some people go to [politicians].”³⁵¹ However, some interviewees also offered important distinctions. Those who were poorer spoke in terms of handouts from politicians being entitlements because it was their money anyway that was being given back to them. As noted, some citizens accused politicians of seeking power to enrich themselves through corruption and argued that it is only ‘right’ that they get a piece of the spoils. One contended, “We poorer ones get offers from the representatives and a lot of people take them. I don’t blame them...they are poor and need help. And the politicians are thieves anyway.”³⁵²

Some citizens suggested that they go to politicians for individual help because it is so difficult to get assistance directly from the government. This is reflected in

347Interview with Mark Espat.

348Interview with Saldivar.

349Interview with Singh.

350Interview with Diane Haylock, former constituency candidate (UDP) and former civil society leader, 10 November 2010, Belize City.

351Interview with Constituent P14, 31 January 2011, Belize City.

352Interview with Constituent P2.

the frustrations of one citizen trying to get a residential lot: “I played the [handouts] game to get a piece of land. I went first to the ministry of lands but got nowhere at all. So I went straight to [my representative] and he got a lease for me quick. I would be stupid not to go to the politician when everyone is playing this game. And I would be stupid not to think he wanted my vote.”³⁵³ As illustrated earlier, it is not only the poor who play the clientelist game in Belize. A review of responses from middle-class citizens and small business owners indicates that, although there is wide agreement that poverty helps to fuel the clientelist game for the poor, some of the basic motivations for their own increased participation are quite similar. The central justification running through these responses is that the playing field for accessing state-managed resources and services and for doing business is not level, and one has to play by the existing rules to get ahead. For example, one small-business owner attested to being tempted to purchase contraband goods for his business because so many others were doing it and under-cutting his prices. However, minimising legal repercussions required providing some sort of ‘support’ to a certain politician.³⁵⁴ Another interviewee informed of the widely used scheme of over bidding for government supply contracts and then, once paid, transferring the difference to particular politicians who had approved the bids.³⁵⁵ One middle-class constituent, who admitted to not needing financial assistance, told of receiving a birthday card with a $100 ‘gift’ from the constituency’s representative, but keeping it because it was free.³⁵⁶

Because the poverty data in the 2002 and 2009 CPAs are disaggregated by rural/urban location, district, ethnicity, migration and gender, it is useful to explore a few further possible links between poverty and clientelism. However, such discussions need to consider that how poverty is measured presents challenges for intra-country comparisons—and, by extension, for cross-national comparisons as well. In the case of Belize, the minimum food basket (MFB)

353Interview with Constituent P21, 4 February 2011, Belize City.

354Source kept confidential by request.

355Ibid.

356Interview with Constituent P8, 27 January 2011, Belize City.

portion of the poverty line³⁵⁷ is calculated by estimating the MFB first by district and then computing a national (average) cost for the MFB. Therefore, the discussion proceeds with the caveat that comparison among districts is not as straightforward as it may appear.

As indicated, political clientelist behaviour emerged first in urban areas, and especially in the Creole centre of Belize City. By the elections of 2003 and 2008, it had spread extensively to all other districts, and by extension to all ethnic groups. Generally, most politicians perceived that clientelism is marginally higher in urban areas. In particular, many pinpointed Belize City as having more intense and more overt clientelist practices, and the Afro-Creole population as being more partial to clientelism. However, although poverty increased between 2002 and 2009 across all geographic areas, the 2009 CPA found that poverty was almost twice as high in rural than urban areas, and that as much as 80 per cent of the indigent poor reside in rural parts of Belize (Government of Belize, 2010a: 64-65). This would suggest higher incidences of clientelism—in contrast to the perceptions of politicians.

The situation in the Belize district sheds some light on this apparent contradiction. Although the Belize district had the least amount of poverty of all six districts in both the 2002 and 2009 CPAs, and the urban part of the Belize district (that is Belize City) was only marginally less poor than rural Belize district, there were interesting variations. The south side of Belize City, along with the Toledo district, were found to have high “concentrations of poverty and other social and development issues” (Government of Belize, 2010: 213).

Additionally, Belize City is the most densely populated part of the country (with 17.1 per cent of the total population) and 10 of the 31 constituencies are located there—seven on the south side. This combination of concentrations of poverty and electoral constituencies in a small urban space, and the fact that Belize City is the national commercial, financial and media centre, contribute to making it the node of political clientelism in the country. Also consequential is the historical fact that Belize City was the launch-point for the emergence of modern

357This line, below which individuals are considered poor, includes two components: a “minimum cost of a food basket needed to provide a healthy diet for an adult male” and a non-food expenditure amount (Government of Belize, 2010: 47).

political clientelism—due largely to being the fermenting ground for the nationalist movement and party politics. To a large extent, despite Belmopan being the administrative capital, Belize City (where both major parties are headquartered) remains the ‘political’ capital of the country.

Additional insights come from exploring the links between poverty and ethnicity.

The 2009 CPA found that Creole households had the lowest poverty rate of 32 per cent, that the Maya had the highest at 68 per cent, and that there had been significant increases since 2002 for the Mestizo and Garifuna. However, apart from the perceptions of interviewees that a larger proportion of Creoles were clients, there is no clear evidence that differences in incidence of poverty by ethnicity significantly affect the relative prevalence of political clientelism among different ethnic groups. Clientelist behaviour is observable at high extents across segments of all ethnic groups and political parties target them all for votes. Furthermore, the discussion of Belize City suggests that the views of some politicians—to the effect that Creoles are more prone to becoming clients than other ethnic groups—is highly dubious. As it did historically, Belize City has a higher concentration of Creoles than any other part of the country, and the higher prevalence of political clientelism in the city, for the various reasons given above, has probable led to this false perception. This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the Belmopan constituency, which has a population of near-equal proportions of Creoles and Mestizos/Maya. Constituents from both ethnic groups participate in the handout game and, if anything, the Maya/Mestizos (who have lower incomes in Belmopan overall) make up larger client numbers.³⁵⁸

The 2002 and 2009 CPAs also assist in assessing the finding that women make up a significantly larger proportion of the client population at the constituency level than men do. The 2009 study found a virtual balance between male and female poverty rates (at 42 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively), and that

“female-headed households (including single-person households) are slightly less likely to be poor than male-headed ones—29 per cent compared with 32 per cent” (Government of Belize, 2010a: 71). These figures suggest that there

358Interview with Saldivar.

are other gender-related factors at play in the observed female/male client breakdown. When asked to reflect on the reasons for the gender disparity in clients, responses from several female politicians indicated that women have more responsibilities to provide for the home, that there are large numbers of single-mothers as heads of households in some areas, and that women have more time to come to political clinics because men are more apt to have day jobs.

The 2010 population census did indeed confirm that there are more female-headed households: 22.6 per cent of children under the age of 18 years were living with their mothers only, compared to 2.5 per cent living with their fathers only and 65.8 per cent living with both parents (Statistical Institute of Belize, 2011: 55). In terms of unemployment, 2010 figures show that, at 33.1 per cent, female unemployment was more than twice that of males at 15 per cent (Statistical Institute of Belize, 2011: 16). Additionally, the fact that women’s requests of politicians were revealed to be more related to basic needs than those of men points to the presence of a clear socio-economic relationship based on the uneven gender burden of dealing with the effects of poverty. One observer may have it just right: “Women have always been the political foot soldiers. They may go more to politicians, but get less from the informal handout system...just as they get less in the formal economy.”³⁵⁹

Linkages to Neoliberal Economic Policies

As noted, by 1990 both the PUP and UDP were evolving toward decidedly more capitalist macro-economic approaches. As in almost every other nation in the region, Belize was pressured by financial institutions and major bi-lateral economic partners to adopt ‘Washington Consensus’ neoliberal economic policies in the late 1980s and the 1990s. By the elections of the 1990s, both parties were competing to out-do each other in enacting and implementing market-oriented reforms, such as foreign investment promotion, trade liberalisation, privatisation and deregulation. Distinctive perspectives on the role this macro-economic policy shift played in the expansion of clientelism are

359Interview with Barnett. Several studies, including those by Catzim and Rosberg (2001) and by Lewis (2012), have confirmed the common knowledge that women make up the vast majority of campaign workers in both parties. Barrow-Giles (2011) found similar gender roles in her study of women and politics in the Caribbean.

provided by two Belizean political actors with diametrically opposed ideological orientations: Assad Shoman, perhaps Belize’s most prominent socialist, and Ralph Fonseca, widely seen as its most ardent capitalist. Shoman, who was a representative and minister, had co-led the last failed attempt in the mid-1980s to move the PUP to the ideological left. Fonseca, who also served as a representative and minister, was the PUP’s campaign and finance manager from 1987 to 2008 and a principal architect of the PUP’s sharp turn to the right and its embrace of neoliberal economics in the 1990s and thereafter. Both key informants pinpointed the spread of neoliberal capitalist policies and programmes in Belize as a central cause of the expansion of political clientelism, but they gave very different interpretations of the specific linkages.

Fonseca argued that neoliberal economic policies have been positive for Belize and its people and have provided the fuel for the economic growth witnessed over the past two decades.³⁶⁰ He contended that as the two parties competed more intensely for votes in this free-market context in the 1990s, both politicians and voters began naturally to see votes increasingly as commodities to be bartered:

Voters had more purchasing price for their votes...just like everything else in the market place. They understood politicians were dependent on their vote...because there was no longer this natural affiliation to any party. It’s just like market forces—only in this case increased demand for votes. And the politicians and party strategists have to service it [the demand].³⁶¹

By ‘service’, Fonseca meant delivering targeted benefits to people for votes, and he believes that a political party simply has to have the right machinery to

“manage” demand [expectations] and supply. In short, Fonseca, who preferred the term ‘benefits politics’ to handout politics, viewed the expansion of political clientelism as a natural, expected and potentially positive element of capitalist growth.

On the other hand, Shoman contended that the implementation of neoliberal policies, such as unbridled foreign investment and privatisations, contributed to a loss of state power, skewed distribution of economic wealth, increased

360Interview with R. Fonseca.

361Ibid.

poverty and dependency and a culture of consumerism.³⁶² This neoliberal atmosphere, he argued, also contributed to larger sums of money entering party politics as business interests sought to ‘buy’ influence. He added that in a context of competitive party politics, in which parties have no substantive distinctions and in which more is being given as handouts, more politicians accepted clientelism as an electoral strategy and more people began to demand handouts to make ends meet. He argued that people play the ‘game’

as a logical reaction in a context in which social spending is limited and social institutions are failing.

Although differing strongly on the merits of the neoliberal economic policies adopted in the 1990s, both Shoman and Fonseca agreed that these have played multiple roles in the expansion of political clientelism. However, on the particular impact on poverty, Shoman’s analysis of the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and clientelism has more currency based on the available evidence. Whereas the poverty that contributed to the pre-independence emergence of political clientelism had its roots in the mid-twentieth century economic collapse and in the inequities of the colonial system,

Although differing strongly on the merits of the neoliberal economic policies adopted in the 1990s, both Shoman and Fonseca agreed that these have played multiple roles in the expansion of political clientelism. However, on the particular impact on poverty, Shoman’s analysis of the relationship between neoliberal economic policies and clientelism has more currency based on the available evidence. Whereas the poverty that contributed to the pre-independence emergence of political clientelism had its roots in the mid-twentieth century economic collapse and in the inequities of the colonial system,