GRINGO CONSERVATIVES IN BELIZE

The United States boarder acts as a great filter for many different things in many different ways including political ideas. However, in this post I am talking about people who leave our country to live for extended periods as expatriates in some foreign country, specifically Belize the country where I lived for many years. I think of longshoreman Eric Hoffer’s idea that the person who leaves the group is the person that is not content; the immigrant is the unhappy loner. This implies a push that drove the émigré to make a life altering decision while the country where the end up has some sort of attraction: the pull. People from around the world viewed the United States as the land of opportunity: freedom of religion, jobs opportunity, education, and wealth attainment, for example. No one I know finds these thoughts strange or unusual; in contrast, when you say people leave the United States to live abroad, it raises eyebrows and begs the question why would someone do this. The conclusion I came to surprised me.

There are a large number of retirees; those who have accumulate wealth in the United States and want to live a better life style on a low income than they possible could live in America. Of course, this small group represents the older generation of the working class. Then there is a group of students and adventurers looking for the exotic life style, which soon satiate their macabre curiosity about living in poverty and soon return to a productive working life “back home”. Both the Peace Corps workers, who are adventurers with a small income, and “hippies” who are adventurers without an income fit this description. Then there are others; the ones that Eric Hoffer was talking about. A group of hard working people who feel the United States somehow did not fulfill their expectations. Almost invariably, these people bring along accumulated wealth to buy land or farm machinery, etc, which suggests they were not honestly analyzing their own situations.  

The people who I have met who fit this category have a collective belief, which seems more revealing than their economics; they are looking for “more freedom”. Among my expatriate friends, without consideration for gender, and I can list a large number of them, fit the following profile: most are from the Southern United States with Texas being over-represented or from Alaska. It always surprised me to know the number who were from Texas who moved to Alaska and then to Belize. They are hard working, many with an agricultural background often ranching. They resent liberals who, in their minds not only do not work for a living but also never intend to work for a living. In fact they often mention that they left the U.S. because the government excessively protects them in an indulgent way; they are outspoken in this regard. They are often class and race conscious. In their minds, by moving to a poor country they automatically move from middle class to the upper class, a distinction of which they are proud. They hide their racial prejudices but when it is exposed, it is intense. What is strange is that they picked a country in which to live that sports a huge, huge non-white population.

They are invariably politically conservative, mostly radically so. They all seem to be trapped in the Fox news Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh whirlpool of misinformation. They live in an isolated world of conspiracies, build a bomb shelter, hoard food for the coming collapse of the Untied States, arm yourself, Obama is coming for your guns, and all that long string of ridiculous nonsense these people peddle. No rational person outside their circle understands how they can believe in such idiocy; but they do and do so with all their heart. Invariably, they consider government regulations stifling of their inflated self worth and enterprises, which they take in a personal way, as if the government aimed all regulation at them. I would guess that this consideration of government regulations more than anything else that pushed them out of the United States and in turn attracted them to Belize. The result is they actually live life as if they were in John Wayne’s the Wild West. For them it is not pretend, it is real.

Belize is a new country and has its own struggles. Belizeans are working hard and it is paying off; things are rapidly changing for the better. Belize has a parliamentary form of government. They have laws and regulation very similar to those in the United States but closer to those in England. Against this background, Belize is not a rich country. Taxes are low because of this; you cannot collect taxes from people who do not have money. Belize achieved independence 33 years ago, which resulted in the withdrawal of British law enforcement. The people struggled financially to build on what they inherited. Many gringo residents of Belize will dispute this but I have seen the level of law enforcement dramatically increase over those 33 years. For example, like my village, some population centers had constables but had no transportation—the police had to take a bus but most of the areas under the constable’s jurisdiction had no bus service. Now they have vehicles. Obviously, traffic control was non-existent then and is still marginal—if you wanted to drive at high speed, you could. If you wanted to ignore a stop sign, you could. Strangely enough, this fed into the fiction of the expatriates living where, there are “no government regulations”. The conservative immigrants loved it; of course, they loved it until they needed police assistance.

I have great hope for Belize. I see my conservative friends driving reasonable speeds and riding motor cycles with helmets even when there is no one to enforce the law. They tell me that it is being told by the “hated” government that they have to wear a helmet that they don’t like. In fact, they tell me the reason they hate the government is that it tells them what to do—even speed limit signs irritates them. They do not want the government telling them what to do even if it is what they would tell themselves to do. Once you understand this enigma you understand the conservative mind set; you understand why they feel compelled to be in control of government; once in control they do trust each other anymore than they trust liberals; this conclusion surprises me. 

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