PM Briceño Says Government Is Going After Gangs 

And while the business and residential communities in Cayo have expressed their concerns and Area Representative, Orlando Habet has given Cabinet’s assurances for more fighting power. Earlier today, the Prime Minister also gave his word that the government will go after gang members and those who refuse to find employment and terrorize others. He told reporters that once individuals are found guilty of being gang members, there might have to be an amendment to the law to require those people to be imprisoned.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“The law is very clear that if you’re a gang member, you can get 10 years. Imprisonment, and if you’re a head of a gang member, you can get as much as 20 years. Unfortunately, for one reason or the other, in San, and I have to be very careful how I say this, for whatever reason, the police department took two gang members to court in San Pedro. They admitted, or they have accepted that they’re guilty, and they were just given a $1,500 fine. And I believe that, that we can’t – that’s a slap on the people of San Pedro, because these people have been – these gangs have been terrorizing the people in San Pedro. So we have said that we are going to go after them. We’re not – we cannot allow a small group of people to terrorize this country, and we’re even talking about maybe even amending the law to ensure that once you’re a gang member and you’re found guilty, that you are going to go to jail.”

 

Reporter

“Doctors are being terrorized by gangsters.”

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“That would happen in any place. It happens in the United States. Just yesterday in the United States, they hijacked a public transport bus. So for you to say, it’s a failure because something like that happens in every society – now the failure would be if we refuse to act. If you look at what we’ve been doing over the years, we’ve been strengthening the police department, we’ve been giving them more equipment, we’ve been getting more police. We just agreed to give them another amount of – we just approved some more monies for them to be able to continue to monitor the northern borders to ensure that Kaborga gang or cartel cannot come into Belize. So we are doing. As something comes up, we are acting on it.”

 

Reporter

“There is some type of fundamental failure of 10 days elapses, and you all don’t know anything about this major security breach.”

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“How can you act if you don’t know? If your pikni misbehave and nobody tell you, is it a failure of you?”

 

Reporter

“But something is broken in the Ministry of Health then.”

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“The problem was that these doctors were terrorized by these people and were afraid to speak out, and they finally did. So by the time you got your video, we were already acting. We were already hunting down these two individuals. And also now we’re going after all of those that were outside in the compound, in a threatening manner. We have been acting, and I don’t see how you could hold the minister in charge of the police responsible for something like this. If you have people that do not want to work, and want to terrorize our citizens, then we have to deal with them accordingly.”