Who Does Hugo Patt Support? 

In our exclusive interview with the United Democratic Party’s 1st Deputy Leader Hugo Patt, we told him that both Tracy Panton and Moses “Shyne” Barrow have kept him as 1st deputy leader. We also asked him if he believes that both sides are forcing him to choose a side.

Patt responded, “I’ve spoken to both sides, and I told them that my position presently is that I will respect the process that transpired last year in August, if I’m not mistaken, where you had the National Party Convention basically taking a decision and where an executive was endorsed.”

He stated that if Panton were in Barrow’s current position, he would have supported her, and similarly, he would have supported Patrick Faber or anyone else in that role. “If, in the case of Tracy and Shyne, we were to look at the situation, if Tracy had been in the position that Shyne is in right now, I would have supported her. If Patrick would have been there, I would have supported him. If anybody else was there, I would have supported that person.”

He said that it is important to maintain established processes for the UDP to ensure certainty moving forward. Patt, however, could not ignore the number of UDP delegates that participated in the Alliance for Democracy convention on October 20 in Belize City. He said, “I’m aware that there was a substantial number of delegates in the activity that honourable Panton did. I cannot personally underestimate that.”

He said that he explained to his constituents that in a convention, there will always be candidates, and there will be a winner and a loser. Patt says that it is understood that the winner has the responsibility to embrace others and unify the party, while the candidate who does not win should support the party leader.

“I had advised Ms. Panton, look, wait it out. It’s just a few months, in my opinion, that’s left before we have general elections. Let us work together. Let us focus each on our individual constituencies so that we can put in decent fighting whenever we have the general elections. And I spoke to the honourable Barrow as well. I told him, look, we have to sit down together and talk to everybody. We will have differences, but let us agree to leave our differences aside, and for the sake of our oath to our people, let us make sure that we do the right thing. But that’s as far as I can go.”