Blz: Born dread!

[Manuel] Esquivel is of course the former UDP Prime Minister who along with Dean Barrow and his UDP Cabinet sat in Belmopan and produced a list of some 1000 public officers who were “retrenched” one week before Christmas Day 1996. That was the UDP and is the UDP today in 2004. A cold, callous, bitter and vindictive group of individuals band together by their hatred of the PUP.

You may say, who cares what Manuel Esquivel says; he’s no longer the UDP leader. But what Esquivel thinks and says is important you see, because he is still the chief economic and financial advisor to the UDP leader and party, and in fact Barrow made it clear before the 2003 Elections that Manuel Esquivel would play a prominent role in the financial administration of a UDP Government. Another reason in the long list of reasons they lost so badly.

And what Esquivel is advising Barrow and the UDP is both foolish and heartless. Esquivel still firmly believes that firing public officers is the best way to control spending, that along with reversing the wage increases, halting all Government spending on Capital Projects, no new schools, no health centers, no low-income houses, no new roads, no further expansion in rural water and electricity supply, no land development, no rehabilitation and development of Tourism Sites, Nothing! Nothing!
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To further solidify his image as the “Iceman” Esquivel made an alarming analogy (so alarming that Channel 7 left it out of their web transcript) about a homeowner who has a mortgage with the bank, and can’t meet the payments. Esquivel essentially said too bad, “it’s heartless”, but if you’re not paying you have to be put out on the streets. That’s true for a Commercial Bank, but that’s not the way you can run a government or a country. Yes, people have a responsibility and obligation to meet their expenses, but creative measures have to be adopted to provide people with greater opportunities and less burdensome ways of doing so.