Who Makes the Cut? PUP Faces High-Stakes Selection Process

The PUP may be riding high in office, but internally, it’s facing a numbers crunch. A total of one hundred and fifteen hopefuls applied to run in the upcoming municipal elections, competing for just sixty-seven seats. With the party already holding sixty-one, the challenge now is trimming nearly fifty applicants to finalize the slate. At the mayoral level, most incumbents want back in, but they’re not alone, eight new challengers have thrown their hats in the ring. We asked Secretary General Collet Montejo how the party plans to sort through the crowded field.

 

Collet Montejo, Secretary General, People’s United Party

“What we do is… And that’s one of the things I sit with them and explain to them that your application is just that. It’s not a rite of passage. There is nothing saying that you will be even on a slate if you are going to a contested convention or if you are going to be endorsed. All right? It doesn’t matter whether you are incumbent or a new applicant, everything has to go through the process, so there’s no rite of passage. What we have is a national campaign committee we put in place in each caucus. We have the northern caucus, the southern caucus, the eastern caucus, the western caucus. So all four caucuses will be working almost simultaneously. The national campaign committee on Thursday, I believe, yes, on this coming Thursday, we’ll be meeting to designate what we term as the interview or vetting committee. They will get a certain period of time. I anticipate a week, a week and a half, two weeks at the most, to get their work done and report back to the national campaign committee so that the national campaign committee can then put that together and make its recommendations to the national executive. Let’s use Belize City, for example. If we have more than eleven people approved, more than one mayoral candidate approved by the national executive, then we will have a contested convention. In the case of Belize City, we’ve already informed our applicants that we are looking at a delegate convention. All right? We anticipate that we’ll have in excess of seven hundred and seventy-five delegates in Belize City that will be selecting the slate, the PUP slate for Belize City. In the case of other municipalities, it all depends on what the national executive determines. If they have contested convention, they will use then what we call a list that is reviewed by both sides or all candidates to determine who they believe should be allowed to vote in their convention. In the case of the  delegates, for example, in Belize City, each constituency is allotted one delegate for every twenty-five votes that they garnered in last general elections. So that means that these delegates will be chosen by the executive committee. The executive committee in local, lo- that local constituency is who determines who the delegates will be.”

 

Two of the closest watched conventions will be those for Belize City and Corozal Town. In Belize City, two councilors are seeking to succeed three term Mayor Bernard Wagner, while in Corozal Town, Thea Ramirez Garcia’s backed Shajerie Rogers is seeking to unseat three term Mayor Rigo Vellos. 

 

Attention readers: This online newscast is a direct transcript of our evening television broadcast. When speakers use Kriol, we have carefully rendered their words using a standard spelling system.

 

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