Three years ago, in THE REPORTER’s “Road to Referendum” column, the generalities of Belize’s legal position against the Guatemala claim were discussed. The column’s articles were founded predominantly on the “Legal Opinion on Guatemala’s Territorial Claim to Belize” (henceforth referred just as the Legal Opinion), written in the early 2000’s by a quadripartite of the best minds in international law.

The first installment in that brief “Road to Referendum” series, entitled “Belize Legal Position Part One”—which could still be found on The Reporter’s website—outlined briefly some of the cornerstone arguments that have led pretty much every legal professional to declare that Guatemala has no case, while simultaneously underscoring the “ironclad” nature of our position. Continue reading →

The recent escalation of tensions between Belize and Guatemala, especially following the latter’s apparent sidestepping of the confidence building measures, is something for the international economic relations’ textbooks and scholarly journals. Particularly, if the recent reports by the Belizean media of declining bilateral trade in Melchor de Mencos are accurate, then the Guatemalan government has just become a real-time confirmation of what recent international relations research have predicted.

For instance, in a 2015 study by Ryan Brutger and Austin L. Wright, entitled “The Costs of Conflict: Border Disputes and Trade Diversion”, it was found that two things are likely to happen “when a dispute between two states becomes particularly intense”: bilateral trade declines by “an average of 82%”, and it is likely that trade with third party, non-disputing trading partners increases by 2.5%.   Continue reading →