Dean Barrow
Dean Barrow was prime minister of Belize from February 2008 to November 2020, the first black prime minister of the country and, with three elections won, its longest-serving after Price. He was the barrister who led the United Democratic Party for eighteen years and governed twelve, through the debt Musa had left, the nationalisation of the telephone company and the electricity, and the pandemic that ended his term with the economy down by a seventh. He was born in Belize City, the grandson of a UDP founder. He read law at the University of the West Indies and in Miami. He was a city councillor at twenty-nine, entered the House in 1984 for Queen's Square. He was foreign minister and deputy prime minister under Esquivel through the 1990s, and the party's leader from 1998, and the opposition leader who won in 2008 by twenty-five seats to six on Musa's scandals. The first term was the nationalisations. Belize Telemedia was taken from the Ashcroft group in August 2009 by an act passed in a day, and Belize Electricity from Fortis in 2011, which the courts, the Privy Council and the arbitration tribunals then spent a decade pricing. The compensation the country paid Ashcroft, several hundred million dollars, was the debt Musa's debt had become. There were the superbond restructured twice, in 2013 and 2017, and the Petrocaribe oil money from Venezuela spent on the streets and the schools. There were the free secondary education, and the murder rate that made Belize City one of the hemisphere's worst and the gangs of the south side the government's other opposition. The second and third terms were the referendum of May 2019 that sent the Guatemalan claim to the International Court of Justice, which the country approved by fifty-five per cent after he had campaigned for it and the opposition against. There were the Sarstoon quarrel with the Guatemalan navy, the corruption of the immigration ministry's passports and visas, which an audit found being sold, and the Chinese and Taiwanese money. There was the pandemic, in which the borders closed in March 2020 and the tourism that was two fifths of the economy stopped. He handed the party to Patrick Faber. The election of November 2020 was lost to Briceño by twenty-six seats to five. That was the margin he had won by. His brother Denys was a minister. His son Shyne, the rapper who served nine years in New York for a shooting, leads the party now. The country finds that either fitting or not.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Belizean
- Roles: prime minister, lawyer, politician
