Jules Vasquez is a Belizean national asset, and tonight the whole Caribbean said so

By Horace Palacio:

In Georgetown, Guyana, at the opening of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s 57th General Assembly, they called a name for the first-ever Caribbean Defender of Media Freedom award.

The name was Belizean.

Jules Vasquez, news director of Channel 7, stood at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre and accepted an honour created to span the entire region, the Dutch, English, French and Spanish Caribbean, chosen over distinguished nominees including the veteran Trinidadian press freedom advocate Wesley Gibbings and the Media Institute of the Caribbean itself.

Now, a disclosure before a single word of praise, because it makes the praise worth more. This column runs in a newsroom that competes with his. We chase the same stories. We fight for the same scoops. In this trade, rivals do not hand each other flowers.

So believe me when I hand him this one.

Jules Vasquez is a Belizean national asset. And it is time this country said so out loud.

Think about what a national asset actually is. A thing that protects the nation and produces for it. A bridge. A reef. A power grid. Well, in a democracy, a journalist who cannot be frightened is infrastructure too. He is the smoke detector wired into the national house. And for more than three decades, through governments red and blue, through hurricanes and scandals, through every administration that wished he would lower his voice, that man has stood in front of power with a microphone and asked the question power was praying nobody would ask.

This very year proved it. When the Mira Millions leaks needed a press willing to run them, the press ran them. When the 80 million dollar Speednet deal needed its numbers stress-tested, it was his newsroom’s analysis this column itself leaned on. A fearless press is not a luxury Belize enjoys. It is a load-bearing wall Belize stands on. The Caribbean just certified one of its master builders.

And a nation of 420,000 produced the region’s first defender of media freedom. Write that in the ledger beside every other proof this column has offered that small never meant lesser. The region has millions of journalists across dozens of territories. The inaugural crown came home to Belize.

Now let me tell you about the speech, because the speech was the man.

He did not stand there and polish his own legend. He confessed. He told the room he would never know how he reached that podium. He spoke, in his own words, of the motivating energy of self-loathing and imposter syndrome. He reached for Leonard Cohen’s famous line about being born with a golden voice, and then admitted the truth of his own beginning. He was born with a stutter. A face and figure, he joked, that his mother might say was best suited for radio.

A boy with a stutter grew up to out-question every powerful man in Belize and out-earn every golden voice in the Caribbean.

Read that sentence to your children tonight.

Because this is the lesson stitched into everything this column has written about lonely seasons and hard training. Greatness in Belize almost never arrives gift-wrapped. It arrives with a stutter, with doubt, with a voice in your head insisting you do not belong in the room. Vasquez told the region his secret plainly, that he was not born fearless, but was born with, in his words, “the gift of a certain determination and audacity,” an ability to disregard fear and face down danger for what the public needs to know.

Not the absence of fear. The disregard of it. Every young Belizean who has ever felt unqualified for the room should frame those words. The imposter syndrome never left the man. He simply refused to let it drive.

And then he did the most honourable thing a person at a podium can do. He pointed the light away from himself.

He spoke of the families behind every journalist, the suffering family you never see on screen, the children who watch a parent come home drained after the newscast, crushed after a missed scoop, briefly lit up after a caught one, then back on the rollercoaster by morning. He named the team behind him, past and present, as the bedrock of the newsroom. And he honoured his on-air partner of thirty years, Indira Craig, whose voice has anchored Belizean evenings for a generation.

Hear that part clearly, Belize. Journalism in this country is paid for twice. Once in salary, and once at dinner tables where a chair sits empty because the story was not finished. When you honour the journalist, honour the family that lends him to you every single night.

Now the uncomfortable truth folded inside the trophy, because this column tells whole truths or none.

You only need defenders where something is under attack.

This award lands in the very year this column documented advertising pulled to punish coverage, a proposed law that would put online journalists under licence, whistleblowers left naked without protection, and a looming telecom monopoly that made media owners across this country form a coalition in alarm. The Caribbean did not just hand Belize a compliment. It handed us a mirror. Our journalists are fighting a real fight, right now, and the region has noticed even if Belmopan pretends not to.

So the proper way for Belize to celebrate this honour is not applause alone. It is armour. Pass the whistleblower protection law. Fix the broadcasting bill so it licenses no journalist’s tongue. Keep the advertising checkbook away from the newsroom’s throat. A country that produces the Caribbean’s first defender of media freedom should be legislating like a country that deserves him.

I wrote some weeks ago that we must give people their flowers while they can still smell them, that the eulogy comes too late for the ears it praises. So here are the flowers, Jules, handed across the competitive fence, which is the only place in journalism flowers mean anything.

You were born with a stutter and became the region’s clearest voice.

Belize, know your assets. This one asks questions for a living.

Guard him like the infrastructure he is.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, Horace Palacio, and do not necessarily reflect the views or editorial stance of Breaking Belize News.

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