By Belize Live News Staff: There are quiet returns to politics, and then there is Juliet Thimbriel’s.
Fresh off an extended absence from the airwaves, the UDP National Campaign Manager is back hosting the party’s morning show, Fus Ting Da Mawnin, and back in the thick of the fight. Her reward for the comeback has been a wave of political attack ads levelling serious accusations at her, that she profited from public funds under the last UDP government, amassed considerable wealth, and holds as many as twenty properties.
To be clear, those are claims made in circulating political ads. They are unproven, and no authority has established any of them.
Rather than ignore the ads, Thimbriel sat down with Greater Belize Media’s Paul Lopez and dismantled the headline number one figure at a time. Twenty houses? “I don’t have anything close to twenty houses.” Fifteen? No. Ten? No again. And then came the detail no attack ad mentioned, offered on the record and unprompted: a Belize Bank mortgage costing her more than six thousand dollars a month. “You all can do your investigation,” she challenged.
Thimbriel believes the timing of the ads is no accident. She returned to the airwaves, she says, because Belizeans were “being taken advantage of,” and her party has been releasing what she describes as thousands of documents on government spending, with more ministries to be examined in the coming weeks. Those are the UDP’s campaign claims, and the procurement controversy they orbit remains the subject of an unfinished government-ordered audit.
If the ads were meant to rattle her, the interview suggests they failed. “They can say anything they want against me. It does not matter,” she told Lopez, insisting she is not a candidate on any ballot but a voice informing the public. She even waved off the personal jabs with a line of her own: “If they can’t find a father that takes care of them, I have my father that takes care of me.”
Her closing shot was aimed upward, at the Prime Minister and the PUP, whom she accused of pressuring and taking advantage of Belizeans, an accusation that is, like everything else in this exchange of fire, a political charge rather than a proven fact.
In a season where documents, ads, and allegations are the weapons of choice, Thimbriel has made her position plain. She is not leaving the stage, and she is daring anyone to check the receipts.
