UDP Opposition Leader says defection of former campaign manager “no loss”
Posted: 07/09/2007 - 09:22 AM
Author: Adele Ramos
UDP Opposition Leader Dean Barrow commented today on the recent defection of former Belize City campaign manager, Dale Trujeque, immediately after Trujeque’s resignation as the human resources manager of the Opposition-run Belize City Council.
“If he had not been in such a rush to join the PUP, it might have done more damage,” said Barrow. “He undermined his credibility by rushing into the arms of the PUP.”
The Opposition Leader said that while defection is a reality in party politics, he doesn’t see “any kind of loss at all” in Trujeque’s resignation.
Trujeque was affiliated with the United Democratic Party for 10 years, and in 2006 was campaign manager for the UDP team that won the municipal elections here in the City. The new council hired him as their point-man in HR – Trujeque’s area of focus while he worked for Belize Telecommunications Limited.
He and five other senior managers had resigned en masse in July this year, but after meeting with the party’s central executive they rescinded their resignation and returned to the Council. Trujeque told us last Thursday that his return to the Council was uneasy, and he later made his resignation final in protest of the manner in which councilors handed down decisions to him and other managers.
“It was quite clear that he couldn’t work with the City Council,” Barrow told our newspaper, saying that there was a fundamental misconception on Trujeque’s part about the way things should be run at the Council.
While the city councilors are not always right, Barrow said, the principle is that they are the elected officials and the ones answerable to the electorate, and so the final decisions rest with them.
“Mr. Trujeque was not comfortable with that. That came across clear as daylight in the meeting,” Barrow commented. “He obviously felt he could live with perhaps submitting himself to authority to the mayor but not 11 bosses.”
Barrow said that the relationship between Trujeque and the Belize City Council was bound to come to an end sooner or later, but he said that it struck him as strange that he immediately joined the ruling People’s United Party.
He added that there was “a certain degree of spite and spleen” in the broad generalizations Trujeque made about the UDP’s ability to govern the country at the national level.
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