The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw
One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
Chapter 1
I f you feel a need to escape the law, elude creditors, hide assets, or shed the skin of your humdrum life, you could do worse than run away to Belize. Belize is a tiny nation tucked between Guatemala, Mexico, and the Caribbean Sea. It’s firmly attached to Central America but considers itself a Caribbean island, like a chicken that thinks it’s a duck. For more than a hundred years Belize was known as British Honduras, one of the most remote outposts of the British Empire, which explains why it’s the only Latin American nation to embrace English as its official language.
It’s difficult to overstate the smallness of the place. Imagine a country the size of Massachusetts with the population of Corpus Christi, Texas. Give it an army of seven hundred soldiers and a seat in the United Nations and you start to get an idea of Belize. Centuries ago more than one million Maya populated this part of Central America. Today fewer than three hundred thousand Belizeans spread themselves among the country’s ...
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