Benque Viejo del Carmen taxi drivers are upset after municipal authorities in San Ignacio are enforcing that they cannot pick up passengers within the twin towns. Mayor Earl Trapp spoke with Love News.
Mayor Earl Trapp
“Basically what happened is that we implemented a policy whereby individual taxi operators would be paying a trade license so we took away the privilege of the Benque taxis from operating within our municipality. This is one of our town’s policies, it’s only fair to the Cayo or San Ignacio or Santa Elena Taxi operators paying a trade license to operate within a municipality. It’s unfair to have Benque taxis or Belize taxis to come and operate within a municipality without a trade license so it’s a courtesy that we extend to our local taxis and we are here to protect our people and that is one of the reasons why they are not allowed to operate within our municipality in terms of a business. When it comes to traversing our towns, we cannot stop them. You can go where you want but we have policies within our municipalities whereby they can drop off or pick up people but they cannot operate within our municipalities. As a matter of fact we went a step further by providing them with the privilege of a stand where they can have their customers go for them to pick up or they can drop them off there so we extended that courtesy to them but yes indeed we are trying to discourage of the Benque taxis operating within our municipalities. Benque operators can bring their passengers from Benque to Cayo we don’t have a problem with that and that is the reason why we gave them a specific area where they can drop off and pick up passengers and so they need to sensitize their passengers from Benque that they need to come to this certain point, this is an area they can drop off and pick up passengers. So if they can sensitize them on where this is then I think it would alleviate the situation that we are having in San Ignacio at the moment.”
We understand that some of the Benque taxi drivers wanted to hold a demonstration to protest the Town Council’s move.