Belize is a small country, but is unusually diverse.

It combines a richness of culture with extraordinary archeological sites and rainforest that is never far away.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

Belize is best known for its coastline, its beaches and its barrier reef, which is the second greatest in the world.

It also has the highest percentage of intact rainforest of any nation in the Americas, but even more important Belize is a melting pot.

It has a sizeable population of Mayas, of African Belizeans called Garifuna, of Asians, and Hispanics.

It is the Mayas who have the longest history in this region.

Belize is a pretty small country, it's about the size of the state of Massachusetts.

It's biggest neighbour is Guatemala, which occupies its entire border to the West to the North a small portion of Mexico.

It is actually a British settlement, it used to be called ....

It was called British Honduras, but for the last three decades it's been Belize, an independent country, but it's part of the British empire and the country still has what they call a governor general, who was appointed by the Queen, but other than that it's a completely independent country.

More than any other country in Central America, perhaps in the Americas, Belize has managed to maintain a good portion of its rainforest intact.

One of the best ways to see this is what they call the Hummingbird highway.

It's about an eighty mile section of highway that rambles through hills that are still very heavily forested.

It is a delight to drive through.

Most of Belize was once covered by impenetrable rainforest.

One of the taller trees is the guanacaste tree.

It grows fairly fast and it actually grows up into Mexico.

This is a good ol' timer.

There's a province in Costa Rica named after this tree, it is so important for the rainforest.

This one is probably about 15 feet in circumference and I'm going to guess 150 feet high.

The intact rainforest protects against erosion because of all these plants, the roots keep the soil bound in and although it's been raining here for almost three weeks constantly, this little stream is perfectly clear.

That's a service offered free by the rainforest.

One of the features of forests, tropical and semi-tropical, in the Americas is the eternal presence of these leaf cutter ants.

They call them chomos in Mexico.

They've had about three weeks of un-ending rainfall here and the chomos have not had much of a chance to go to work.

Now they are going up this very large guanacaste tree bringing down leaflets and bringing them about 100 yards across the plaza here and down into their burrows where they chew them up and inoculate them with fungi.

They raise their own mushrooms there, which is a great meal for them, but it also contributes greatly to the fertility of the soil and it recycles the leaves from the trees.

The country of Belize is actually an extension of the Yucatán peninsula to the south and the Mayas lived here for thousands of years and built their grand, monumental sites.

There were no borders in those days.

This was all Maya country and the river Mopan, oh my gosh, it is huge, drained the entire Northern part of the Petén.

The rivers and small watercourses were essential to the evolution of the archaeological sites.

Cahal Pech is not the largest Maya site.

Its buildings are not the largest.

It certainly does not have the tallest pyramids or the grandest palaces, but it may be the oldest.

This site is older than Tikal.

Oh, yes.

How much older than Tikal do you think it is?

Well, if this is the beginning, Pilar, Xunantunich, Narnjo, Tikal, Poptún, Tohcuk, Caracol the Mayas went in a triangular way this way.

So here is where they would come and they would do the trading.

This is the market here, where they trade the shells, clay pots, baskets, corn, fish, peppers, sale and feathers.

So they came from the Yucatán, from Guatemala and this was the focal point for the trade.

Ah yes, for this period of time.

Probably 4,000 years ago.

Or more, yeah.

Okay.

So while on the maps this is just another Maya site.

It really turns out to be the one you need to understand.

It really gives us the origin point of the other sites.

Chichen Itza Uxmal in the Yucatán, Narako of Tikal, the great Tikal in Guatemala of Ceibal, the very old.

All of these, we come back here to find their origin.

Yes, so this is the beginning of the Maya civilization.

Everything started here.

These big steps would slow people down.

So they have to realize that this is a very solemn and important place.

Yes.

You can't go running up the stairs.

No.

The Mayas were very respectful people at one time, but if you provoke one of them, they would be very violent.

From here we're going to go south to Belize to see what happened about 2,000 years after the height of Maya civilization.

A new people, who arrived here, not of their own accord, but have made a pretty good deal for themselves.

The Garifuna people are most concentrated in the Southern part of the country, particularly around the town of Punta Gorda.

For Belizeans, especially the Garifuna, the 19th of November, is the holiday of the year.

It's sort of Independence Day.

It commemorates the time when almost 200 years ago, the Garifuna people were pretty much forcefully transferred from an island in the Caribbean by the British to what was then British Honduras and is now Belize.

It commemorates their arrival here.

The Garifuna are a people that lived first in the Orinoco Basin by Venezuela and then they traveled onto the West Indies, which is basically St. Vincent.

There are other areas, but those people remain there and so they were known as the Caribs Indians, but we changed our name to Garifuna.

It's a highly matriarchal society and even though the men may have been playing the drums.

It's the dancers, whether they're male or female that decide how they want the drums to be beaten.

Men do fishing and hunting, but when it comes to the base for the foods, it's the women that plant, harvest, and prepare.

Even today.

Punta Gorda is the southern most town of any size in Belize and it is perhaps the most Belizean of all places.

It's almost entirely a mixture of Garifuna, Maya and people of Guatemalan or Hispanic origin.

You hear English spoken, but you hear Garifuna just as much.

Spanish is everywhere and there's a lot of Mayan influence.

So when you come here you really feel like you're in another continent.

Punta Gorda is a small town.

It's the site each year during the celebration of a most unusual, international standoff, Battle of the Drums.

The setting for the battle of the drums is not elegant; it the municipal basketball court inside and they have specially added palm leaves to give a sense of festivity to it.

The bands actually don't all come from Belize.

There are that some come from Guatemala, some come from Honduras.

The ceremonies began at about 8 o'clock, 8:30 at night and will continue well after midnight.

The PA system amplifies the marvelous voice of the MC who is speaking Garifuna, but as a courtesy to the visitors, he is translating into English.

Following the Battle of the Drums, Settlement Day commemorates the arrival of the Garifuna in Belize.

People have told me that the most authentic reenactment of settlement day is not in Dangriga, but is in the small town of Hopkins.

The boats arrive.

The people get out.

They have a party and it winds up at this church.

The most visible thing on the boats are the palm trees and other growies and it looks as though I'm going to guess there are at least ten people in each of those boats.

They're moving very slowly.

Ah yes, they're getting closer and now I can hear the drumbeats.

We are celebrating the arrival of the Garinagu from Honduras.

This was British Honduras so the Garinagu loved the coast and they were skilled sailors we're still conning to be coastal people, and still using the forest and using the sea for our survival.

They have to paddle the boats in.

They cant use motors that's one of the rules and that's also a symbol of the difficulty they had arriving.

It was not an easy arrival.

The boats were small.

There was nothing available to them when they got basically dumped here on the shore back in 1823.

When the Garinagu boats arrived to British Honduras, we had the English people already in the mouth of Belize, which was now Belize City.

It was a settlement then and they had to ask permission to land here because the English knew the Garifuna very well from St. Vincent.

It was here that they make relationships, so the Garifuna asked for permission to live here and they were given the southern part of this country.

All the greenery is very symbolic because its part of the important heritage of the Garifuna that they brought from St. Vincent the plants, which they used to cultivate their own crops.

They brought them with them because there was nothing here.

They brought their own stock for planting and all of the palms, the cutting, the sugar cane, the casaba that they're wearing, all of those are basics of their diet.

The significance of all the greens that you see on the people celebration is a tradition that our people usually go green.

We respect nature.

We live off the forest and the sea so we use a sustainable living.

These are the drum circle fathers, the fathers use these drums in our ceremonies and when we are having meetings we use the drums.

Drums are of significance to us, because it is a part of us in celebration, especially to our God.

Three times the people were rejected coming in on the boats, finally the community accepted and here they come.

The first place they go is to the church to be blessed.

The drumming and the singing to accompany the drumming has strong connections to Nigeria, which is why some people say that this is really an African ceremony.

Huge mortar and pestle was the actual tool to use to grind the cassava root.

It came from Nigeria.

The root was important when they were on St. Vincent and it became important here.

It's lost its importance now, but originally it was their basic starch.

There's a special mass that's prepared just for settlement day here in Hopkins.

The priest is going to deliver the homily and the entire service will be in Garfuna.

It will be interesting to see how much of the congregation can participate in Garifuna and how much of it just has to sit and hope that they can understand and respond.

We are a people that have kept our language, our food, our religion, our culture intact.

Internationally, however, Belize is best known for its incomparable beaches and its barrier reef.

As a country, Belize is almost entirely orientated toward the Caribbean.

It's only about 50 miles wide at its widest point and it's hardly 200 miles from north to south, to the west is Guatemala, to the east is Honduras and to the very north is Mexico.

The chain of reefs extends from north of Belize a hundred miles or so south and that has turned out to be the economic salvation of the country.

The economy has had a very difficult time in recent years, but more and more people around the world are realizing that this is a worldclass place to see marine life.

So how many reefs are there, right out in here?

Well, it's one reef, which is the second largest barrier reef from all the way up north... Yeah, second largest in the world.

Yeah, but it's kind of split up into several different little channels.

What fish do they take out of here mostly?

Well, most of the guys take out of here is the snapper, but different varieties, barracuda.

Barracuda?

Yeah.

In the marine park, there is no fishing allowed?

Yeah, no fishing, it's a no take zone.

You can go snorkeling, or scuba diving, but you can't fish.

The sea is a huge attraction of tourists to Belize, but the sea also figured prominently into the minds of ancient Mayan engineers who located and supervised the construction of the archeological site Lubaantun.

Lubaantun is located about 125 miles south of Cahal Pech.

It was governed by a very different sort of Mayan king or kings.

We know that the site was located near the ocean, because in 2001 a hurricane leveled almost all of the forest and people realized that from this site you could see the ocean almost 20 km away and it was an important place for trading products of the ocean inland to other Mayas.

We know that Lubaantun was at war with a number of other Maya kingdoms.

One of the ways we know it was very different was it had independent architects who had the audacity to make rounded corners as opposed to the traditional and mandatory square corners found in every other Maya site.

The enormous trees that are growing out of these ruins, in this case it's a cedrela, are the biggest factor in the destruction of the sites, but the rocks were cut so perfectly that here archeologists almost needed to do no work to bring the site back to the state we see it in today.

Now that I've seen Lubanntun, it's time to find some Mayas who actually are living in Belize today and there's quite a few of them.

There is a famous preserved cockscomb preserve.

It was created back in the 1980's to protect jaguars and a couple of villages that were inside the preserve were moved outside.

They are Maya villages and they now furnish most of the guides and even the managers for this huge preserve.

A small village used to be here before the area became protected, because they realized at the end of the program that there was much more that needed to be done for us to save the jaguars.

So what they did is they cleared this area, protect it, and the village that used to be here became illegal because no one can live in a protected area.

This used to be their site and they used to do their farming here.

So this was all open then.

A lot of species, birds, everything else within this park is now protected.

This used to be here, like I said cut to the ground and now...

So in 21 or 22 years, we have trees that are over 100 ft high.

Exactly.

On an average we got about 180 inches of rain per annum.

180 inches.

Now, I'm from Tucson, AZ and we get less than 12.

So it's wetter here.

Lots of rain.

The second reason for protection is because of this drainage system.

Without the forest, the rivers dry up.

And then if we don't protect it really, it effects our water course, people wont be able to drink and wash etcetera and that effects our reef.

It's all tied together, isn't it?

It's a whole network of problems that we create.

Here's a tapir track.

The next important thing about cockscomb is that this becomes like a storage for species.

What makes it very important to is that it is our national animal.

It represents, it's an ambassador to our whole country in that sense.

This area is sizeable; it is 128,000 acres of land.

This is a sacred tree of the Mayas.

We believe that this particular tree connects the God of the underworld with the God of the above.

This tree is over 100 years old A lot of these trees would never reach this size in areas where there's logging because people take it when they are much younger.

So we've got some sort of palm nut here, what is this?

This is the cahoon nut from the cahoon palm.

We cook it to extract oil and this makes good cooking oil.

That's palm oil?

Palm oil and you can take the same oil and you can massage your skin and shine your hair, it looks straight and fine.

The oil itself, the insects don't like it.

It propels them.

I didn't realize it, but this particular fish is totally dependent on the forest because of the fruits such as the inga and other trees that lives near the water and when the fruit drops in the water, the fish gets it.

That is also to show the connection between water and the forest and people and other species that is totally dependent on the whole eco system.

It's very important, but for the most part we can go and we can drink it.

That is very important.

Conservationists from Belize and abroad are concerned about preservation of Belize's forests and its barrier reef.

Belizeans are equally concerned about the fate of the Garifuna and the Maya cultures.

Join us next time In the Americas with me David Yetman.

I grew up in a teetotaling family, believing that consuming alcohol led one to imminent debauchery.

Things have changed.

Brewing beer has developed into an obsession in my country.

It can be seen in every city and small town in the U.S. from the kitchen jugs to the 20,000 vats.

Beer has taken on a life of its own.

One characteristic of Meso-American archeology, you will invariably find in a site a ball court.

From southern Central America on almost to South America all the way to Central America, people built ball courts.

Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Agnese Haury.

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