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On November 2, 2009, in 2022, Hurricane Lisa made landfall just outside Belize City, along with tax evasion, corruption, gang warfare, and some of the most beautiful beaches you'll find anywhere in the hemisphere. Hurricanes are a fact of life here, and this was a big one. Lisa leveled homes, flooded neighborhoods, and blew the roof clean off the Supreme Court, where Jasmine's cases were going to be heard in the coming weeks. You almost couldn't make up a better metaphor for her situation. Delays caused by acts of God. Though those were almost welcome, considering the troubles Jasmine was having with her legal team.

I had to hire another lawyer because Dickie hasn't been helping me. I've asked for a year.

Firing Dickie had come as a complete shock to me, but Jasmine claimed that she had no choice.

And I can't get a hold of Dickie. Dickie still hasn't changed my variations. Dickie has not responded on that. I don't trust Dickey. I really don't. And so we're kind of in a fight. He's useless. Freemason. And Michael Ashcroft is a grandmaster. And it's like when they give you an order, you have to follow it above all else.

Yeah, well, I don't know about that. There's no way we can know that. For what it's worth, though, Dickie had struck me as a legitimately good option. Confident, professional, respected, as legit as you're going to find in Belize. When we met with them to talk about Jasmine's case, he seemed engaged. But there were signs and in retrospect, decisions that seemed strange from the outside. Like choosing not to interview Lion O'Neal's mom, even when she seemed willing to say on the record the cops had used her son to try and set Jasmine up. There's no satisfying explanation for that. And it highlights this one thought that I'd heard several people. Dickie's part of the system, which isn't necessarily bad. An effective attorney needs to be friends with prosecutors, with judges, with politicians and cops. To think otherwise is naive. But also the chumminess can be unsettling, especially from where Jasmine sits. Who do you trust? Jasmine felt in her bones that Dickie was compromised, and so she pulled the plug. But now she was in a fix, and she was running out of options for experienced attorneys who could actually handle these major criminal cases. The first replacement for Dickie had been kicked out of the military and was once accused of ordering a hit on someone involved in one of his cases.

He took the job, then basically went dark.

So these are the messages I've sent from my other phone, and he still hasn't gotten back to me from either phone.

Another lawyer failed or forgot to even show up for a hearing. Then there's the one who fell asleep in open court. Jasmine's life had become a seemingly endless torrent of delayed hearings, ominous threats, and crushing disappointments. To state that completely obvious, it was not a good time for her to lack dependable counsel. But let's be real. This is Belize, and there was still plenty more for her to worry about. This is white devil, and I'm Josh Dean. Episode eleven lionfish hello? Hello?

I'm just gonna put my other phone away from us right now.

Hold on. Are you on two phones now or this is all in one phone?

Oh, no, I have like five phones.

But this one is the safe one.

This is the safe phone? Yeah, but the other one. Yeah, it's been acting up like crazy.

Like, Jasmine had talked about her phone behaving strangely before, but it seemed to be happening more often lately. Apps crashed, messages vanished. Often it was just a bad feeling. But lately, she also seemed more nervous. In general, everything was seeming fishy to her, like she'd recently gotten a tip from someone she trusted who called and asked a weird question.

He goes, do you have somebody named six with you?

Jasmine puzzled over this, was the person misspeaking? And he really meant to say six because amazingly, there actually was a guy named six. His real name is Shaquille, and he'd been helping Jasmine and her mom with odd jobs around the house, driving them places, and generally just being around at a time when they were feeling vulnerable.

I said, yeah, he just got here today. Why? And he said, he has a hit on him for $7,000. And he said, I think you need to get him away from you because you and your mom might be in danger.

This made no sense, though. Sixx was a law abiding guy with no known enemies. Why would anyone want to kill him? Well, thats just it. Nobody wanted to kill him. It was all just a mix up. There really was a hit out, apparently just not on six. The alleged hit was on sticks, who, believe it or not, Jasmine also knows because, well, of course she would. Belize. Anyway, sticks is a known agitator, an outspoken activist. A hit on him would at least make a little more sense. But Jasmine was reading a lot into it.

I think what they're trying to do is, like, say, sticks is at my house and they do a drive by. They could say Jasmine Hartin is with known activists who has a hit on him and gang affiliations and whatever.

Jasmine may have been paranoid, but this talk of hits, it's not as crazy as it sounds. As I've said before, Belize is a place where you can buy a murderous and cheaply. In fact, one day after this conversation, Jasmine sent me a news story featuring some terrifying video. It was all over the local news.

New Year's Eve saw David Ramnerace and his brother John socializing in this yard, along with their wives. But the peace and the joy of that night were shattered when a gunman ran into the yard and shot both brothers.

CCTV footage had caught the whole thing with disturbing clarity. The gunman shoots the two men, then proceeds into the house, where he also shoots their wives before stopping on his way out to shoot the two men again point blank in their heads before finally dashing off into the night. The clip is shocking. It's one of the worst things I've ever seen, honestly. Already, the shooter had been Idd and arrested. His name was Elmer Na, na is, or Washington, a cop with a very bad reputation. He's been accused of various incidents of violence and intimidation over his time in the police force, as well as something more sinister. In 2017, a man named Farid Ahmad was shot and killed in his car. A different belizean cop, Michelle Brown, was arrested for that murder and then later acquitted. Brown claimed the real killer was Elmer Na, but Na had someone who would vouch for him, his uncle, also his boss, and, conveniently, his alibi.

Nas said that on that night, he.

Went home to Coney Drive, where he.

Remained with his uncle, senior superintendent Marco.

Vidal, for the rest of the night. Marco Vidal? If that name sounds familiar, it's because the prosecutor in Jasmine's case is one Cheryl Lin Vidal, Marco's estranged wife. Small town or, you know, country. But wait, there's more. In 2021, when Na was arrested again in connection with a plane found loaded with weapons and cocaine, guess who his lawyer was? Dickie Bradley. Anyway, it probably didn't surprise anyone to find Elmer Na in the news again, this time accused of double murderous.

Yesterday, at his arraignment, he insisted that the man in the video is not him and that he is being wrongfully accused. Time will tell if Mister Na has gotten a very bad rap or if he is as the police now claim the baddest of the bad apples.

I dont just drag you down this rabbit hole to make a point that there are no doubt some bad cops employees. And Jasmine has reason to fear for her safety. We're here in the rabbit hole because Jasmine, she wasn't just sharing that clip of Elmer Naa because it was evidence of how scary Belize can be. She shared it because she knows Elmer naa. They met by chance at a car wash in Belmapan, and he chatted her up. But Jasmine always wondered if he'd been sent there or was watching her because he'd arrived on a dirt bike, which is not a vehicle you see at a lot of car washes. Anyway, they chatted and exchanged numbers. This seemed like a person to keep on her good side.

So I fired Dickie Bradley on a Tuesday. And then on Thursday, I get a random text from El Murnau. He wanted to know where I was. He said that he was looking for a job. I was like, that's not a coincidence.

Implication being that he was allied with those who were not on her side.

Then that didn't work. So now they're sending an Elmer na. Like, that's how I took the chain of events.

Jasmine says that she knew Elmer was a heavy. She also knew that he was very well connected.

I was, like, really nervous, and I was waking up at all hours in the night. And I was sending him, like, psalms 91 and psalms 27 about evil can't hurt me.

The text she's referencing here from the book of psalms in the Old Testament, are both about standing up to your enemies, believing that God will protect you. I've seen them. She really was doing this.

And then I actually spoke to him, and I asked him if he would talk about the police corruption and his uncle and everything else, and he was contemplating it. I was trying to turn him to be an asset. Always thinking, business. You want to try to kill me, but I'm going to twist you to be an asset.

As Jasmine saw it, Na was now in a very precarious position. Even if he did manage to get himself freed, which seemed unlikely, given the evidence, he would be in danger no matter where he was, because he knows way too much. A belizean journalist we spoke with often, who lives in exile because he feared for his life at home, described Belize to me as like an onion. Every layer you peel back reveals just one more layer of corruption. It's rotten through to the core. Decisions are directed by power that wants to stay invisible, and largely does. Jasmine may have been shaken by the Elmer Noz situation, by the Styx six mix up, and by a host of other things. But she wasn't fading away. After the break, she joins a whole new fight.

The zip code associated with the billing address is 12345.

Perfect. 012345 for the zip code.

That's me on the phone with customer service. Well, actually, it's not me. It's a clone of my voice powered by AI. Okay, fine. That was also a voice clone. This is me, Evan Ratliff for real. And this is Shellgame, a podcast about what happens when I set an artificial version of me loose in the world. Search for show game wherever you get your podcasts.

You're listening to white devil from Campside media, the bit you heard before of Jasmine trying to flip an alleged hitman back to the good side. It's pretty wild, especially if you rewind time to June 2021 and try to imagine the series of events that will lead this woman, with the houses, the clothes, the parties, the picture perfect family portraits, who seemingly had it all to be here. But the more Jasmine felt herself caught in the various bear traps of corruption, the more it radicalized her, I guess, to fight back in any way possible. Which resulted in some curious new hobbies.

So I'm kind of an investigator now. I've been a mischievous little brat for a little while now, but today, for some reason, I just wanted to. I woke up with an extra added level of hatred for the police department and the corruption. So it lit my fire, I guess, to continue my investigation.

Investigation into what, exactly? Well, anything and everything regarding police corruption and institutional skullduggery. And Jasmine had assembled a team of sorts, a ragtag collection of Belgians she knew or had met who also felt beat up or broken down by the system.

We're getting together to figure all this out and figure out what we're going to do with all of our information, and we need somebody to take the lead on exposing this.

If anyone out there was hoping that Jasmine might just break and back down.

Well, I'm fucking pissed. Like, I'm so angry with the corruption here. I've had enough. They've had enough. We're willing to go forward, and we're all coming together because. Power and numbers.

She sent me a photo of a t shirt she was wearing. It had a large, crudely cropped photo of Michael Ashcroft's face with two small horns drawn on his head and the words white devil under it. She'd had a bunch of them made for a protest she was attending.

I'm already getting myself in trouble all the time. I might as well wear the shirt.

One shirt went to sticks, the guy you heard about earlier, the one who allegedly had a hit put out on him.

We came off the slave ships, understand me, extracted from our motherlands, brought from different Caribbean, and ended up here in Belize.

Sticks real name is Perry Smith. He's Belizean born, but spent 18 years in the US, including some years in federal prison on drug charges. When he got out, Uncle Sam deported him, and Sticks found work as a stevedore at the country's largest port, loading and unloading ships. But that job had radicalized him, and, he says, put a target on his back.

When I started to talk out publicly against the bullshit that I see that's happening in this country, I had hits put on my head.

Understand sticks was chatty, but a little offish at first. I asked him about the story I'd heard from jasmine, about the rumor mill allegedly mixing up two nicknames, six and sticks. He'd heard it too, and he didn't exactly seem fazed. But also he believed it.

I can't say who's behind it because the range of things that I talk about and talk against never know. He might be a businessman, he might be a politician.

Perry Smith has tangled with Belize's elite for years because of his job at the port, a port which Michael Ashcroft basically controls through Port of Belize Limited, or PBL, which is a subsidiary of Waterloo Investment holdings. Conditions on the job, Stick says, are bad. And a few years back, he and the other stevedores went on strike, using their collective bargaining power to fight back with some success. PBL suffered losses and retaliated by suing the stevedores union. But the government stepped in to try and smooth things over, offering 1.5 million Belize dollars in ex gracia relief payment to the workers, which the Ashcroft alliance apparently didn't like. In fact, they apparently didn't like it so much that the Good Lords Port Company filed an injunction to stop the payment. This injunction, by the way, was filed by Godfrey Smith, that Ashcroft allied lawyer who represented Jasmine until he didn't. This all feels petty, even spiteful. Anyway, this is all to say that sticks, the stevedores and Lord Ashcroft go way back. Lately, sticks and some of his friends had joined another fight against a controversial Newport project. The developer. I'll give you one guess.

A clear cut note to the Ashrof Waterloo project was delivered this morning to the government of Belize in the form of 20,132 signed petitions. The signatures were collected from across the country in hopes of putting an end to the port of Belize. A cruise, tourism and port expansion project.

Waterloo was applying to build a massive new development, including a port, one that protesters claimed would lead to an environmental disaster. The dredging required for the build would decimate parts of the coral reef, one of the most pristine in the world and Belize's greatest tourism asset. 20,000 signatures were collected opposing the plans. That's one in 20 Belizeans. It was a protest against this development that Jasmine had her white devil t shirts printed for. Perry told us that there was actually more to the opposition than ecological devastation.

The port needs an upgrade. But what Ashcroft is proposing is gentrification.

The Ashcroft backed investors would only support an upgrade of the existing port if it included a cruise ship terminal bringing in more tourists. Something sticks felt would push out the people living there.

He's trying to gentify the whole south side of Belize and disenfranchise a whole community's way of living for years from slavery. We have been living back there in the southe.

Lord Ashcroft was not shy about making his case for the project, as heard here in an interview on good old Channel five. What's the appeal of having this project at this location?

Well, I've just explained, onshore berthing a bulk handling facility, regeneration of the south side, more foreign currency coming in through the bigger Oasis ships coming in. And isn't one of the things the government wants is more foreign currency? Or is this too difficult?

Ah, the investment argument again with a.

Condition Waterloo's made abundantly clear. There isn't one without the other.

No cruise ship terminal, no upgrade for the commercial port.

I would like the challenge of doing something that I believe is right for the country.

In other words, this was all in the best interests of Belize. And Ashcroft didn't have much sympathy for the protesters. The thing about this specific port protest is that for Perry and for Jasmine, it's just a battle in a much larger war. They both have personal reasons to oppose Michael Ashcroft and his partners in the so called Ashcroft alliance, the power they all represent. These protests were loud and consistent and had been popping up off and on for years over a range of issues.

You are doing this against the constitution of police.

It's our people that punish every time. Every time Mister Ashcroft is doing something.

It is a problem for us.

The new port had already been rejected twice on environmental grounds. There was significant opposition inside the government because another influential caucus supported another cruise port project backed by another powerful family. But if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. A clause in the process allowed Waterloo to simply reapply and reapply by the end of 2022. Ashcroft's new port proposals have been rejected three times. It didn't appear that the dispute would end anytime soon. It also didn't look like the Ashcroft alliance planned to give up. For Perry, it was all wrapped up in years of oppression. For Jasmine, piling onto this righteous seeming fight felt like a tangible way to get out some frustration and to feel like she was on the side of good. She also met some very interesting people at these protests. As I've said now many, many times, Belize is small. Everyone knows everyone, especially among the rich and powerful. And while the port rallies were mostly a collection of have nots, Jasmine did run into someone she knew a bit from her old life.

I went outside to have a cigarette, and there's a busload of people, and they ended up, like, coming around. I gave out a bunch of shirts to them, and then we were just talking by the cardinal anyways, and then I see Shine walking by, and I said, hey, shine, I said, how's your best friend Andrew? Tell him I said hi. And he just kind of shook his head and smiled and got in his car.

Moses Barrow, aka Shine. Who is he? That's quite a story. Shine. Shine.

Shine in the Texas.

Shine, as most people know him, is the current leader of the UDP, the opposition party, which means that as of now, it's entirely possible that he will be prime minister after the next general election, which will take place by 2025 at the latest. So his story may be playing out in Belize with an ascension to power, but it begins on the streets of New York City. Cheyenne's given name was Jamal, and he moved with his mother from Belize to Brooklyn. As a kid, he grew up poor and became involved in gangs. Shine was his street name. In 1996, when he was just 18, he was shot. He's spoken of this moment as the thing that turned his life around, leading him to focus his natural talents on music. Cheyton became one of the key figures, working with Sean Diddy Combs bad Boy Records. But with his debut album set for release, he was involved in a shooting at a nightclub in Times Square on a night out with his mentor Diddy, indeed, his then girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez.

They was in the club, and it popped. I heard some dudes threw money. They threw money, and, like, it got crazy.

Shine was charged with three counts of attempted murder. His more famous friends walked free. Shine's debut single, bad boys was released to critical and chart success, but a year later, he was behind bars, pondering the perceived injustice of it all. Shine didn't speak about this in public until April of this year, when he seemed to confirm what many people had long that he was a scapegoat. He said as much, responding to comments made by one of the nightclub victims in the wake of the many, many allegations against Diddy that came to light this spring.

It certainly reopens the wounds that I've been saying this all along. Everyone knew all along that I was the fall guy.

Guilty or not. Shine served eight years and, like Perry Smith, was deported back to his birth nation. Upon his release, the famous rapper began his journey after six this morning when he left the detention center in Buffalo.

New York, in the company of a.

Us marshal in prison, Shine had a spiritual awakening and converted to orthodox Judaism. He emerged an apparent new man, determined to make a new life as a politician in the place of his birth.

You know, I think everything is about timing, and, you know, the opportunity that I have today to impact the world, everything that I've been through is really worth it because I'm not just a leader in Belize, but I'm a world leader.

It is objectively an incredible story. Arise and fall and rise again. So how did Shine pull off this remarkable second act? The clue is in the name Jamal. Now Moses Shine. Barrow is his full name. Does that ring a bell?

This is our house. This is our country.

Shine is the son of Dean Barrow, the legendary ex prime minister Belize, who first called Michael Ashcroft the white devil way back when. The whole shine thing, it is a great story, but maybe that's all it is. The general sense in Belize, at least among the people, is that a new leader, even a famous rapper promising a glorious new future, isn't likely to change much. Ask Perry Smith.

Politics down here is like sports. Politics down here is like being a goddamn movie star, being a musician. The politicians are the rock stars.

That's not a compliment.

Every politician lies. Even every judge lies. Every individual that walks the face of this earth lies. Let's be realistic, yo. Believes are set up just like anywhere in the goddamn world. Anywhere in the world. Because if you a bilderberg, you're a Rockefeller, you a rod child, you're a Carnegie, and you living in the goddamn states. Stop playing. Belize is nowhere different.

Money talks and so does power. Jasmine, who's hung out with Shine when she was living the high life alongside Andrew, isn't the biggest fan of the man either. She doesn't believe he's the reformed savior of the belizean people he claims to be. And if you ask her, Shine's rise to power isn't likely to signal any kind of sea change. It's probably just the same movie with a new cast.

Michael Ashcroft contacted Andrew and said, listen, I want you to become friends with Shine. I just met with Dean Barrow, the ex prime minister. We need you to get close with Shine because we're making some moves.

Andrew, for the record, says that this assertion that he befriended Shine at his father's behest is, quote, totally untrue.

So then all of a sudden, I see shine running for politics. So this is going to be just history repeating itself. The next Michael Ashcroft junior and Dean Barrow junior ready to scrub a lease over even more.

Ashcroft and Barrow are, on the surface, enemies clashing in parliament and often in public. But according to Jasmine, they aren't actually enemies on the ground. Their relationship, she says, is, at the very least, mutually beneficial.

It's a game, like they actually get along well. It's smoke and mirrors.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. We'll be right back. On the 26 January 2023, Jasmine was in court again, this time for the drug possession charge and the common assault she was accused of at Alaia after attempting to go home that first week and see her kids. And yet again, both charges were pushed to a future date. No clarity, just further delays. It felt like things were being dragged out purposefully. Jasmine and Louisa had grown quite close by this point, and the local press had begun to refer to Louisa as her PR representative. Leaving court that day, after yet another delay, Luisa read a statement to the media on Jasmine's behalf.

The people of Belize deserve better than a police force and justice system that are willing to ignore law and morality to please one man. These manufactured charges and I orchestrated attempts to destroy my reputation and smear me globally have given me a world stage in which to expose them. My children will know the truth, and I will continue to use the international audience they have tried to pit against me to fight their corruption and expose the backdoor deals that have robbed two children of their mother and countless Belizeans of justice.

Jasmine was now fully mixing the messages of the resistance, this overt attack on corrupt systems, with her own fight for justice and whatever skepticism existed about the night of the accident and her privilege, many people in Belize did relate and support her.

Yeah, speaking of that does make a difference. It does make a difference. I can't continue watching bullshit happen and don't talk about bullshit, because it's gonna keep happening.

It's going to keep happening, and it always will. As the layers of the onion are peeled back, so are layers of corruption right to the core. People in blease feel this. They know it, even if they can't see it. And it's been this way, well, since pretty much forever. In 2022, Kate Middleton and Prince William visited Belize. It was the first stop on a tour of commonwealth countries in the Caribbean to honor Queen Elizabeth's platinum jubilee. There are signs of Britain's colonial past everywhere. In Belize, King Charles III is the monarch. But it now feels like history. What remains are mostly echoes, and some of them are dark.

When we got independence in 1981, it got a little worse. It's like you're on a roller coaster. But this roller coaster does keep going down.

Dismantling hundreds of years of direct rule and giving agency back to the people seemed like the right thing to do. But there's a feeling now that this has mostly just sowed the seeds for creating a state where chaos reigns, where the same shadowy colonial power is maintained and solidified, power arguably farther away from scrutiny than they were before.

The seeds of corruption was planted when the colonizers were here and they left the house niggers to take over.

Perry means basically everyone in power since then, up to and including the barrows.

Black people been selling out. Black people. UDP had the most black leaders in their regime, and they did the least for the black people's plight in this goddamn country over the goddamn 13 years they was in power.

It's hard to see how independence improved life for the vast majority of Belizeans, despite the money flowing into their country. And it's also hard not to look at all this as simply a new form of colonialism that is, control by one power over a dependent area or people. Remember tax transparency campaigner John Christensen's golden rule? Those who have the gold make the rules. Michael Ashcroft is the very public face of shadowy interests that benefit directly from the structures and systems that make up Belize today. He is also, to the stevedores, the face of an oppressive elite that keeps Belizeans down. Their protests are largely driven by low wages and poor working conditions.

He's a slave driver. He's a slave master. He's here to make money and control men in our government.

Raymond Rivers is another stevedore activist and sometime leader of the ongoing protests at the port. His phone connection, I'm sorry to say, was bad because he was using a series of burners to stay off the radar. That's how much he distrusts the powers that be.

I've been to the end of the rabbit hole and fucking came up back, and, you know, and that's where I am. I don't know if he set up all these politicians who believe that they're in a freemason kind of Illuminati cult, where 4000 of them believe they are the owners, along with Ashcraft, of this country, and everyone at the bottom are slave to them. That's how I take it.

This sentiment comes up often in the rare times when someone is speaking freely. The rot is just that deep. You can't reverse it. Raymond and some other radicals feel that the only hope is to uproot it, all of it.

If I could hold a rebellion one day, I would get rid of every single one of these people. You know, all judges are liars. Like maybe half the police force, half the media, maybe the whole bar association, all the courts. It's like a fucking cancer sucking my country and my people.

Raymond had something interesting to say about the jasmine of it all, too. How this new attention, even from a powerless canadian, who many Belizeans surely dislike, actually does kind of matter. Even the t shirts, which seem like the emptiest, most harmless kind of protest they could bring into the light what has long been invisible.

Like, who's that guy? That's Ashcroft. Oh, that's Ashcroft. Many people don't even know the man who fucked up this country.

Raymond was sympathetic to Jasmine and what she was facing. He believed that she was being targeted because she had been on the inside and knew too much. He even had some interesting thoughts on Henrys shooting.

They know that Jasmine not kill that person.

They know Jasmine didnt kill that person. He means Henry, of course. So Raymond has his own version of what happened that night on the pier, a story he says that several people in San Pedro had shared with him. But the code of the street has kept them quiet. That theory. Buckle up.

That night they drove both of them. Jasmine and the police. Andrew Ashcraft did it because he jealous. The police. And it's like someone sending you two complimentary drinks and, you know, you feel like he's from the hotel and it's laced with stuff.

A little hard to understand, I know, but Raymond's street sources claim that both Jasmine and Henry were drugged by the ashcrofts, and that someone else then shot Henry and made it look like Jasmine was the shooter.

This is all the ashcroft. Fucking do it. I'm gonna show her who's the fucking boss. If she don't want to fucking listen, I'm gonna use the whole entire fucking system I own. Once you're in the system, all these liars, they don't play.

It's not the craziest theory I've heard. It would honestly explain a lot. It's just not true.

I mean, I wish that was the truth, you know? I just remember being really in shock, following everything. It does seem like a blur, like a bad dream. You're floating, you're disoriented. You don't know what's going on. But, yeah, no, I don't think I was drugged, though.

But she has heard the wild rumor many times.

They literally said to me, everybody knows that you were drugged, that Andrew did it, and they're pinning it on you, and that's why they want you in jail, because they want to keep you quiet from telling the truth. And then they said there was a sniper, and then they said that Christopher Knobley, chief of police, killed him. So there's all kinds of different stories then they've said, oh, apparently I'm also like a hit woman, and I was just like a sleeper agent.

It was not, Jasmine says, a setup. There's no nefarious plot, as much as she sometimes wishes there was. But she does think that Andrew and whoever was supporting him from the shadows saw in the tragedy an opportunity. And that ever since, they have been trying to destroy her, using their power in all its forms to crush her. It reminds me of something that lawyer Audrey Matura told us.

She has to be very careful with whom she surrounds herself. She has to understand that while she may have been an insignificant person, born in a little town in Canada, come to Belize to be a sales agent, she got involved with a very powerful set of people whose dirty laundry she knows. And she may not say it, but she may have participated in some of the things that they've done. She is a danger to them. If people could see the big picture.

They would know that Audrey is older than Perry or Raymond. She seems worn down by it all, but she also understands why they fight. She's just not very optimistic about what can be accomplished while you're alive.

You have to just talk against it and leave a record, leave all the warning with the hope that the younger generation will do better. And they hope that when Michael Ashcroft passes off in his natural death, his son, who seems to be more of an idiot, does not have the savvy, will not be able to manipulate, and that maybe we have a different era of politicians in the scheme of things, Jasmine is like a drop in the bucket. She's insignificant for Michael Ashcroft. She's significant because she's the mother of the heir to their throne. And those kids might be smarter than their dad. I think Michael Ashcroft knows he will die and he needs to leave his empire in the hands of more competent, savvy ears. And poor Andrew. I could tell him to his face he doesn't cut it.

Audrey does find some peace in a vision she carries around of the future and of all the leaders and people with visible and invisible power in her country.

My only redemption is that all of them must die, and all of them will die a painful death. They might have dementia and be shitting up themselves and have some lady have to clean their butt, and they have a catheter on their penis and they can't pee. Oh, my God. They'll die bad. I mean, I don't rejoice in people's misfortune, but it's funny to see how they suffer. That's the only redemption. We're no longer the Garden of Eden. The white devil came and gave the government the apple, and they ate it. And all of us have been thrown out of the Garden of Eden.

Not long ago, I finally reached an influential belizean id been trying to talk to for some time. He's been outspoken about the country's problems and about the ashcrofts in the past, but he didn't seem to want to get into it all again, no matter how much I pushed him. He did, however, use a metaphor that I have to share. It's too perfect, he said. He thinks of Michael Ashcroft in his ilkhouse, billionaire expats who thrive in developing nations like Belize as lionfish. The lionfish, if you don't know, is a species that's not native to the Caribbean. It comes from Asia. But at some point, lionfish showed up in the Caribbean, and this beautiful, exotic species proceeded to out compete nearly all other wildlife that live in the coral reefs, like the one off Belize.

Most other fish are not so lucky.

The native fish were caught completely off guard. They had no defenses for it. Like any ecosystem, a reef has equilibrium. The species that live there are adapted to deal with adverse forces, like natural predators, but they just aren't prepared for powerful invasive species. So lionfish became an apex predator and basically took over. People have tried all kinds of things to fight back the lionfish, including marketing it as delicious to eat, banning their import, even hosting tournaments where fishermen compete to see who can kill the most none of it seems to matter. Instead of equilibrium, the lionfish, the foreigner, now rules the reef. And all the other fish just have to do their best to survive. And the casualties of decades accumulate around the margins. I asked this guy if he had any hope of bullies changing. He wasn't optimistic. Its institutions, in his opinion, were too far gone. The leaders, he said, discussed him way more these days than the lionfish. Then he asked me if I'd heard about Wendy Oxalu. Wendy, you'll recall, is the good samaritan who paid Jasmine's bail when she was out of options and then for a while, became her legal advisor.

I told him I had heard from Jasmine, who had just sent me a clip that Wendy posted to Facebook.

My name is Wendy Oxalu. I was an attorney in my birth country of Belize until last year, when I was forced to flee the country and live in exile out of fear for my life. This is going to make me emotional, so please bear with me.

Wendy alleged in a ten minute post that she was raped by a very powerful Belizean. But she did something rare, something brave.

She named the man I was raped by, Andre Perez. And then, and now again, sitting minister of government.

Perez is a cabinet minister. The story dates back a year, when Belize's prime minister suspended Perez in the wake of allegations that stemmed from Agzalou's release of intimate photos he'd texted to her. He announced that an investigation would ensue, but then there was no further sanction. And privately, Wendy says she began to experience pressure and harassment.

As legal counsel to Jasmine Hartin, I had been to the police stations on several occasions to visit her after she had been jailed on trumped up charges on a Friday and released on a Monday. Movements that were designed, designed only to humiliate and degrade her as a person and human being.

In other words, seeing what Jasmine went through, standing up to power, scared her. She fled Belize and is now living in exile.

And I knew right away that if I spoke out, this, too, would be my fate. I would not just be fighting a battle against a rapist, but against an entire entrenched patriarchy sitting in cabinet. And I kept silent for months. If the patriarchy that rules Belize wants to discipline me further because I'm speaking out tonight, they can do all manner of things. Yes, I run that risk. But at this point, they have already robbed me of everything. My peace of mind, my life and my livelihood. The one thing they cannot take away from me is my agency and my voice. And I will tell my story over and over until it's heard.

Where is Wendy now? I couldn't tell you. She's too scared to reveal the country. I traded some messages with her and asked if she talked to me about it all, but she declined. She was just too worried about her family and about her future. But I'm struck by a line from that post.

I'm just the face of this story, or the poster child, as they call it, of this story. This story is about men, powerful men in positions in this country who take advantage of women and are not held to account. But truth is truth, and no amount of lipstick on a pig can mask it.

Jasmine is one of the few people out there who understands the fear that wendy was experiencing, but she doesn't have the option of running away, not with the fate of her children hanging in the balance. If she ever wanted to get her kids back and rebuild her life, she needed to face her judgment. And finally, almost two years after the death of Henry Jamata, the thing that had been hanging over her head was about to be decided. Her criminal trial was finally approaching, and so many outcomes were still possible. That's next week on the 12th and final episode of White Devil. Under the shade I flourish under the rocks and stones. White Devil is a production of Campsite Media in association with Olive Bridge Entertainment. The show was written and reported by me, Josh Dean, with the series producer Joe Barrett. Desert island the story editor and sound designer is Mark McAdam, who also provided original music. Additional sound design by Joe Barrett Studio Engineering by Ewan Lytramuin our closing theme is under the Shade I formed flourish by Chris Halton, and new Manhattan, including Eli Carvajal, Hava Carvajal, and Louis Cherniofsky. This episode was fact checked by Sarah Ivory, additional research by Emma Simonov, and reporting in Belize by Hippolyto Novello.

Artwork by Anthony Garace a special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slaywin, Ashley Warren, Sabina, Mara, Emma Simonoff, Destiny Dingle, and David Eichler. Campsite Media's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, Matt Sher, and me, Josh dean at Olive Bridge. The executive producer is will Gluck. If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. It really does help other people find the show, and here's a thought, maybe tell a friend to check out white devil while you're at it. Anyway, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

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