Although Belize is located on the mainland of the Americas, the country more closely resemble the English-speaking islands of the Caribbean than their Latin American neighbors. Christopher Columbus passed near the coast, but later Spanish explorers and settlers ignored the areas because they lacked the mineral riches that brought the Spanish to the New World. The wealth would prove to be not gold but agriculture. By the end of the eighteenth century, the indigenous populations had been greatly reduced or driven to remote areas, and the coastal lands held growing populations of British or Dutch plantation owners. Plantation work was labor intensive, and initially African slaves,  »» More