With President George W. Bush pushing Congress to consider passage of the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement (FTA), activists want to make certain more people are aware of how this agreement would affect Colombia's Black population.

Afro Colombian activist Marino Cordoba, leader of the organization AFRODES (Asociación de Afrocolombianos Desplazados/Association of Internally Displaced Afro-Colombians; www.afrodes.org), spoke on Friday, March 28 at New York University about this issue.

Marino Cordoba takes a question from a student at NYU  (Karen Juanita Carrillo photo)

read more 

"Booker, a Jamaica native, was 18 when she married Norval Marley, a British man 32 years her senior. Their son brought Jamaican reggae music to international prominence, becoming its international image. Bob Marley died in Miami of a brain tumor in 1981 at age 36.

"Mrs. Booker was the matriarch of a movement so powerful that the mystical qualities of the Marley musical legacy remain strong and potent," Jamaica Information Minister Olivia Grange said.

"After Norval Marley died in 1955, Booker married an American man and settled in Delaware. She wrote two biographies of her famous son and recorded two albums, Awake Zion! and Smilin' Island of Song.

"She was a star in her own right," Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding said in a statement. "Her life was one of hardship, struggle and eventual fulfillment, and through it all, she exuded hope, strength and confidence."

"Few people, much less their governments, appear to be concerned about what is happening in Haiti, next to Cuba our nearest neighbour and, in historical terms, the people who paved the way for our freedom from slavery and implemented for the first time anywhere in the world, the idea of universal human rights," John Maxwell writes in an OpEd in the Jamaican Observer....

"Today, and especially for the last few weeks, the starving people in Haiti have been trying to get the world to listen to their anguish and misery. Along with some other poor people in other countries, the Haitians have been driven to desperation and the edge of starvation by the rapidly increasing price of food. Unlike all the others, the Haitians are over the edge, they are starving, refugees in their own proud country, where many are forced to eat dirt to survive, however tenuously.

"Only the Cubans, the Venezuelans and the Vietnamese appear to care about what is happening in Haiti. The rest of us are too concerned with 'wealth management' and the prospects of foreign investors with bursting wallets floating down from the sky to make us all rich."