"We're trying to work in compliance with the principles of Durban," Judge [Graciela Dixon], the current president of Panama's Supreme Court, said. "There's an emphasis on establishing the precise policies our countries need to assure inclusion for African descendants in Latin America." Late last year, Congresswoman Campbell hosted some 75 delegates from 20 countries who came to Costa Rica to attend the third Conference of Afro-Descendant Legislators in the Americas and the Caribbean. "I don't come from the activist Afro tradition," [Edgard Ortuno Silva] confesses, "but from the militant tradition of change. I admit that what has happened to me is that I overcame the problems of Blacks in Uruguay, of people of my skin color. And most people who have overcome no longer have a consciousness of being Black. But in my case, the political process I have been a part of made me aware of the African activist movement and I have talked with them and they have made me conscious."
The Caribbean branch of the Toronto-based Global Afrikan Congress (GAC) this week welcomed British Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments on the horrors of slavery, saying he has done much more for the cause than "our own" Black-led governments in the region on the issue. Maxie Fox, a spokesman for the GAC formed in Barbados in 2002, said the GAC and other Afro organizations have been trying for years to persuade regional governments to "have a discourse" on slavery, its effects on Blacks and even reparations, but only Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo, a Hindu, has seen it fit to acknowledge correspondence.
