People from the developed world continue to be fascinated by Africa, especially Europeans. It is a continent of stark and intense contradictions: immense mineral riches yet widespread, staggering poverty; the cradle of civilization and a hell of unending civil wars;.... Glimpses of the kind of poverty and squalor that is found in Africa can be found in Belize and the Caribbean too.

t is expected that the Secretary General of the Organization of American States will shortly be making his recommendations in this latest round of Belize-Guatemala negotiations. After seven or eight years of protracted and intense negotiations, both countries realized the futility of negotiations and started leaning toward a juridical solution.

Is Belize “a retarded place”? ... it neither fully shares the Caribbean ethos nor that of the neighboring republics, and, in this sense, is on its own. This fosters an insidious insularity, intellectual in-breeding and an outlook not measured or tested against regional or global realities.