Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

Aime Cesaire, black poet and politician, died in Martinique’s capital Fort-de-France on April 17 2008, far from his ancestral lands, and as a long-serving mayor of his adopted city.  There were petitions for him to be shipped back to France and buried in the company of great French poets and literary figures there.

The annual International Poetry Festival in Medellin, Colombia, is the largest of its kind anywhere in the world.  It has an interesting origin, in that it was born out of the misery and frustration of the early 1990s, when the country was drenched in violence and corruption from the drugs wars, and Medellin was the world’s most violent city and the centre of the global drugs trafficking business.