Pubdate: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 Source: Guardian Weekly, The (UK) Copyright: Guardian Publications 2003 Contact: http://www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/GWeekly/front/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/633 Author: David Brotherton, in Santo Domingo VICTIMS OF AMERICA'S FAILING WAR ON DRUGS US Washes Its Hands Of Ex-Residents Taken From Families They arrive every Wednesday on a government-provided bus at the same downtown destination: the corner of Maximo Gomez and Bolivar. Tonight the total number is 46. Forty men and six women.Looking tired and bewildered, they descend the steps of the large, grey Hyundai. Some of them are young men, almost boys, in their early 20s. The women look to be mostly in their 30s, and many of the men are in their 40s, perhaps even 50s. Who are these hapless Dominican wanderers descending on Santo Domingo? They are this week's batch of deportees from the United States, who have been sent back to the Dominican Republic. Most of them will never return to their wives, children, mothers, loved ones, who continue their lives in the different ethnic enclaves of Manhattan, the Bronx, Boston and Miami. The story of the Dominican deportees began in the early 1990s as part of the war against drugs, which has so far cost US taxpayers $150bn without making the slightest dent in supply or demand. Hundreds of thousands of poor and working-class men and women have been sentenced to spend the next five, 10, 15 and even 20 years in US prisons for an ounce or two of cocaine, a couple of grams of crack or a few bundles of marijuana. There have been a number of relatively big-time dealers among them, but mostly they are small fry. Many of them face numerous handicaps: a lack of legal knowledge, a lack of fluency in the English language, no money, and the stigma of their race. Sitting on a bench in the Parque Colon in the colonial zone of Santo Domingo, Javier describes his arrival in March 2001, after seven years in New York state prisons. "I have all my papers with me. I have my green card, I have my tax statements, I have my social security stubs, I have everything. What am I doing here? I have six children all living in New York City; I haven't seen them for years. "You go from day to day. Some days you can make 500 pesos ($18), other days you make nothing. "I'd like to get a better job but you need a good conduct letter. If you're a deportee it's stamped all over it so as soon as the employer sees that, it's all over. "What did I do? I sold prescription drugs, I think it was morphine, to an undercover. For that I got seven years and deported to a country I hadn't been to in 20 years. All my family's over there. "When I first arrived I wanted to kill myself. I was gonna take an overdose of something. I don't know why I didn't." Javier's story is not unlike those of a great many of the 20,000 formerly legal residents of the US who have been deported back to their homeland over the past 10 years. Unfortunately for them, either when they were in prison or just before they were sent away, the US Congress passed the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act. It says that "an alien convicted of an aggravated felony shall be conclusively presumed to be deportable from the United States". One of the key aspects of this legislation was the dramatically increased list of offences that now constituted an "aggravated felony". In effect, the present act guarantees that almost anyone receiving a sentence of 12 months or more is automatically deported. And so here they are. Back in a poor Santo Domingo neighbourhood, often where they grew up. Back in the daily Santo Domingo mix with the same tendency for black-outs, erratic water supply, no jobs, no government system for retraining, and a host of public services that have been taken over by US or Spanish corporations - ensuring that monthly telephone bills are on a par with those of Manhattan and electricity prices are, according to the US ambassador, the highest in the world. There are deportees who are now businessmen, police administrators and even politicians. But most are unemployed. The US, which has an imposing presence through its embassy, trade mission and aid headquarters, takes a hands-off approach, best summarised by a political attache at the embassy: "Dominican deportees are not the problem of the United States. They knowingly broke the law of a country where they were guests, and now they have been dealt with according to our system of justice. We have no interest in the matter." A glimmer of hope recently emerged after five deportees met one of the country's most well-known radical priests, Padre Rogelio Cruz. The group discussed founding a national organisation of deportees. Luis, a deportee and barrio lawyer, described the task ahead of them: "Some of us screwed up and we paid our debts to society. Others were guilty of nothing, but they got busted anyway. But all that's behind us. Now we have to focus on the future." As another plane arrives with 40 or 50 deportees on board, waiting for them in Santo Domingo will be a growing number of men and women who have had enough of living and suffering in silence. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek