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.