Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean, Migration & Refugees, North America

POLITICS-GUYANA: Once Rare, U.S. Visas Now Almost Impossible

Bert Wilkinson

GEORGETOWN, Mar 21 2007 (IPS) - It was always in the cards given the level of official corruption, warnings from Washington about the failure of authorities to deal with Guyana’s growing brigade of drug barons, and the desire of so many to leave this former British colony for so-called greener pastures in the United States.

This week, the U.S. State Department finally pulled the plug, announcing that with immediate effect, locals applying for non-immigrant or tourists visas need not bother to bring official documents like land titles, job letters, invitation documents from relatives overseas and even statements of savings from commercial banks. Too many of those documents are phony, the embassy says.

“We simply don’t have the time and resources to verify what is an authentic document or what is not,” said Susan Tuller, the head of the U.S. embassy consular section in this small South American nation of 730,000, which is also home to the headquarters of the 15-nation Caribbean Community. “Applicants will simply have to impress consular officers that they should be granted a visa and that is as it should be.”

For years, the mission with less then 20 U.S. expatriate staffers, supported by local hires, says that it has simply been overwhelmed by the level of corruption in the form of forged documents to support applications for tourist visas.

But while almost everyone here agrees that the decision is understandable, given the ease with which official documents can be bought for a small fee, the larger story has to do with what was not said and what the new ruling means.

For one thing, locals trying to obtain a visa by simply turning up without documents proving who they are stand little chance of impressing consular officers, who already operate on the notion that the applicant would probably “jump ship” and remain in the U.S. illegally, joining friends and family in the large diaspora there.

The rate of rejection of Guyanese seeking U.S. tourist visas is astonishingly high and among the worst on the planet. Embassy officials say some 60 percent of applicants are rejected, a figure topped only by a small group of countries including The Gambia with 65.5, Ghana with 61.1, and Uzbekistan with 61 percent.

What’s more, a verification exercise done by federal agencies in the last two years indicates that 8.5 percent of those who travel on non-immigrant visas do not return.

“Compared with the rest of the region that figure is very high, double in some cases. For example, in the Dominican Republic, Belize and Jamaica, their figure is only four percent,” says Tuller.

She says that the verification exercise has shown that people from all classes of society are in this group, “so we will be going now with what a person tells an officer.”

Aubrey Norton, a University of Guyana professor and opposition member of parliament, says the announcement speaks volumes about the political situation in the country and underlines how Washington appears to be increasingly viewing the entire government and national community as corrupt.

“The Americans are obviously putting political pressure on government for not dealing with the drugs situation in the country, as there have been no indictments of big dealers in Guyana. Also, it is clear that they are seeing the entire place as corrupt and that they hardly trust government or anything from government,” he said.

Government spokesman Kwame McCoy says that “government has noted the announcement and will comment if and when it sees fit. We are aware it has implications but we may comment later.”

U.S. officials are not unmindful of the fact that one of the biggest visa fraud rackets in State Department history occurred in Guyana in 1999-2000 when an expatriate vice-consul was found selling visas for 10,000 dollars each. Federal investigators figured out that he and local co-conspirators had sold 700 visas in all before being caught in a sting operation and convicted in a Chicago, Illinois court.

The Canadian government also ran into problems with fraud and corruption. At the close of the 1980s, investigators uncovered a visa for sale racket that led to the jailing of a former embassy employee. Guyanese now have to travel to neighbouring Trinidad, where the Canadians have moved their consular section.

Norton says that it is becoming quite clear that relations with the U.S. are deteriorating because of the apparent reluctance of authorities to deal with local drug barons thought to be linked to officialdom.

He pointed to the fact that U.S. agents nabbed three alleged major traffickers in Trinidad in the last two years only because they had left the local safe haven. Such arrests are not expected here in what is seen as an enabling environment created by authorities, a point the State Department makes year after year in its annual assessments of the narco trade in Guyana.

Last year’s report estimated the illegal drug trade at 150 million dollars annually, “and possibly much more”, an amount equal to 20 percent of Guyana’s reported gross domestic product.