Caribbean crime wave linked to US deportations

The crime was horrifying enough - a nightclub owner, hacked to death with a machete, was found buried in pieces. But what really outraged people was that the accused killer had been deported from the U.S. to his native Grenada as a convicted felon.


Grenada's Ronald Michael Phillip, aka Ronald de Ally, second right, is escorted by police officers to the Sauteurs Magistrate Court in St. Patrick, Grenada. Phillip, a convicted felon in the U.S. who had been deported to his Caribbean homeland, is the suspect in the murder of his landlord and nightclub owner, whose body was found Sept. 5 hacked with a machete.

As a foreign-bred criminal, the suspect never should have returned to the close-knit tropical nation, relatives of the victim and others said. Islanders called for more vigilance over deportees by the government, which says it needs help from Washington to handle the return of hardened convicts.

"I hope that my brother did not die in vain and something can be done to monitor these criminal deportees," said Gemma Raeburn-Baynes, a sister of the nightclub owner, Michael Raeburn-Delfish.

The United States has deported thousands of convicted criminals to the Caribbean annually since 1996, when Congress mandated that every non-citizen sentenced to a year or more in prison be kicked out of the country upon release. In all, the U.S. is responsible for about three-quarters of the region's returning criminal deportees, with the United Kingdom and Canada accounting for most of the other ex-cons arriving in the islands.

It's a phenomenon that also afflicts many parts of Central America, where street gangs that grew out of Los Angeles spread to the region through massive deportations. Brutal and powerful, the "Maras" are blamed for rampant violent crime, extortion and more recently acting as enforcers for drug cartels.

In the Caribbean, governments say deportees are exacerbating crime in nations with high levels of violence such as Jamaica. On the smaller islands such as Grenada, once considered idyllic havens from gang violence, officials say the returning deportees are partly to blame for increasingly bold and sophisticated crimes and homicide rates soaring to record levels.

The United States is attempting to defuse tensions with island governments by exploring programs to help them reintegrate deportees. During a visit to Barbados in June, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. is no longer ignoring complaints that have topped the Caribbean's diplomatic agenda for more than a decade.

U.S. officials say privately that the deportations cannot be blamed for the increase in violent crime, but declined to discuss the issue on the record, saying the U.S. does not want to hurt relations with Caribbean governments with which it cooperates on other issues.

The man accused in the machete attack in Grenada, Ronald Michael Phillip, 55, was deported from the United States on July 6, 2000, the day after leaving a state prison in Uncasville, Connecticut, where he had spent more than six years.

Read more: The Associated Press

 

Grenada formally ceded to Great Britain in 1783 by the Treaty of Paris. A century later, in 1877 Grenada was made a Crown Colony. In 1967, Grenada attained the status of "Associated State of the United Kingdom", which meant that Grenada was now responsible for her own internal affairs, and the UK was responsible for her defence and foreign affairs. Independence was granted in 1974.