Prime Minister David Thompson disclosed this yesterday during a Press conference shared with the United States Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Thomas Shannon, at Ilaro Court.
"I hope that this will be one of the areas in which we can get some quick results because it is a major concern," Thompson told reporters.
The problem of deportees featured in discussions which Thompson, The Bahamas' Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham and Belize's leader Dean Barrow had with President George Bush in the White House last week as well as the talks between Thompson and Shannon yesterday.
Mechanism
"A mechanism" to deal with the problem had also been discussed, Thompson said, without going into details.
The Prime Minister spoke against the backdrop of speculation that Barbados and other Caribbean nations may soon be forced to absorb more criminal deportees from the United States.
This was triggered by a decision by the United States Sentencing Commission to lighten punishment retroactively for some drug crimes.
Crime
One worry for Caribbean countries was that some deportees left the region as children and no longer had family ties, a network of friends or any kind of support system. Another was the deportees' involvement in crime.
Shannon, who is on a swing through the Caribbean, noted that the United States hoped to be able later to sit down with CARICOM leaders and work on a security co-operation agenda.
Trafficking in whatever form was now managed and run by organized crime networks and cartels which were "transnational actors" with no respect for sovereignty and with "enormous" resources of telecommunications, money, weapons and transportation at their disposal, Shannon pointed out.
On the other hand, the small states of the Caribbean were "not adequately equipped" to face these problems, he told reporters.
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