GEORGETOWN, Guyana (AP) — Guyana and the United States are close to an agreement establishing a system for deporting Guyanese nationals convicted of crimes in the United States, an American official said yesterday.

The memorandum of understanding would require the US Government to provide background information on criminal deportees before they arrive, US Embassy deputy chief of mission, Betty McCutchan, said.

Another key consideration would allow deportees to transfer financial assets they may have acquired in the United States, in an effort to prevent them from becoming social and economic burdens in Guyana, she said.

Guyana, which hosts the headquarters of the 15-member Caribbean Community, and several other Caribbean countries have been pressing the US Government for an agreement on deportees. McCutchan said she hopes the two countries will sign the agreement by next month.

This former British colony of 700,000 residents has absorbed more than 500 criminal deportees from the United States since January, compared to 300 for all of 2002, according to police statistics.

Most were deported after serving out convictions for rape, drug trafficking, murder and armed robbery, police said. An increasing number are being deported after serving time for domestic violence, Cabinet Secretary Roger Luncheon said.

The news came as Caribbean officials planned to meet with US Secretary of State Colin Powell this week in Washington and discuss anxieties about US deportations of Caribbean nationals convicted for crimes committed in the United States.

Since the US Congress passed a law in 1996 to repatriate immigrant criminals, more than half-a-million criminals have been deported, 80 per cent of them to seven Caribbean and Latin American countries — Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia, Mexico and Guatemala.

In Jamaica, one out of every 106 males over the age of 15 is a criminal deportee, creating a 10,000-strong force that police blame for hundreds of murders.

Caribbean officials say the criminals, some of whom had lived in the United States from childhood and no longer have family connections in their homelands, have introduced new and more violent crimes.