Dear Editor,
Further to your office’s request for a response to a letter captioned “Guyanese in the USA inconvenienced by lack of passport books” (07.02.06) purportedly signed by an Andrew Marques, kindly be informed as follows:
1) No passport application has been received by our Embassy from any Andrew Marques between June 2006 to the present time.
2) Our Embassy’s stock of passport books began to reduce in October 2006, causing a temporary shortage, and this triggered the employment of measures to restrict the issue of new passport books to cases of immediate need. In spite of the shortage, all applicants who required new passports for essential purposes such as visiting a sick relative or presentation of a valid passport for US citizenship purposes, were issued with new books on a continuous basis so long as they satisfied the Embassy as to their necessity.
3)The Embassy received a supply of 1,000 books on January 19, 2007 at which time there was a backlog of 407 pending applications dating to June 2006, with only 50 books on hand. Our consular section, working overtime, has since issued 98 new books in the 14 working days since January 19. As a result, all applications received between June, 2006 and October, 2006 have since been processed. It is estimated that the entire backlog will be cleared by the end of this month.
4) The letter writer’s suggestion that the life of passports be extended beyond 15 years to facilitate persons becoming citizens is prohibited by the regulations.
5) To summarize the above, there did exist a shortage of books last Christmas as stated by the writer but had he or she satisfied us as to their need, they would have been provided with a new passport.
6) You will note that the writer has directed his comments at the Washington Embassy. The New York Consulate also issue new passports. Although they also suffer from shortages of books, I believe they are usually better supplied than our Embassy.
Yours faithfully,
Bayney Karran
Ambassador
Embassy of the Republic of Guyana
Washington DC
