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by Tamsen Fadal
BROOKLYN (CBS) ― "Little Guyana" is a hardworking, tight-knit Queens neighborhood where musical echoes of the Caribbean emanate from a line of colorful storefronts that dot the main street.

It is a peaceful home away from home for the many immigrants who left violence-wracked Guyana for a better life.

But lately, the neighborhood has been struggling to deal with images of terror and violence that keep putting the word "Guyana" in the headlines.

The latest blow came when four men from Guyana and Trinidad were arrested on charges that they plotted to blow up the jet-fuel pipeline and tanks at Kennedy Airport. The reaction among residents is usually the same: Shocking. Embarrassing. Crazy. Stupid.

"They let a whole nation down! Stupid!" said Yadran Harry, a 37-year-old grocer in the Queens neighborhood that is home to at least 50,000 immigrants from Guyana, mostly of Indian descent. Thousands more Guyanese immigrants, mostly of African heritage, live in Brooklyn.

The Guyanese community has been struggling with other negative stories in recent months, despite the fact that residents up and down the main street -- Liberty Avenue -- insist that this is a peaceful place.

Last month, authorities said a young woman from Guyana was gunned down by her police officer boyfriend after she broke up with him.

A separate crime involved a Guyanese-born woman who had her throat slashed on her doorstep by the man who allegedly raped her, to keep her from testifying against him.

And in another horrific case that has been playing out in a New York courtroom, a former insurance agent and an ex-postal worker are accused of taking out life insurance policies on impoverished members of their Guyanese community without their knowledge, then hiring hitmen to shoot or poison them to collect the money.

At a time when the U.S. government is reassessing immigration laws, residents say a string of crimes associated with a particular nationality puts everyone in doubt.

"People are afraid they'll be watched more, that travel and immigration will be restricted," said Gary Girdhari, publisher of the Guyana Journal monthly magazine.

The three crime cases topped by the terrorism arrests -- often reported on TV with a map of Guyana splashed across the screen -- "are embarrassing acts committed by a Guyanese person, and people are broadbrushed by them," said Girdhari, once a science professor in Guyana.

Guyana is a former British colony on the northeast coast of South America where about a third of residents are descendants of African slaves and nearly half are the descendants of Indians imported as contract laborers in the 19th century, according to government figures.

The JFK plotters are Muslim, but only 7 percent of Guyana's population is Muslim. Fifty-seven percent are Christian, and 28 percent are Hindu.

The country has long been plagued by violence and drugs; drug traffickers earn the equivalent of an estimated 20 percent of Guyana's gross domestic product, the U.S. State Department has said.

Last year, the country tapped former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik to reform the police force. But he recently lost the job because of his legal woes in the U.S.

In Little Guyana, a meeting is planned for Saturday at a Liberty Avenue mosque, and a group of community leaders issued a statement condemning the beliefs of the terrorism suspects -- three of them Guyanese and one from Trinidad. One is a former member of Guyana's parliament.

"We vehemently condemn any and all acts of terrorism and call for the highest punishment under the law," said the statement, signed by a group of leaders including politicians and clerics who urged "neighbors and fellow New Yorkers not to rush to judgment, and more importantly, not to paint every Guyanese and Trinidadian here in the U.S.A. with a prejudiced brush."

For Harry, the grocer, the aftermath of the terror plot arrests came in a very personal form: a phone call from his 18-year-old son.

"He asked me, 'Dad, what's going on?"' said Harry, a father of three who with his wife opened the R&N West Indian Grocery shortly after immigrating to the United States about 10 years ago. "Coming to America was everybody's dream. This drives me crazy. I can't believe it!"

As he spoke, he lifted up two live crabs that were flown into New York from Guyana via Kennedy Airport, where one of the suspects had once worked as a cargo handler.

That's about the only link anyone in the Queens community has to the four men.

"These men are aberrations," said attorney Albert Baldeo, a native of Guyana.

The arrests were mostly a surprise to a group of immigrants more interested in making a good living than in international politics -- let alone terrorist causes.

"We've never had any ties to radical Muslim fundamentalism," said Baldeo.

The accused mastermind of the alleged plot, Russell M. Defreitas, is a U.S. citizen born in Guyana, a Muslim of African descent. He told a federal informant that his feelings of disgust toward his adopted homeland had lingered for years.

Such an attitude is foreign to Guyanese shopkeepers along Liberty Avenue, where the closest most of them get to politics is to vote for Democrats.

"It's hard enough to get by, and then you're going to turn around and do this!" says Angela Harry, the grocer's wife, who works 14-hour days in a neighborhood where many people hold two or three jobs.

For now, except for speaking out against prejudiced assumptions, "you can't do anything," concludes Girdhari. "You just have to tell your story."

(© MMVII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)