In French Guiana, virus exposes inequality, colonial legacy

PARIS (AP) — When white doctors walked into Camopi, a majority Indigenous town in French Guiana near the border with Brazil, townspeople felt worry instead of relief.

With French Guiana facing a wave of coronavirus infections, the doctors from the French mainland were there to administer tests and treat the sick. But for residents of the former colony, few of whom have internet or television or knew about COVID-19, the appearance of the health workers carried echoes of the arrival of Europeans in South America and the disease and exploitation they brought.

“There is still in the minds the time of colonization and the havoc wreaked by viruses brought by colonizers,” Jean-Philippe Chambrier, a member of the Arawak tribe and representative of Indigenous communities in French Guiana, told The Associated Press. “So when they saw white people from the mainland, they made the link.”

France’s most worrisome virus hot spot is on the northern coast of South America: French Guiana, a territory of about 300,000 people where poverty is rampant and health care is scarce. Its outbreak has exposed deep economic and racial inequality that residents say leaders in Paris have long chosen to ignore.

Months after the virus stabilized in mainland France, it grew in French Guiana. For weeks in June and early July, about a quarter of new daily infections reported in all of France were in French Guiana, which has just 0.5% of the French population. More than 6,500 cases have been recorded in the territory, although officials fear the number of infections is estimated to be much higher.

Its hospitals reached capacity in June, and the French military intervened to ferry patients to the French Caribbean island of Martinique. The national government sent 130 reserve health care workers to French Guiana, with more on the way.

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