Word: guianas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Last April, British Guiana, the Kansas-sized land of jungle, mountains and coastal sugar lands that is Britain's only colony on the South American continent, held its first popular elections under a newly granted constitution-and returned the first openly pro-Communist government ever to hold office in the British Empire. Last week, after six months of mounting frustration over the colony's Red-created unrest and subversive intrigues, Britain suspended the constitution and sent in troops to guarantee public safety. Said Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton: "Her Majesty's government is not willing to allow...
...Deterrent. Ever since 1925, when a reporter visited Guiana and wrote a blistering exposé of the prison colony for his paper, Le Petit Parisien, enlightened Frenchmen have been clucking over the shameful institution they call "the dry guillotine," but little was done about it. It took more than ten years before the French government finally admitted that Cayenne "does not appear to have any deterrent effect upon the criminals" and was "not good for the prestige of France in [the American] continent." In 1938 the government announced its intention to let the penal colony "disappear by extinction." Red tape...
Reserved for political prisoners, the little island which gave the whole colony its name was actually only a small part of the sprawling penal community-two other rocky islands and two mainland settlements along the banks of French Guiana's Maroni River. But the name sticks: only the Devil himself could have designed such hellish discomfort for his prisoners as those that abounded in the steaming jungles of Guiana, or hired jailers as efficient as the shark-infested seas and fever-ridden swamps that stood guard on all sides of the Cayenne colony. The world got its first full...
Freedom to Starve. Most were not so lucky. French law provided that anyone serving under eight years had to stay in Guiana as a libéré, or freed prisoner, for another period equal at least to that of his sentence; anyone sentenced for more than eight years had to remain in the colony for life. About all that differentiated the libérés from the prisoners was the fact that the freed men had to scratch and beg for their living, while the prisoners at least got fed. Money or influence might buy a man special...
Other prisoners spent their days, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., working on Guiana's roads, forests and plantations, their nights locked in fetid barracks. For those who rebelled, there were solitary cells on St. Joseph Island, cement pits whose only opening was an iron grille. Few inmates long survived St. Joseph. One who did was the locally famed Paul Roussenq, an ex-soldier serving 20 years for attempted arson. Paul's reputation as the ace of all incorrigibles earned him a more or less permanent home on St. Joseph. He wrote frequent obscene letters to the prison...