History of French Guiana

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Background: 1498 Christopher Kolumbus discovered French Guiana. First settled by the French in 1604, French Guiana was the site of notorious penal settlements until 1951. The European Space Agency launches its communication satellites from Kourou.

French Guiana became an overseas départements of France on March 19, 1946.

After the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, the French Guianese government closed all unsupervised roads so that Anthrax would not pass across the border.