From Jungle Prison to Spaceport

The ESA spacecraft carrying the James Webb Space Telescope launched on Xmas morning 2021 from the Centre Spatial Guyanais in the city of Kourou in French Guiana. You may wonder what a European spaceport is doing in South America. The French space agency CNES was established in 1961 with a spaceport in Algeria, which was then part of the French empire. Algeria fought and won their independence in 1962, and the space agency had to start all over. They selected French Guiana because it was already a French territory and had good conditions for space launches. They built Kourou specifically for the space center, evicting around 600 villagers to do so.
But French Guiana, and particularly the Salvation Islands off its coast, has a sordid history. Until the mid-20th century, it was France's penal colony. After slavery was abolished in France, the country sent prisoners to South America to serve out their sentences- and to harvest crops and build infrastructure. Of the 80,000 or so prisoners sent to French Guiana, the majority never made it back to France even after their sentences were up. This was the setting of the book and movie Papillon. Read about the space center built overtop a notorious penal colony at Supercluster.