{"id":703,"date":"2017-04-21T12:22:01","date_gmt":"2017-04-21T12:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/?p=703"},"modified":"2017-04-21T12:22:01","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T12:22:01","slug":"french-guiana-protests-resume-after-easter-truce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/2017\/04\/21\/french-guiana-protests-resume-after-easter-truce\/","title":{"rendered":"French Guiana protests resume after Easter ‘truce’"},"content":{"rendered":"

The movement behind more than three weeks of social unrest in French Guiana said Monday it would press its action until the government signs a draft accord on an emergency package and reopens talks on further funds.<\/h2>\n

Activists are protesting against what they say is decades of under-investment in the French territory<\/a> in South America, paralysed by a general strike which 37 unions called on March 25.<\/p>\n

Locals have been pressing demands for a “Marshall Plan” of French aid, along the lines of the huge US economic support given to help western Europe to recover after World War II.<\/p>\n

The seven-page accord “to suspend the movement in its present form”, drawn up by the “Collective to Get Guiana Moving” spearheading the protests, was sent to the government on Sunday.<\/p>\n

“To have a swift signature, we have an obligation to harden the movement,” Valerie Vanoukia, representative of very small companies in Guiana, said on behalf of the collective after a general meeting calling on the population to remobilise.<\/p>\n

She said the barricades which had been lifted for Easter would be back in place from Monday night.<\/p>\n

The draft accord calls for an emergency plan of more than one billion euros ($1.07 billion) put forward by the government and proposes reopening dialogue on an additional two billion euros the protestors have demanded so far.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
UNDERSTANDING FRENCH GUIANA’S SOCIAL UNREST<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
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<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Vanoukia stressed that in the original government text, questions on health, education, land and the communes “have not received any real answers”.<\/p>\n

She said two points were non-negotiable: “The government must act on the fact that the Guianese people want to take charge”.<\/p>\n

And she insisted that no demonstrators taking part in the movement would face punishment.<\/p>\n

“We accept the resumption of the dialogue that the president of the republic has proposed to us,” she said, and “to have a quick response, we will continue raising the pressure” just before the first round of the French presidential election this weekend.<\/p>\n

Vanoukia said she was “very confident to say that the movement will be suspended in the next two or three days”.<\/p>\n

A blockade of the port in the capital Cayenne has seen the flow of fresh produce slow to a dribble in the territory bordering Surinam and northern Brazil on the northeast coast of South America, some 7,000 kilometres (4,400 miles) from Paris.<\/p>\n

The protests also led to the indefinite postponement of an Arianespace rocket launch at Europe’s Guiana Space Centre in Kourou.<\/p>\n

The Kourou space centre has become a symbol of economic disparity in Guiana and a focus for anger, given many locals have no electricity or running water and around one in four is jobless.<\/p>\n

Guiana has been administered as a French region since the end of the 18th century and was also used as a place to send convicts for forced labour between 1852 and 1946.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The movement behind more than three weeks of social unrest in French Guiana said Monday it would press its action until the government signs a draft accord on an emergency package and reopens talks on further funds. Activists are protesting against what they say is decades of under-investment in the French territory in South America, paralysed by a general strike… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":704,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/703\/revisions\/704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/baileyonlineclassroom.com\/theamericasblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}