FRANCE'S PAD IN SOUTH AMERICA

TO Paris, French Guiana has always been a very special colony. Other outposts provided lucrative markets and natural resources, but Guiana depended on France for nearly every necessity--right down to clothes, cheese and Calvados. Yet, in a grisly way, the Indiana-sized enclave more than paid its keep. Brutally humid, far from France and isolated by shark-infested waters and impenetrable jungle, Guiana was the dread, virtually escape-proof exile to which France's worst criminals were shipped. The most famous, of course, was Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish army captain who was cashiered on a trumped-up treason charge. Beginning in 1895, Dreyfus spent four years, two months and 21 days in isolated confinement* before public indignation and Emile Zola's J'accuse won him new hearings and eventual exoneration. But almost 75,000 other Frenchmen served time in Guiana. Buffeted by yellow fever, malaria and sadistic jailers, not many made it home again.

Telemetry Stations. Now French Guiana, elevated from colony to departement when the prisons were shut down in 1946, is bidding to redeem its past through a promising future. The reason: equatorial Guiana is strategically located for the space age. At its latitude of 5DEG north, the surface velocity of the rotating earth is much swifter than at Cape Kennedy, which is at latitude 28DEG north. Thus, a rocket fired in Guiana can lift about 24% more payload with the same thrust than one fired at Cape Kennedy. Moreover, Guiana has a 120DEG stretch of open water north and east of it that is ideal for polar-orbit launchings. As a result, France, forced out of its former space station in the Algerian desert two years ago, is bringing French Guiana into the space age with a $102 million investment in launch pads and their support complexes.

The new base, officially called Le centre spatial guyanais (but likely to be referred to as "Cape de Gaulle" as work goes on), will be used solely for scientific shots, including space probes to study such phenomena as alpha radiation and communications satellites to link Western Europe with other continents. Located in a spread of savanna and sandy coastland at Kourou, 26 miles north of the capital of Cayenne, the space center is tied to tracking or telemetry stations at Bretigny-sur-Orge in France, the Canary Islands, the Congo (Brazzaville), Upper Volta and South Africa. From its complex, six space probes have already been launched this year, and scientists and technicians are now working on the 18 more scheduled to follow.

Inevitably, as French scientists and technicians have arrived, Kourou has mushroomed from a back-country village to a boom town of 5,000 people. Eventually the population will reach 50,000. In order to build launch pads, schools, power plant, sewer lines, dispensaries and 50 miles of paved road, laborers have already been brought in from Brazil, Martinique, Guadaloupe, Saint Lucia and so many surrounding places that 22 nationalities are now at work together.

Creoles in Miniskirts. Kourou's instant urbanization is attractive, TIME correspondent William Forbis reported after a visit. Trim white bungalows, three-and four-story apartment houses, outdoor fountains and sculpture, a shopping arcade and new hotels are in place, including the 100-room Hotel des Roches, which went up alongside the old "Dreyfus Tower" used by signalmen 75 years ago to communicate with Devil's Island eight miles across the water.

Peugeots and Citroens clutter formerly drowsy streets, and Creole girls in miniskirts speed by on Honda motorbikes. Kourou's outstanding restaurant-bar belongs to Raymond Vaude, a grey-haired, aquiline metro, or Continental Frenchman, who boasts three distinctions. He never appears without a white. visored cap, he comes from De Gaulle's town of Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, and he is a bagnard, or ex-convict. While a black cat stalks up and down his bar, Vaude, a onetime burglar, eagerly sells his space-age customers postcards depicting naked prisoners hobbled in leg irons, cramped in the ancient two-ft.-wide cells or being guillotined. Another bagnard painted the scenes from memory.

Graced by new hotels and brought closer to France by four-a-week jet flights, Guiana has even begun to dream of flocks of tourists. One attraction is the jungle, where jaguars, anteaters, alligators and piranha abound and where slave-descended bush Negroes speak a language of only 340 words called taki taki. The tourist who seeks new frontiers had better jet in fast, however. In the space age, the taki taki vocabulary is already growing, and some of the bush Negroes are reportedly dancing the twist and the boogaloo.

* Dreyfus was an occupant of Devil's Island, a place for political prisoners that has become synonymous with the French prison system as a whole. Devil's is one of three coastal islands ironically named the Salvation Islands. Nearby He Royale was for dangerous prisoners and He St. Joseph for incorrigibles who, if they continued to make trouble there, were guillotined and tossed to the sharks. Other prisoners were quartered on the mainland at St. Laurent prison.

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