Fighting AIDS in French Guyana : Capsizing Minds in Paris First

French Guyana is a region as any other in continental France : same laws, same administrations, same local councils, same public services. There is some differences though.  French Guyana has a 700 km border with Brazil and 500 km with Suriname. HIV prevalence is up to 1 %. This territory faces a generalized HIV epidemic.

The paper considers the obstacles faced in the first decade of the 21th century to implement an up to date response to the epidemic : "cultural factors " understood negatively as resistance from local populations have been vastly overestimated; late responses in continental France in part due to a inaccurate and oversimplified understanding of the epidemic; contradictions between the administrative structure in Guyana and its situation as an enclave in Latin America. The paper argues that the responses implemented in French Guyana to fight the AIDS epidemic are a product of  number of contradictions:  between a national policy to fight HIV that is unable to import models that have been successful in Europe or to rethink its routines including in metropolitan France or to even think of how to interact with other policy contexts, in this case in Latin America.