Brazil–France border

Which river did the treaty mean?

In Article 8 of the Treaty of Utrecht, signed on 11 April 1713, the King of France gave up for ever his claims to the “lands of Cape North”, between the Amazon and the river “Japoc, or Vincent Pinson”. Those lands went to the King of Portugal.^[2] The trouble was that nobody had pinned down where that river was. Several rivers carried those names on the imprecise maps of the time.^[1]

The Portuguese said it could only be the Oyapock. France disagreed and pointed to rivers closer to the Amazon: first the Cassiporé, then the Calçoene, and finally the Araguari, which flows into the Amazon estuary.^[1] France's aim was access to the Amazon.^[1]

The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon moved the line back and forth. A treaty signed in Paris in 1797 put it at the Calçoene, and the Treaty of Badajoz in 1801 put it at the Araguari. Then in 1809 Portuguese forces from Brazil occupied French Guiana itself.^[1] A convention signed in Paris on 28 August 1817 handed the colony back.^[2] Granger writes that it placed the border clearly on the Oyapock, but the 1900 arbitrator treated it as only a provisional arrangement.^[1][2]

Sixty years of neutral ground

In 1840 France built a fort on the right bank of the Oyapock, officially Brazilian territory. Brazil answered with a military colony on the Araguari. After British mediation, both sides took down their forts and agreed to treat the land between the Oyapock and the Araguari as neutral until a final settlement.^[1] From 1841 to 1900 this “Contestado” belonged officially to neither country. It was run by a few officials and, above all, by self-appointed leaders from both sides.^[1]

In 1855 Brazil offered to split the territory at the Calçoene, and Napoleon III refused.^[1] In 1886 a French explorer, Henri Coudreau, backed a short-lived “Independent Guiana” republic at Counani, which lasted about a year and issued its own stamps and money.^[1]

In 1894 gold was found in the Calçoene area, and thousands of miners arrived. In May 1895 a Brazilian militia led by Francisco Xavier da Veiga Cabral arrested Trajano Bentes, who was acting for the French at Calçoene, and took him to the village of Mapá. The governor of French Guiana sent soldiers to free him. Seven French soldiers died, including their commander, Captain Lunier, and about forty villagers were killed. Brazilian accounts call those deaths reprisals; French accounts say they died in combat after an ambush.^[1]

The ruling in Bern

The scandal over Mapá led France to accept Brazil's proposal of arbitration.^[1] A treaty signed in Rio de Janeiro on 10 April 1897 asked the Swiss government to decide which river was the “Yapoc or Vincent-Pinson”, and to fix the inland border.^[2] Brazil claimed the Oyapock and, inland, the parallel of 2°24′N. France claimed the Araguari and a line running west, parallel to the Amazon, as far as the Rio Branco.^[2]

Brazil's case was led by the diplomat Rio Branco, who submitted two memorials in nine volumes, written in French, and two atlases with 150 maps. France relied on the work of the geographer Paul Vidal de La Blache.^[1]

The Swiss Federal Council gave its award in Bern on 1 December 1900. It ruled that the river of the Utrecht treaty was the Oyapock, which enters the ocean just west of Cape Orange, and that its thalweg (deepest channel) is the border. From the Oyapock's main source to the Dutch border, the line follows the watershed of the Amazon basin, almost all of it along the crest of the Tumuc-Humac mountains.^[2] It rejected both inland claims. It called the 1817 convention provisional and a parallel of latitude an artificial line with no legal title behind it, and found no legal basis for France's line either.^[2] France accepted the award without conditions.^[1]

After the award

Books on French Guiana often speak of a “loss of 240,000 km²” in 1900. Granger points out that the Contestado had never officially belonged to France, so what French Guiana lost was a territory it had only hoped for.^[1] The former Contestado was added to the Brazilian state of Pará. In 1943 President Vargas separated it, with Macapá, as the Federal Territory of Amapá, which became a state in 1988.^[1]

The French engineer-geographer Jean Hurault marked the watershed border in the south in 1956 and 1962. Brazil had pressed for boundary markers there.^[1] Saint-Georges, the French town on the Oyapock, had no road to Cayenne until 2003.^[1]

A bridge, visas and gold

In 1997 Presidents Jacques Chirac and Fernando Henrique Cardoso met at Saint-Georges and decided to bridge the Oyapock.^[1] The cable-stayed bridge is 378 metres long and cost €50 million. It was inaugurated on 18 March 2017, twenty years after that meeting, and opened to traffic on 20 March.^[3]

Crossing is not symmetrical. A visa is needed to enter French Guiana from Brazil, but not to go the other way.^[3] Granger cites an estimate of perhaps 25,000 Brazilians in French Guiana in 2009, out of 225,000 people.^[1] Illegal gold mining in the forest is a lasting problem. In 2019 AFP reported that some 10,000 gold seekers were thought to be active in French Guiana, most of them from across the border in Brazil.^[4]