South American politics, commerce and even sport often treat the Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana as if they belonged to another region.

Aug. 24 (UPI) -- Look at a map of South America and something strange becomes obvious.

Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana form a continuous band along the continent's northeastern Atlantic coast. Yet South American politics, commerce and even sport often treat the Guianas as if they belonged to another region.

Football makes the point almost perfectly. Guyana and Suriname are sovereign South American countries, and French Guiana is physically part of South America. Yet all three compete in Concacaf, the region's North and Central American and Caribbean football confederation, rather than CONMEBOL, South America's own governing body.

There is a historical reason for this. When CONMEBOL was founded in 1916 by the football associations of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay, Guyana was British Guiana, Suriname was Dutch Guiana and French Guiana was French. Their institutions, languages and commercial relationships developed through colonial systems quite separate from those of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America.

That history shaped far more than football. For centuries, South America's political geography mattered less than the imperial connections that linked its territories to Europe and the Caribbean. Even after independence, many of those patterns survived.

Guyana was one of the four original signatories of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, establishing CARICOM, the Caribbean Community, in 1973. Suriname joined in 1995, and this year, French Guiana became CARICOM's eighth Associate Member.

Guyana and Suriname are not required to choose between being Caribbean and being South American. They are already both.

The larger failure belongs to the rest of South America, which has never integrated the Guianas as fully as their geography warrants.

The institutional foundation already exists. Guyana and Suriname are associate states of MERCOSUR, the South American trade bloc. But association on paper is not the same as physical integration. The proposed Corentyne River Bridge between Guyana and Suriname was still under bilateral discussion in July, an indication of how much basic connectivity remains unfinished.

A genuine Guiana Shield corridor, linking northern Brazil with Georgetown, Paramaribo, French Guiana and their Atlantic ports, would move South America beyond isolated projects. That would require better infrastructure, from roads and border procedures to port and air links, along with deeper institutional cooperation across a region divided by Portuguese, Spanish, English, Dutch and French. Such a corridor would begin to replace an old colonial map with a more natural continental one.

French Guiana may offer the most intriguing opportunity. It is geographically South American but legally part of the European Union as one of the EU's outermost regions. EU customs rules apply there, although it lies outside the EU VAT area. Since May 1, 2026, the EU-MERCOSUR interim trade agreement has been provisionally applied, reducing trade barriers between the European Union and Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

French Guiana is not a shortcut around those rules. MERCOSUR goods must still satisfy rules of origin, customs procedures, sanitary requirements and technical standards, and special safeguards apply to the EU's outermost regions.

But that is precisely why French Guiana deserves more attention. Rather than serving as a tariff loophole, it could develop as a place where South American producers, logistics companies and investors become more closely connected with European standards, commercial networks and markets.

Existing port infrastructure provides at least a starting point. The Grand Port Maritime de la Guyane operates the commercial port of Degrad-des-Cannes near Cayenne and the port of Pariacabo at Kourou; it says more than 95 percent of French Guiana's imports and exports pass through its facilities.

Turning that geography into a genuine MERCOSUR-EU commercial interface would require substantial investment. Greater shipping capacity, warehousing, cold-chain facilities and customs expertise would have to be accompanied by better connections westward toward Suriname and Guyana and southward toward Brazil. The challenge is considerable, but it is primarily one of infrastructure and policy, not geographic impossibility.

There are signs that the political moment may be changing as well. On July 2, the French Foreign Ministry said Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot's visit to Brazil and French Guiana included strengthening French Guiana's regional integration as one of its priorities. Five days later, French Guiana's CARICOM associate membership became official. That opening now awaits a response from the rest of South America.

Even football could play a small symbolic role. Nobody needs to pull Guyana or Suriname out of Concacaf, but greater cooperation with CONMEBOL, through tournaments or other exchanges, could help change how South Americans imagine their own continent.

Football will not build highways or ports, but it can help change mental maps. For most South Americans, Georgetown, Paramaribo and Cayenne remain psychologically more distant than Lima, Bogota or Montevideo. History explains why. It no longer explains why they must remain so.

The goal is not to pull the Guianas away from the Caribbean, but to bring South America closer to them and begin overcoming the barriers of language, commerce and political habit inherited from an earlier age.

The continent does not end at Brazil. The Guianas are South America too.

Federico Sosa is a Paraguayan economist and international consultant with experience in foreign direct investment, industrial development, and trade policy. He is a member of the executive committee of Instituto Patria Soñada, a Paraguayan think tank. The views expressed are solely those of the author.