Pierre Elliot Trudeau became leader of Canada's Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Canada in April 1968. Almost immediately he promised an effort to take new directions in Canada's external relations. One of the regions he focused attention on was Latin America (Dobell, 1972: 115).

That Trudeau was interested in Latin America appears natural for an intellectual raised in Quebec. There has long been a certain sympathy with the concept of latinité. French-Canadian intellectuals often believed that they had much in common with Latin Americans, because of their religions or cultural heritage, and felt a pull from that region even if they had never visited it. Trudeau had been editor of a leading Quebec journal, Cité Libre, and that journal occasionally had editorial comment on events in Latin America. Indeed, Trudeau established his position on political involvement in the Inter-American system in that journal and he has not wavered from that position since then (Octobre 1964; and his recent statement in International Canada, 1976).

It is difficult to write about a martyr. One has to contend with the keepers of the flame, who have strong personal and political reasons for preserving the hero's image. Moreover, myths usually contain elements of truth. Although Leonardo Ruiz Pineda is not known as widely as Zapata, Sandino, Che, or Camilo Torres, there are unmistakable efforts on the part of Venezuela's democratic leaders to include him in the pantheon of Latin America's recent revolutionary heroes.

A series of recently declassified documents in the National Archives provide striking evidence of the shift of United States military strategic thinking away from the nineteenth and early twentieth century unilateral interventionist approaches to the bilateral approaches taken in World War II under the multilateral framework of the Good Neighbor Policy.

It is also significant to note that, despite the multilateral thrust of this Good Neighbor Policy promulgated by President Roosevelt and the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Military Departments— War and Navy—made no provisions for multilateral strategic plans in World War II.

But even as U.S. military planners prepared for bilateral cooperation with Latin American allies in the war, they continued to draft and update unilateral plans for intervention and invasion of key Latin American countries if cooperative approaches should fail.

In the latter half of the 1920s, a half dozen North American, British, and Canadian engineers and geologists individually began secretive explorations for oil, minerals, and likely locations for rubber plantations in the Brazilian Amazon jungle. Their goal: to interest the Ford, Firestone, and Goodyear companies in land that would supply the raw materials for their product—tires. As these land speculators negotiated with the Amazonian state governments for concessions, each thought he had claimed the richest territory with virtually unlimited exploitation privileges. Several scrambled for concessions, and by July of 1927 one individual obtained 2.5 million acres on the Tapajós river in the Amazonian state of Pará. He secretively planted half a million rubber seedlings in the forest (an indication of the vastness, sparse population, and poor communications in the Amazon at that date) and left behind an armed guard to protect the land against incursions by other speculators (Winter, 1927). In a subsequent contract with Pará, Henry Ford then acquired this land to grow rubber.