Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
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).