THE NATIONAL HERO
THE NATIONAL HERO NN was born in 1933 in Santa Rosa, El Oro Province, a town near the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border on the Pacific coast. In those years, the province had become the country's main gold exporter, hence its name. An English company was the primary exporter, while the Anglo-Dutch company Shell had discovered oil on the Santa Elena Peninsula, across the Gulf of Guayaquil in what was then Guayas Province, neighboring El Oro Province. In 1941, when NN was a child, the Peruvian invasion of his province and Ecuador took place. This invasion had been planned and financed by the United States, as President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was interested in neutralizing Ecuador, which had become the main supplier of rubber, quinine, pyrethrum, an insecticide, scopolamine (or truth drug), tagua, and balsa wood to Hitler's Germany. The American president was interested in Peru's rubber, its main export through the Pacific. However, most of the rubber came from the Amazon rainfore...