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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2018
In Enrique Bunster's satirical novel Un ángel para Chile, set in the year 2015, Turcos” hold sway in the Club de la Unión, traditionally the exclusive redoubt of Chile's upper class. In 2015, high and mighty Turcos place orders for wines carrying the names of present-day Arab-Chilean textile millionaires with waiters descended from presentday aristocratic wine-making families. Bunster's fanciful vision of future Chilean society takes what basis of credibility it has from the remarkable economic and political progress achieved by Arab-Chileans in recent years. This progress was accelerated during the 1952-1958 government of Carlos Ibáñez and became a focus for political controversy.
1 Santiago: Editorial del Pacífico, 1959.
2 Chileans of Arab extraction are called colloquially Turcos because the Turkish empire once embraced their area of origin.
3 Letter from Jorge Sabaj Zurob, April, 1960.
4 Arab-Chileans predominate in the ownership of the nation's textile industry.
5 Vea, No. 741 (June 24, 1953), p. 4. Arturo Matte was the candidate of the rightist Liberal and Conservative parties, Pedro Enrique Alfonso was the centrist Radical Party candidate, and Salvador Allende the candidate of the Socialist Party of Chile.
6 Quoted in Zig-Zag, No. 2524 (August 8, 1953), p. 20. The sympathies of the Chilean Arab community lie, in general, with the Arab League in matters of international politics affecting the Arab states. Publications of the Arab colony such as the newspaper, Mundo Árabe, and the magazine, Al-Watan, conduct an intensive propaganda effort exalting the United Arab Republic and Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Arab colony press is strongly anti-Zionist. The degree of its anti-French sentiment may be illustrated by an article in Al-Watan, No. 6-7 (March-April 1960), p. 7. The article alleged that reported successful detonation of a nuclear device by French scientists in the Sahara Desert was untrue. What actually happened, it declared, was that a French experimental atomic laboratory exploded and this, in turn, caused the destructive earthquake at Agadir on the Atlantic Coast in Morocco.
7 In point of fact, both Hales and Tarud were born in Chile. The Tarud family immigrated from Bethlehem and the Hales family from Transjordan.
8 Marcos Chamudes, Cuidado, no me desmienta … (Santiago: Editorial Alonso de Ovalle, 1954), p. 28.
9 Ibid.
10 Ranch.
11 Vea, No. 740 (June 17, 1953), p. 4.
12 Chile, Cámara de Diputados, Boletín de Sesiones Extraordinarias, 1953-54, I (Session 12, November 10, 1953), p. 692.
13 Ibid., p. 682.
14 Ibid., pp. 693-94.
15 No. 2539 (November 21, 1953), p. 41.
16 A few days later Deputy José Lascar of the Partido Nacional Cristiano credited the Phoenicians with having “developed the Inca culture in Peru” and with having “established the Mayan and Aztec civilization in Mexico.” Chile, Cámara de Diputados, Boletín de Sesiones Extraordinarias, 1953-54, I (Session 19, November 17, 1953), p. 964.
17 Ibid. (Session 17, November 12, 1953), pp. 870-72.
18 A neo-fascist magazine which supported Ibáñez for President.
19 Ibid., p. 873.
20 Ibid. (Session 14, November 11, 1953), p. 795.
21 Although the Communist party was at this time illegal, its representatives were well known.
22 Política y Espíritu, No. 104 (November 15, 1953), p. 3.
