Filling the gap: the Colombo arabes emergence as political actors in Barranquilla and the Caribbean region/Llenando el vacio: la irrupción de los Colombo-Arabes como actores políticos en Barranquilla y la región del Caribe
| Autor | Massimo Di Ricco |
| Páginas | 211-241 |
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In the 1990s around 11% of the senators of the Congress of the Republic of Colombia had Lebanese-Syrian and Palestinian origins (Fawcett, 1991: 21). Of these, 8 out of 25 members of the Chamber of Representatives elected in the Atlantic coast Departments had an Arab family name, and around 41% of the senators of the Liberal Party also had Arab origins (Vargas, 2006). Later, in 2006, the senators of Arab origins elected in the Caribbean Departments represented almost the 11% of the total, while around 8% of the representatives of the Chamber were too of Arab origins (Vargas, 2011, 215). Among descendants of Arab origins, Gabriel Turbay pioneered their involvement in national politics already around the 1920s and reached the climax with the election as President of the Republic of Julio Cesar Turbay in 1978. Other descendants of the first wave of Arab migrants started a political career in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the Caribbean region, like Name, Tarud, Abuchaibe and Slebi. Some of these family names, like Name and Abuchaibe, are still nowadays in the political arena and they were joined at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s by new figures like the Char family, Segebre, Escaff, Bendek and Amin. Nowadays the city of Barranquilla and the Departments of the Caribbean region are the places where most of these individuals from Arab descent, and especially their extended families, achieved an extraordinary power on a political but also on economical level.
Considering the fact that among the descendants of the other migrant communities who reached Colombia since the 19th Century nothing similar happened, these numbers and data represent an important starting point for several research interrogatives. What has changed from the ethnically motivated insults against Turbay’s candidacy to the presidency in the 1940s to the time when descendants of Arab migrants entered the political arena, especially in the Caribbean region, and slowly became a new elite? How was the evolution of the Arab descendants from the condition of rejection lived by their parents to their full emergence as a powerful and consolidate elite in the political and economic sphere?
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This article takes its start from these interrogatives and it aims to write through an exploratory research a first preliminary political history of the participation of the Colombian Arabs in local, regional and national politics, with a special focus on the city of Barranquilla and the Colombian Caribbean region.1Barranquilla and the Colombian Caribbean Coast has been the main entrance for the first generation of migrants at the end of the 19th Century, mainly through the ports of Santa Marta, Cartagena and Puerto Colombia, in the outskirts of Barranquilla. Many of these migrants settled in different towns and cities around the region since the first decades of the 20th Century (Fawcett & Posada Carbó, 1998, p. 7). Many migrants and descendants of Arab origins resettled later in the city of Barranquilla due especially to the peculiar social and economical opportunities offered by the city, which has always been the regional centre for business, market and industry.
Previous studies on foreign and Arab colonies contribution to Barranquilla and the Coast stopped with few publications that covered this topic until the 1930s and the 1940s, leaving a gap in order to understand the evolution within the society of the Arab migrants and their descendants.2For this reason, this article aims to consider the already existent studies on Arab migrants contributions until these decades, but it will mainly focus on the period of time that goes from the 1950s until the end of the 1980s. This period is to be considered here as the missing link in order to understand the full involvement of the descendants of Arab origins in the political life of the city and the region. In order to do so it was analyzed the local press, like the Diario del Caribe, La Prensa and El Heraldo, along with the data of the Registraduria Nacional on the local and national elections between 1958 and 1986.
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This is due in order to identify those individuals with an Arab family name who participated and were elected as members of the regional Assembly and the city Council, along with the representatives of the Chamber and the Senate. On one side, the analysis of the press has been useful in order to understand how the ages between the 1950s and the 1980s opened the space for Colombian Arabs to get a prominent role in the actual society. On the other side, it was of particular importance in order to know the composition of the lists presented for the elections.3
Finally, and in order to complete a narrative on the evolution of the Arab colony, it will provide a brief overview of the actual presence of Colombian Arabs in Barranquilla and the Caribbean region politics.4
The studies on the political history of migrant communities and their evolution within the society are almost completely missing in Colombia. For this reason it will be necessary to dedicate the first part of this article to an analysis of the state of the art of the studies on Colombian Arabs and their process of evolution in other Latin American countries. Specifically, the analysis of the studies on Arab descendants political involvement in Latin America will help identify some variables to be used for the Colombian case. The variables will allow on one side to offer a comparative perspective on the issue and on the other side to advance some final considerations on the reasons behind the Arab descendants involvement in politics in the Colombian case.
For these reasons this exploratory research presents different aims and goals. On one side, it wants to open a field of study on the history, evolution and political participation of the Colombian Arabs and the descendants of other foreign colonies, especially in relation with the
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city of Barranquilla. Specifically, this article wants to delineate a first general political history of the evolution of Arab migrants and their descendants from the initial stage, characterized by episodes of low-level racism, toward their evolution as political and economic elites and their political involvement in Barranquilla, the Caribbean region and the national level. The importance of this exploratory study lies in the consideration that political participation is to be considered as the last step in the process of integration of the members of a foreign community to the society of migration.
In 1991 Louise Fawcett published the study on the Arab migrants in Colombia mentioning the lack of research on this topic. More than twenty years after Fawcett’s publication, the amount of studies on Arab migrants in Colombia did not considerably increase. Fawcett has been, along with her husband Posada Carbó, one of the few scholars who researched on the Arabs in Colombia and the Caribbean region with a proper academic and scientific standard. The work of Fawcett and Posada Carbó is to be considered a milestone in consideration of the recollection of data around the first Arab migrants arrival and their first involvement in the society until the decade of the 1930s and the 1940s, but leaving a gap in the studies on their following evolution.
Indeed it looks discouraging the lack of works on the role and evolution of the Colombian Arab community who, more than other colonies, have achieved a certain importance and influence in the political, economic and social life of the country.5Such deficiency is going hand by hand with the lack of general works on migrations in Colombia and the few recollection of memoirs of the first generation of migrants.6
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At the same time, the literature on Arab migrants has been in part criticized for magnifying the role of Arabs in the development of Colombia and the Atlantic Coast, without taking into consideration the presence of other local communities (Rehnals, 2011, pp. 1-2). This goes hand by hand with the almost apologetic vision of the migrants evolution through a life of hard work as door to door peddlers to successful entrepreneurs or famous figures in the national sphere (Rehnals, 2007, pp. 1-2).7Such criticism is mainly due to the consideration that most of the literature has been written by descendants of Arab origins, which directly or indirectly forgot to mention that also Arabs, along with Colombians, have been involved too in illicit practices which helped improved their fortune (Rhenals Doria, 2007, pp. 16-19).8It is possible to find such apologetic vision too in other Latin American countries, where it is considered as a defensive approach emblematic of the attempt of full integration and social recognition of a society that has been hostile to them (Logroño Narbona, 2009, pp. 212-213).
The literature on the Arabs in Colombia mainly focuses on their arrival and first steps in the Caribbean region and on a national level. But it is almost ignoring the role of the colony descendants in the Colombian society or their evolution within the society in an economic or political perspective. Scholars widely managed to cover the data and the political, economic and religious reasons behind the Arabs arrival in Colombia, along with the countries of origin, which are mainly the
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actual States of Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, at the time under the rule of the Ottoman Empire...
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