Shortly after the coup of 11 September 1973 in Chile, nine people came together in the Los Angeles area to express their outrage on film: Seven were students and teachers who had been in Chile, two were politically committed filmmakers. The product of this union was the fifty-five-minute documentary “Chile with Poems and Guns” which reached several thousand international viewers during the first year after its release. Twice aired on Los Angeles television, the film was selected for distribution by Tricontinental Film Center. It also received scholarly notice, being included on the October 1974 program of the Pacific Coast Council of Latin American Studies at UCLA and the November meeting of the Latin American Studies Association in San Francisco.

In a majority of Latin-American countries the coup d'etat rather than the ballot is still the institutionalized mechanism for transferring political power. Some states, like Haiti and Paraguay, are clearly in the “prehistory” of modern political parties. Nevertheless, in the twentieth century the political party with a developed ideology has become a major feature of Latin-American political life.

Current United States publications accord fulsome praise to the policies recently adopted by Chile. Under President Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez the “string-bean republic” not only enjoys an administration of honesty and integrity, but is judged by many to be on the road to solving its major problems through the application of two of our most cherished principles: political democracy and free-enterprise capitalism. That Chile has chosen the patterns of the United States and is seeking economic reform within the framework of classically liberal democracy is taken as an indication that United States - Chilean relations are now characterized by firm and fundamental rapport. There is hope also that as Chilean formulas come to prevail in other Latin American republics, a new era of inter-American friendship and understanding will emerge.

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.