Latin America’s Indiana Jones

This article is part of an in depth special report on the Lebanese in Brazil. Read more stories as they’re published here, or pick up July’s issue at newsstands in Lebanon. Perhaps the strangest phone call Amyr Klink ever got was in the summer of 1984. Picking up the line he heard his father’s booming voice, calling from the office of Pierre Gemayel, the founder of the Kataeb Party in Lebanon. This was unusual in many ways — his father had rarely travelled back to the country of his birth since he left in the 1930s and with Lebanon’s vicious civil war intensifying he was putting his life at risk. Gemayel’s son Bashir had been assassinated two years earlier after making an agreement with the Israelis. While Klink’s father was deeply hostile to Israel, he maintained a friendship with Pierre — who himself would be dead of a heart attack within