'¡Malvinas, Malvinas!

I believe it happened in the mid-90s, during one of my visits to Buenos Aires.  I was shaving early in the morning when I heard a news broadcast stating that an Argentine army detachment had landed in St. George's Island, in a kind of archipelago near the Falkland Islands, near the South Pole.  The broadcast then turned to London where it was announced that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was sending a fleet Southward to protect the islands.  I  was shaving at the time and it occurred to me that this sounded like an echo from 19th Century gunboat politics that had long been laid to rest.  How wrong I was.  No sooner did the news spread in Buenos Aires that people began to rally behind the government.  Soon a mass demonstration assembled in the Plaza de Mayo to chant its support of the military triumvirate headed by General Galtieri, a habitual drunk.  The irony was that the night before the same plaza had witnessed another massive demonstration, only this one demanded the resignation of the military junta and a return to civilian rule.  Overnight, this was forgotten and public attention was centered on some ice covered islands populated by2,000 descendants of Welsh sheep growers who populate the islands.

I promptly got a call from Susan Stannberg of National Public Radio who asked if I might do a live broadcast on the conflict later that afternoon.  I said I would try and interview some people in and out of government.  The first one who came to mind was Roberto Alemann, an old friend who was recently appointed Minister of Finance.  He is the son of the founder and publisher of the Argentinisches Tageblatt, which had the distinction of being the only German-languqge daily in Latin America and was a stanch opponent of the Nazi regime.  My other source was Oscar Camilion, who had been minister of Foreign Relations and Defense of previous Peronist and other military governments, having once served as deputy foreign minister under Arturo Frondizi.  He was also a great music lover with whom I had shared a box at the Teatro  Colon the years I was in B.A. as NYT correspondent.

I decided to call on some of my political contacts.  One of them, Roberto Aleman, an old friend , had recently been named minister of Finance, 1971?The Falklands War (Spanish: Guerra de las Malvinas/Guerra del Atlántico Sur), also called the Falklands Conflict/Crisis, was fought in 1982 between Argentina and the United Kingdom (UK) over the disputedFalkland Islands and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. The Falkland Islands consist of two large and many small islands in the South Atlantic Ocean east of Argentina; their name and sovereignty over them have long been disputed.
The Falklands War started on Friday, 2 April 1982 with the Argentine invasion and occupation of the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and ended with the Argentine surrender on 14 June 1982. The war lasted 74 days, and resulted in the deaths of 255 British and 649 Argentine soldiers, sailors, and airmen, and three civilian Falklanders. It is the most recent conflict to be fought by the UK without any allied states and the only Argentine war since the 1880s.The conflict was the result of a protracted diplomatic confrontation regarding the sovereignty of the islands. Neither state officially declared war and the fighting was largely limited to the territories under dispute and the South Atlantic. The initial invasion was characterised by Argentina as the re-occupation of its own territory, and by the UK as an invasion of a British dependent territory.Britain launched a naval task force to engage the Argentine Navy and Argentine Air Force, and retake the islands by amphibious assault. The British eventually prevailed and at the end of combat operations on 14 June the islands remained under British control. However, as of 2010[6] and as it has since the 19th century, Argentina shows no sign of relinquishing its claim. The claim remains in the Argentine constitutionafter its reformation in 1994.[7]The political effects of the war were strong in both countries. A wave of patriotic sentiment swept through both: the Argentine loss prompted even larger protests against the ruling military government, which hastened its downfall; in the United Kingdom, the government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was bolstered. It helped Thatcher's government to victory in the 1983 general election, which prior to the war was seen as by no means certain. The war has played an important role in the culture of both countries, and has been the subject of several books, films, and songs. The cultural and political weight of the conflict has had less effect on the British public than on that of Argentina, where the war is still a topic of discussion.[8]