In this post FIFA World Cup 2026 - discussion etc - #4653 by Frodo I said I would like to explain how the Malvinas/Falklands claim works in Argentine culture and politics, I’m no longer so sure that I will like it (it’s a lot of work!) but I’ll try.
I’m putting this in Great Debates because it seems appropriate, even if it’s not strictly a debate, I hope that if I’m mistaken the Mods will not kick me too much with their jackboots before moving it to the correct venue.
First of all a reminder that this is not intended to be a defense (or even a refutation) of Argentina’s claims on the islands, so don’t please try and debate that with me.
Feel free, (as if it needed saying! 
) to nitpick any factually incorrect assertion I make, I’m going from memory and a quick look to Wikipedia so I’ll probably make some.
But again the point of the thread is not to establish the facts about the islands but to describe and explain how the issue works in terms of Argentine politics and culture.
My own position, as I said in that thread (and many others before) is that if the islanders don’t want to be Argentine then that’s it, they are entitled to self-determination.
There are, apparently, interpretations of international law that go against that, the concept of “implanted population” for example but I don’t share them.
Second, I would like to express empathy for the islanders, it must be horrible beyond all words to wake up one morning to the sound of soldiers from another country marching on your streets, soldiers of the army of a bloody dictatorship to make it worse.
90% of them were poorly train conscripts that had been under arms for 3 months to a year and were mostly wondering if they were going to get out of that craziness alive, but the islanders had no way to know it.
And some of their officers had been killing Argentines (and stealing their property, and/or babies) for about 5 years at that point, for the crime of being Labor Unionists, Leftists, Peronists, suspected guerrillas, actual guerrillas or simply being somehow connected to a member of the previous kinds.
So I understand, or try to, the hard feelings they must still have about Argentina.
So, the Malvinas/Falklands history
It’s an archipelago some 464 kilometers from the South American coast… and that’s pretty much all everybody can agree about them.
See they were discovered by Amerigo Vespucci… except not, they were discovered by deserters from Magellan’s expedition, except not they were discovered by an English ship, except not they were discovered by the Dutch…
The first settlement was made by the French in 1764, who having set sail from the port of St Malo, called them Illes Malouines (thus Malvinas), though I’ve heard of more or less serious theories stating that there was sporadic occupation by native americans previously. (again, almost nothing seems to be undisputed when talking about the islands)
This didn’t went too well with the Spanish, so eventually the French had to leave.
All through the last years of the 18th century there was constant wrangling between the French, the Spanish and the English for the islands without ever quite getting into armed conflict but with constant threats of it, for example Spanish Navy ships from Buenos Aires and Montevideo forced the English to evacuate a recently founded settlement under threat from their cannons (the English commander asked, and was granted, the right to fire some cannon shots so it couldn’t be said that he had surrendered without firing a shot)
This almost almost precipitated a war between Spain and France on one side (allies under Bourbon dynasty kings) and England and may have caused the fall of the duc de Choiseul, France’s secretary of state.
The English returned to that settlement a year later but left again in 1774.
Eventually the Spanish gained the upper hand, though there are all kind of disputed (surprise!) claims about them ceding one of the 2 main islands to the English, but the English secretly promising never to return anyway…
If I’m not mistaken by 1810 or so the Spanish had settlements there and nobody else and they claimed the “Commandancy of the Islas Malvinas” as their territory, dependent on the Viceroyalty of the River Plate with capital in Buenos Aires (I wouldn’t be surprised if the particular hierarchy of the Commandancy in the regional governance is also disputed…)
Of course in the early 1800 the Napoleonic Wars started, and then Spain’s american colonies revolted, so the islands were abandoned again.
At the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars, but before the colonies revolt, Spain was allied with the French, and the Brittain sent 2 expeditions to try and capture Buenos Aires from them.
This is very important to future Argentine identity.
“Las Invasiones Inglesas” (The British Invasions) are thus not related to the Beatles in the Argentine cultural memory, but to the resistance of the Buenos Aires population that, without (much?) assistance from Spanish regular troops, managed to reconquer the city in the first expedition and directly defeat the attack in the second.
The Spanish Viceroy famously took the city’s treasure and fled to the interior, which is traditionally interpreted as cowardly, though there are some who say that it was his duty to save the gold from the British. (Then again some say it makes clear that the gold was more important than the population of the city)
I’ve read that a distinct “American” (as in “United States of”) identity started to appear during the Seven Years War (What it’s called in the U,S. “The French and Indian Wars” if I’m not mistaken), the English invasions were the Argentine equivalent, popular militias were formed to fight the British that elected their own officers and were not dismantled afterwards.
These militias were key to the May revolution and the start of Argentina’s struggle for independence.
So, as you see, things start to take shape, what’s an Argentine at this point? somebody who resisted British annexation and rejected belonging a Spanish empire.
Of course, things are far more complicated than that, part of the reason Spanish domination was rejected is that they didn’t permit the Buenos Aires elite to trade freely with English merchants, Buenos Aires rich elites have always had sort of a love affair with the British, while on the other side the lower classes remember them only as invaders they died to defend the city from…
In 1816 The United Provinces of the River Plate, the former Viceroyalty of the River late, declare their independence from Spain, and here’s one the key parts IMHO to the Argentinian claim, in the same way as any part of the territory of the 13 American colonies became part of the United States in 1776, the Malvinas/Falkland islands became part of the United Provinces of the River Plate in 1816, inhabited or not.
Of course this can be disputed, what about the Spanish-English treaty that ceded one (or all in some versions!) of the islands to Britain?, what about the secret, or not so secret, agreement to nevertheless never return to the islands? can the United Provinces be considered the successor state of the Viceroyalty? can Argentina itself be considered the same state as the United Provinces considering the civil wars, secessions, revolts and disunity that followed?. But then again EVERYTHING about these islands can, and has been, disputed and argued to death.
In 1820, the government in Buenos Aires sent a frigate to take formal possession of the islands. (another key part of the Argentinian claim), though they remain uninhabited.
Then one the thorniest parts of the whole sad saga begins.
In 1826 a man called Vernet, born in Hamburg, establishes a settlement in the islands, if I’m not mistaken with people from the Argentinian mainland.
And that’s, again, all everyone can agree about.
According to Buenos Aires government he was there on their behalf.
According to the British he had asked them permission to do it, if not exactly in their behalf at least recognizing their sovereignty over the islands.
In the 1830’s the U.S. gets involved, Velvet did not allow U.S. flagged ships to hunt for seals in the islands and even captured some ships that were doing so in defiance of his orders . This was taken by the U.S. as piracy (even when the ships had apparently been released after a short while)
A U.S. Navy Frigate, the Lexington, disembarked troops, destroyed the incipient colony and eventually after some more ugly incidents the islands ended up almost uninhabited again, with just a small Argentine military presence (I don’t remember exactly when they got there but it must have been after the Lexington incident) in a dilapidated fort.
This was vigorously protested by the Buenos Aires authorities, but worse was yet to come.
In 1833 a British warship was sent to “recover” the Islands, the Argentine garrison was forced to surrender, and the islands were “occupied/recovered/annexed/settled” (choose your own verb! they are all disputed!) by the British to the present day (with the brief 3 month interruption in 1982 caused by Drunk Dictator Galtieri discovering a way to kill even more of his compatriots by outsourcing the job to the British Navy)
In 1833 and until 1853 or so Argentina was in the middle of constant civil wars and disputes between the not-so-united provinces, but even in the middle of all that the central government continued to protest the island’s occupation to the point that perhaps one of the only constant policies of that mess that eventually would coalesce into Argentina was the (at that point not unjustified IMHO) claim that the islands had been illegally annexed by the British Empire.
To make things worse a series crisis arose between the Buenos Aires government (somewhat separated from the rest of the United Provinces then, but still at least nominally in charge of foreign policy for the whole messy thing) and the British and French governments, some of them caused by Buenos Aires insistence that all Argentine exports should pass through the Buenos Aires customs (as agreed with the provinces in return from Buenos Aires funding the national army) and the English and French position that they could trade in the inner rivers with whom the wanted. And some caused by Uruguayan political matters that had Pro-Buenos Aires and Pro Anglo-French parties in conflict…
Anyway the whole mess ended up in a 5 years blockade of Buenos Aires, several battles (all won, or at least not lost by the Anglo-French) and the eventual admission of defeat (by the sheer stubborness of the Buenos Aires government) by the Anglo-French fleet at least in what concerns trade and the Buenos Aires customs office (notice again that Argentina, or at least Buenos Aires continues to fight the British for this or that reason 40 years after the first invasions, take note of the effect of that in the incipient national consciousness)
So, the storms abate somewhat and in 1853 we finally get a constitution and national unity (something I used to be ashamed of when I was a child, how come the U.S. gets a constitution in 15 years or so and it takes us 40 years of bloody conflict?)
After 1853 Argentina starts somewhat resembling the early United States, a young expansionist nation with lots of native american territory around that in their eyes was ripe for conquest. And that was at risk of being conquered by other nations if they dawdled.
So back to the Falklands/Malvinas they lay just in front of a bunch of that native american territory, imagine a British base out in front of the coast of Oregon right in the middle of the U.S. “conquest of the West” era…
Even as pro-British as the elite Buenos Aires society was, it was intolerable, so the now definitively Argentinian government continued to protest diplomatically.
Eventually Patagonia was conquered, the natives defeated and barbarically treated in pure 19th century fashion and the land given in enormous stretches to the oligarchy in charge (while the soldiers that died for them,most of them of native american or black descent were given bupkis).
But at this point Malvinas is one of the few constant truly national causes the country has.
So, the aforementioned oligarchy proceed to get filthy rich selling first leather and ,with the advent of refrigeration, meat, to the British Empire, which tends to make them not to care so much about the islands anyway.
Very little of that money goes to develop the country or to the gauchos that raise the cattle or the immigrants from Europe working on the meat-packing plants for misery wages.
British capital funds railways into the interior to bring the raw materials to the port in Buenos Aires and the infamous British owned “La Forestal” company establishes “Company Towns” all along Santiago del Estero exploiting workers in the 19th century fashion and deforesting the Quebracho forests to make railway ties.
All this, of course, provokes a reaction from the incipient left, the anarchist and socialist european immigrants start to agitate against being what one of the Argentine aristocrats in charge called “The brightest jewel in the British empire”.
So as you see from the beginning the left in Argentina stands in opposition to Britain, and in favor of Argentine independence from it’s Empire, if economically instead of politically.
There are lots of bloody incidents between strikers and the police and the army in those years, with “the establishment” being identified or supported by, in popular imagination at least, the British. Those same British who had usurped the islands…
Then comes Peronism, their nationalization of the railways, the U.S. and British hostility to the new government and a lot more bad blood but if I try to define Peronism I’m going to kill the SDMB server space and my fingers and several keyboards.
Suffice to say, in the eyes of the leftward part of Argentina’s population (myself included) Peronism is not the fascist caricature that the Western collective imaginary sees but a movement for workers rights and national economic independence. (If you know me by now you’ll surmise that “is more complex than that” is my catchphrase, the authoritarianism accusations are closer to home than we’d like to admit, Anglophobia contributed to a lack of hostility against Germany in WWII, etc, etc, BUT again, let’s stop with this before it devours the thread entirely)
Phew! I think I can see the end from here.
So as you see, the Malvinas issue ends up being both a national cause, and a leftist cause too, because they are seen as a colonial outpost of the oppressing Empire.
Many here, and some in Britain too apparently (see: ‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas’? Not quite – but the Falklands cannot remain British for ever | Simon Jenkins | The Guardian) think that the islands were in the path to eventually be ceded to Argentina like Hong Kong and other former British possessions. (I’m not so sure, it may be too strategic a position to abandon).
But in any case the stupid and criminal invasion of Galtieri and his Junta destroyed or at least postponed all hope of that for at least half a century.
So, 1982 and all that:
In 1976 an U.S. backed (or at least supported) military coup took power, something that unfortunately had been happening regularly since the 1955 coup that displaced Peron.
Except this time it was different, the Junta announced a “National reorganization process” to fix all our economic and social problems by getting rid Peronism and leftist policies like worker rights and labor unions…
They implemente neo-liberal policies and took enormous debts from the IMF while they killed anyone that protested, could protest, or may be was opposed to it too loudly.
By 1982 it was obvious that the economic bonanza promised by the “Chicago Boys” was not going to materialize, there were riots in several cities, including the famous “Cordobazo” in Cordoba and it became evident that the Junta’s days were counted.
So, what do these geniuses do? they convince themselves that the U.S. is going to support an Argentine military takeover of the islands, and that the British are going to take it as a fait accompli and not try to retake them.
So, “recover” the islands, fulfill a national cause almost older than the country itself, make the left happy by striking at the Imperial oppressor (nevermind than in the left’s eyes THEY were the agents of imperial oppression) make the center happy by recovering stolen national territory and make the right happy by MAKING ARGENTINA GREAT AGAIN Avant la lettre Trump style.
Everybody forgets about the economic disaster and the Junta rules forever…
Of course reality never works the way fascists imagine it will, so the U.S. did not support them (it supported Britain, at least with satellite imagery) the British DID send forces to retake the islands, and even with the Argentine Air Force punching above their weight and sinking several Royal Navy ships the inevitable result was the death of about 1600 of our soldiers,most of them conscripts as I said above, and surrender.
(Interestingly of the 3 forces the Air Force was the least involved in the ongoing mass killings against our own population and had by far the best showing in the war, while the Navy whose hands were bloody to the elbows with Argentine blood where a bloody fiasco, suffering the sinking of the Belgrano and not doing much of anything even in a naval war where they were supposed to bear most of the weight, some of their worst specimens, guilty of killing Mothers of Plaza de Mayo for example, surrendered to the British without firing a shot)
Ah the sinking of the Belgrano:
This is a cause of general indignation here, supposedly the ship was going away from the British Zone of Exclusion around the islands and thus sinking it is a war crime.
I’m not sure it works that way (it’s a war, the Belgrano is an enemy ship, etc) though it certainly seems callous, but it’s an article of faith that Margaret Thatcher personally ordered the sinking of the ship which was serving as a troop transport and thus filled to the brim with young conscripts, most of whom (about a third of the Argentine deaths in the war) died.
The war ends in surrender, and this causes a cataclysm in Argentine politics AND culture.
Politically the Junta is finished, they were in trouble before (that’s why they started the war in the first place) but the defeat definitely kills them dead politically, so democracy returns.
Returns thanks to the British as some like to say? perhaps a bit faster, but again the Junta was in trouble before the war, it’s a bit insulting to us to claim responsibility for it, so I wouldn’t recommend putting that proposition in front of, say, the mother of someone who drowned in the Belgrano.
Culturally losing a war, as Vietnam for example, shatters a lot of assumptions about a country’s self worth.
We surrendered, they killed us in great numbers, we couldn’t stop The Empire from retaking the islands so long in dispute, we were, Not Up To The Challenge.
The country was furious, furious with itself for briefly falling for Galtieri’s trap (the day after the islands were taken by Argentine troops there was a MASSIVE demonstration in the Plaza de Mayo in favour of the government, something that to this days shames many of the concurrents “We fell for war fever” they say, “We were idiots”).
Furious with the Armed Forces for years of tyranny and blood followed by failure in what was supposed to be their main job.
Furious with the British and specially Thatcher for killing our boys.
(Did we expect them to take it and not respond? is not thought about in that way.
I guess Gandhi would have refrained from retaking the islands and saved a lot of lives, but then again Thatcher was not Gandhi ,unfortunately for the 300 hundred British dead and the 1600 Argentine ones)
And just generally furious and depressed.
So the Malvinas issue continues to evolve, now it’s not just a territorial dispute, it has been hallowed with the blood of innocents, it becomes sort of sacred.
NOT, as I said in the WC thread, in favor of the thoroughly despised dictatorship who sent our soldiers to die a unequal war just to stay in power, but as the national cause it always was (the slogan “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” dates from the early 20th century) consecrated by the blood of the fallen.
Of course and logically in Britain it causes some of the same effect but in the other direction, if before the Falklands/Malvinas were a distant possession that may be too costly to maintain forever, now they are sacred soil where their boys died to keep an innocent population from the claws of a bloody dictatorship.
Things simmer furiously under the surface for four years, democracy returns, elections are held, the Junta is judged, condemned and imprisoned (a bright point in this depressing saga, supposedly the first time military dictators pay for their crimes in the third world)
And then God puts His Hand on it…
The World Cup, 1986, Argentina vs England…
Argentina’s wounded pride vs England’s eternal quest to get football to “come home”.
And this small brown man, a boy from the slums of Buenos Aires who saw his mother pretend to stomach ailments to give him and his brothers her food so they weren’t hungry, appears.
This flawed, incredibly charismatic genius, a person who never completed high school, but who nevertheless coined expressions and phrases that are still used today in our dialect appears.
Diego Armando Maradona: everybody knew he was the best footballer in the world, but the way he used that to heal our wounded pride was magnificent.
First he steals from them (as they stole from us, the islands, yes, but also the blockade, the support for the oligarchy, La Forestal, the exploited meat-packers, the sinking of the Belgrano, everything a third world nation has to reproach from the first world), he scores with his hand, the ref doesn’t see it, the goal stands, “He who steals from a thief”, the saying goes, “receives a hundred years of forgiveness”
But then, then he goes and shows them that at the sport they invented, WE are the true masters, he dances through the entire English defense from the center of the field to England’s goal, eludes Shilton and scores the greatest goal that can ever be scored.
The country explodes, it turns out we are not so shitty, if at least in one thing, one infinitely unimportant but still immense thing, “Football is the more important of the things that do not matter” is another, more recent saying.
Argentinians are not prone to terrorism, or revenge killings, but I suspect that nobody ever thought of doing that kind of thing against the British in part because of Diego, there are many reports of parents or relatives of the Malvinas casualties who cried that day and considered those 2 goals a gift that brought peace to their dead relatives.
And so we took “revenge” in a football way, without more deaths.
I know that from a first world perspective some of these things may sound crazy “Revenge?, you started the bloody war!” I can hear you say. But cultures do not work in entirely rational fashion, see for example the Falklands moving from almost forgotten outpost possibly on it’s way to Hong Kong’s fate to sacred soil after the death of soldiers to retake it.
Anyway, the final act is the 1990s neo-liberal reforms and the 2023’s fascist trump loving “libertarians” being elected to the presidency.
The second democratic election after the Junta fell, put the Peronists back in power… or so everybody thought, because Carlos Menem the new president started taking totally non-peronist measures from the start, from economic liberalization, to restricting workers rights, to closer ties with the U.S. “Carnal relations” he called that in his usual not-very-bright way, (which prompted the question of who exactly was fucking who, and the obvious answer) to… De-malvinization.
While not entirely abandoning the claim over the islands Menem’s policies were a step into that direction, and from that point the fight for economic sovereignty (that Menem was busy selling to the best bidder) got intricately mixed with the (at that point 160 years old) territorial sovereignty fight.
Malvinas, the privatized state enterprises, the support for the U.S. in international forums..all got mixed up.
Flash forward to 2023, Milei, who’s Menem but without the shame (Menem at least pretended to care for the lower classes, he had no alternative being,if in name only, a Peronist) gets elected to the presidency in a wave of rejection of leftist politics.
Milei has an avowed admiration for the worst exponents of first world politics, Margaret Thatcher, Trump, Netanyahu…
And Milei is of the opinion that it doesn’t make sense to continue with our diplomatic claims of the islands, “we lost them in the war” he says, and to my shame pretends to share my opinion that the rights of self determination of the islanders (something that doesn’t seem to worry him overmuch when it’s the Palestinians’ rights to the same of any other non-first-world population anywhere).
And so here we are, some thousands of characters expended to explain why the Argentina National Team in the World Cup displaying a flag with the words “Las Malvinas son Argentinas” does not represent support for Galtieri’s dictatorship, nor for any right wing cause (except for the, for now fortunately small, ultra-nationalistic right) but for a center-right to almost-extreme-left (the extreme extreme left does not believe in national borders) national cause, a cause I think misguided but that, for good or ill is part of the national “soul” so to speak.
@Thing.Fish asked what could be good in that cause? as I see it the good part is the spirit of rebellion against the Powers That Be, the refusal to acknowledge that a piece of territory that was (DISPUTED ALERT! DISPUTED ALERT!) stolen from you has been lost
A Mexican twitter account laughed at Argentina for showing that flag “It’s like if we were to show a flag that said ‘Texas is Mexican’” he said.
Argentinians were aghast, “So you’ve accepted the robbery?” “We would’ve supported you if you did that!”.
So what I see of “good” in Malvinas is that represents Argentina’s pride, especially in a moment when the government is destroying our universities, selling our natural resources, definancining scientific research, cancelling small modular national nuclear reactors that could’ve put us at the forefront of that particular technology, etc.
If we were some sort of superpower that could realistically attempt to take the islanders self-determination from them I would consider it a bad thing, as things stand, I sang “For Malvinas, For El Diego, For Leo’s last world cup!” to the top of my lungs at the obelisk the other night, because it represents rebellion against being turned into “the brightest” (or not so brightest) jewel of another Empire.
I completely understand if y’all don’t share that feeling, but one doesn’t pick and choose what one feels.