PATAGONIA LETTER:A sense of injustice and humiliation still haunts veterans 28 years after the Falklands War
“LAS MALVINAS son Argentinas” (the Malvinas are Argentine), proclaim blue and white banners and graffiti in the world’s most southernmost city, Ushuaia, whose citizens commemorate the short, disastrous war of 1982 against Britain every year, enduring sub-zero temperatures in an all-night vigil.
A former prison colony on the island of Tierra del Fuego – overlooking the Beagle Channel and separated from the mainland by the Strait of Magellan – Ushuaia, considers itself the true capital of the islands, more well known in Europe as the Falklands.
They may consist of windswept bogland and remote outcrops of rock 500km away in the South Atlantic, but every child in Argentina has only to consult their school atlas to know they are part of their sovereign territory.
Twenty-eight years after the Falklands War, a sense of humiliation and injustice haunts Ushuaia’s war veterans. Their feelings are shared across social classes, regardless of political allegiances, because the conviction the Malvinas belong to Argentina is as much a part of Argentine national identity as the tango or Eva Peron.
Diplomatic tensions between Britain and Argentina, far from receding with time, have been mounting steadily since British oil exploration, in disputed territorial waters, started earlier this year. In a show of bravado in March, Argentinian Falklands War veterans tried to storm the British embassy, called for a boycott of British goods and planned a Greenpeace-style protest against the oil drilling platforms, using civilian ships.
Fighting talk by Argentina’s 30,000-strong veteran community has been followed by regular small-scale protests in Buenos Aires to highlight the presence of the British oil platform and the start of oil drilling.
So is the question now all about the oil, and the potential huge wealth from waters around islands that were allegedly seized by the British in a strategic move to capitalise on Europe’s mid-19th century wool boom?
“Argentina has laid claim to the islands since 1833, even before the English docked and took it for themselves with cannons, and colonised the land,” says Roberto Romero, vice-president of the Malvinas and Ushuaia veterans’ centre.
“The oil complicates things; we are now watching the looting of our natural resources by the British,” he adds, denying that this is a simplification of the picture. However, he is at a loss to explain why it took his country more than 150 years to reassert its claim to Las Malvinas.
The veterans' centre is hung with military memorabilia, a picture of the Belgrano– famously torpedoed by the British and sunk with the loss of 323 lives – photographs of regiments, old rifles and bayonets, and shields commemorating fallen comrades.
Flanked by two survivors of the Belgrano attack, Romero continues: “It is not the oil or the fishing rights that upset most people here, it is the sense of injustice.”
President Cristina Kirchner has recently reasserted the claim, objecting to the British oil exploration. Latin American and Caribbean nations have voted unanimously to back Argentina’s claim to sovereignty of the islands.
The British foreign office response has always been that the Falklands will continue to be British as long as the islanders want them to be.
The veterans of the Falklands War, offering tea, biscuits and their memories to visitors, are sad men living in the past, who proudly wear their medals. Some medals were won for bravery during the Falklands conflict – Romero, a retired paratrooper, was honoured for heroic combat. Other decorations were presented to veterans by towns and other civic authorities in the absence of any recognition by successive governments.
Argentina, it must be remembered, is a country which does not like losers.
The official treatment of its veterans has been one of the most shameful legacies of the war. “A total of 649 on our side died and to date 500 veterans have committed suicide,” says Romero. “There was no help or jobs when we got home after the war – only disgrace – because we had lost the battle; many who fought were young conscripts who had never fired a gun before. We were treated like outcasts afterwards, the authorities tried to pretend we did not exist.”
It took many years before veterans could qualify for limited pensions and healthcare.
Men like Romero and his comrades today freely admit they were used by dictator Gen Leopoldo Galtieri in the junta’s bid to cling to power, but that war was too high a price to pay.
“Las Islas Malvinas will be returned some day, but it must be by peaceful means, through diplomacy and negotiation, with the world on our side. That belief keeps us going, that gives us hope, and it lessens the pain of the past.”