Since then, relations between the
two countries over the Islands – whose 3,000 or so residents overwhelmingly
prefer the status quo – have ranged from hostile under Argentina’s struggling
junta to relatively cordial to contentious under successive civilian
governments. At the moment, matters are at the contentious end of the spectrum,
as Argentina has applied political pressure
on Uruguay to prohibit the entrance of Falklands-flagged vessels into
Montevideo and boarded
Spanish-flagged vessels fishing under Falklands-issued licenses. Since
declaration of an exclusive fishing zone in 1986, fishing royalties have made
the Islands a prosperous place.
Meanwhile, as the 30th anniversary
of the invasion approaches, Argentina
has decided to create a Malvinas war museum at the site of the former Escuela
Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA, pictured above), the naval mechanics’ school that saw some of the dictatorship’s most grotesque “Dirty
War” crimes. Part of the sprawling ESMA campus, in the Buenos
Aires barrio of Núñez, is presently dedicated to an Espacio
Para La Memoria detailing the crimes of that regime.
According to reports, however, the
museum will not glorify the invasion or even mention Galtieri or any other
military official. Rather, it will focus on the experience of the 10,000
soldiers – many of them teen-age conscripts from the subtropical northern
provinces – who suffered in the South Atlantic cold under officers who were far
more cruel than the weather. The abuse of rank-and-file combatants by their own
officers got a vivid depiction in the in the outstanding movie Iluminados
por el Fuego, some scenes of which were filmed in the Islands.
That’s good as far as it goes, but
it would be even more convincing if the museum if it acknowledged the
psychological impact on the Islanders, who were outnumbered five-to-one by
Argentine forces – roughly equivalent to a theoretical occupation of Argentina by
the entire population of Brazil. The Argentine army laid down land mines that
they failed to map accurately and, even today, anti-ordnance units have been
unable to remove them entirely.
As I learned from my own
experience living in the Islands during 1986-7, the Islanders bitterly resented
the Argentine officers, who often threatened them. At the same time, the locals
often sympathized with the poorly clad and ill-fed foot soldiers unprepared to
resist the weather – and the British. In fact, one Islander even supplied us a diary
written by a miserable and barely literate provincial conscript who spent days
suffering in a cold, damp rock overhang with little food.
On the other hand, some could make
patronizingly inaccurate judgments of those same soldiers – one told me, for
instance, that they were kids as young as age 15. In reality, the age of
conscription was 18 in Argentina, and not everyone of that age went – my own
brother-in-law, who was a 22-year-old conscript in 1982, never left his
hometown of Olavarría.
In fact, he continued to live with his parents for the duration.
Certainly these facts are part of
the story that ought to appear in any museum of the conflict. So should the
fact that, when General Galtieri announced the successful invasion of the
Islands, hundreds of thousands of cheering Argentines filled Buenos Aires’s Plaza
de Mayo – only to turn on him after his ultimate failure to hold onto them.
New from Southern Cone Travel –
The iPhone App!
Over the past couple months, I
have been working with Sutro Travel of San Francisco to create a new Argentina
iPhone app, which also works on the iPod and iPad. For more details, please
visit Argentina
Travel Adventures at the iTunes Store. At just $2.99, it’s a true bargain.
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