Las Malvinas Son Argentinas: Return to the Falklands?
April 4, 2016
Las Malvinas Son Argentinas: Return to the Falklands?
by John Wight
The longstanding dispute over the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic between Britain and Argentina is once again in the news; this time as a result of the recent findings of a UN commission that has adjudicated that Argentina’s existing maritime territory in the South Atlantic be expanded by 35%, thus bringing the Falklands within Argentine territorial waters.
Known in Argentina and throughout Latin America as Las Malvinas, the Falklands, which lie 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and over 8,000 miles from Britain, have long been the subject of territorial dispute. At the beginning of the 19th-century Spain held sovereignty over the islands, occupying them for 40 years up until 1811, after which its former colony of Argentina asserted sovereignty. The islands came under British control in 1833, when they were seized by force, and have remained a British territory ever since.
Various British officials have, over the years, even admitted to the indefensibility of Britain’s act of colonialism in seizing control of the islands in the early nineteenth century. In 1936, for example, John Troutbeck, then head of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s American department, outlined the problem surrounding Britain’s control of the Falklands in a memo to his superiors. He wrote that our “seizure of the Falkland Islands in 1833 was so arbitrary a procedure as judged by the ideology of the present day. It is therefore not easy to explain our possession without showing ourselves up as international bandits.”
In 1982 the war between Britain and Argentina, which ensued when the then Argentinian government attempted to seize back the islands by force, cost the lives of 258 British and over 600 Argentinian servicemen. It proved a turning point in the fortunes of the nascent and up to then deeply unpopular Tory government led by Margaret Thatcher. Jingoism swept the country, allowing Thatcher to press ahead with the structural adjustment of the UK economy, which in the process devastated working class communities and delivered a resounding defeat to the trade union movement over the course of a series of hard fought strikes and industrial disputes throughout the early and mid 1980s.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/04/las-malvinas-son-argentinas-return-to-the-falklands/
LA forum:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1016150701
