By Alberto Cox Délano | Think Pieces | June 14, 2022 |
By Alberto Cox Délano | Think Pieces | June 14, 2022 |
Foreword. As a Chilean, by writing about the Falklands War, I might as well grab a white-hot iron with plastic gloves. When the Argentinian military-civilian dictatorship decided to invade the Falkland Islands in April 2, 1982, only one Latin American government supported them, and instead, collaborated with the British providing intelligence and backchannel assistance: Pinochet’s dictatorship. Four years earlier, the fascist dictatorships of Chile and Argentina came within hours of doing that thing Europeans like doing so much: Going to war against each other for bullshit reasons and bringing an entire continent down with them.
Even though the Beagle Conflict was resolved via diplomacy, tensions were still high between both dictatorships. Pinochet, being the tricky dick that he was, de facto helped Britain and Thatcher instead of simply remaining neutral.
Let me restate: That was Pinochet’s doing, as with everything terrible in the ’80s. We had no part in that the same way you had no choice during the dictatorship. We’ll never condone anything he ever did because he f**ked us even more than he f**ked Argentina during this war.
If I’m writing, I do it as someone who is partly neutral, partly involved as a South American and anti-colonialist, and compromised as I am part Argentinian. Yep, this war is also part of my karma in living in the South.
Don’t cry for the wounds that won’t stop bleeding
The Falklands War was a strange and random war in an almost mad-libs nature, but Colonialism has a way of putting the most unpredictable groups of people against each other: Here we had a country in the Global South, quite literally the South of the South, ruled by people who were ideologically and strategically aligned with the US and NATO, invading a group of islands off its coast that were part of the United Kingdom inhabited by people who felt British through and through.
Before Argentina gained its independence, they had already been passed around several times between the British, the French, the British again and the Spanish, the latter stating the final claim right as the Independence movements dawned on the continent 600 kms westwards. Up until the 19th Century, they had been mostly uninhabited, used primarily as a way-station for whalers and seal hunters. And though Argentinians gauchos had already started settling it, the British finally took over for good circa 1833. Oversimplified at YouTube has a funny little recap of the islands’ history if you are interested, but suffice it to say that the only thing it could provide the Empire was a colony more suited for the Brits ability to absorb sunlight.
But the Argentinians never forgot about the islands. The Falklands-Malvinas had been properly claimed by the Spaniards, and are a part of Argentina’s continental shelf, but the British started consolidating their hold on the islands right as Argentina was … well, nation-building.
The loss of the Malvinas became an open wound to rally around. After World War II, a succession of British and Argentinian governments did try to find a diplomatic solution to the problem, or as much as a wounded empire was willing to pretend, the Falklands-Malvinas being their projection towards Antarctica.
For most countries that have lost territory, the loss becomes a structural foundation of your national identity. But the Falklands were unique in many ways: Too small, too barren, and barely inhabited, what value could they have for in a country with millions of square kilometers of land, mostly flat and ridiculously fertile.
But more than any other territorial loss, Argentina’s claims were all about the principle. It’s one thing to lose a province to independence or war with a neighbor that speaks a similar language. It’s another altogether to lose it to an empire on the other side of the world, the eternal rival of your previous rulers (how much of history is just inherited trauma on a macro scale?), who only held on to it because they could… and because a couple thousand of their people had inhabited it for a century and change.
The Falklands were perfectly suited for the collective unconscious of negative nation-building, a grievance that is never critical, a pain that lies close enough to feel it and far enough for practical and logistical considerations.
That is, unless you have a group of complete psychos ruling the country. Psychos that in trying to transform the country, pull you backwards and ask more and more from you, until the collective you cannot take it anymore.
So the psychos decide to do something about it.
If they are the fatherland, then I’m a foreigner.
Everything about Argentina is on a different scale compared to the rest of Latin America: The millions of European immigrants, the wealth they reaped from agriculture and oil, leaps forward in industrialization, size of the middle classes, Buenos Aires, its cultural vanguards, their football. The unfulfilled promise of becoming a superpower.
Did they feel like this because they are a majority white country? Yep, mostly.
But you still feel it — whether you are five, seven, or twelve — going from Santiago to Buenos Aires felt like, well, like traveling to a developed country, and one that brought the drama, from the buildings to the urban layout to the advertisement.
But if their achievements as a country were on an enormous scale, why wouldn’t its darkness be any different?
The horror of Argentina’s last dictatorship and its Dirty War are unfathomable, almost in a European scale. Even in a period where almost every single South American country was under its own fascist, civic-military dictatorship. Perhaps they killed more people than anyone else, in absolute and relative terms, because they had more resources because they had a better infrastructure for it. Or perhaps it was because Argentina’s dictatorship was as cruel as it was incompetent and corrupt, just a matter of rounding up entire families and disappearing them, it doesn’t matter how prominent they were. Maybe it was because they had zero counterweights. Or maybe it was the new tactics on “counterinsurgency” they learned at the School of the Americas.
It was probably all of that combined. But by 1982, the dictatorship had pushed things as far they could take them, with the country isolated, in economic turmoil, and on the brink of an uprising. Which led the head of the military junta, Leopoldo Galtieri, to plan an invasion of the Falklands-Malvinas as the ultimate spin. A victory they could turn into a national vindication, a way to silence any opposition and perhaps become what all his predecessors in the dictatorship wanted to be: A new batch of founding fathers for Argentina.
Many accounts agree that the junta actually believed the UK would not retaliate, as Thatcher’s government was considering cuts in the military budget and they were reducing their presence in the South Atlantic. They actually believed their position as US allies against communism would compel Reagan to mediate, and worst-case scenario, the Soviets could help. You know, to the same government that had killed thousands upon thousands of communists. In April 2, the junta invaded the islands successfully, using almost new Amphibious Assault Vehicles they had bought from the US. True to form about everything in Argentina, the junta had picked a fight against with an enemy that was more powerful, wealthier, and had more support. But Galtieri had managed to buy time; millions of Argentinians celebrated in the streets and in front of the government palace. Even the intellectual leader of the opposition, writer Ernesto Sábato, supported the invasion as something bigger, as a way to combat colonialism.
So, was this truly an anti-colonialist feat? Or was it just a geopolitical version of your drunken friend picking a fight with a bigger fella on the street? The drunken part not being that much of a metaphor: Galtieri was famously an alcoholic.
The answer is no, no victory achieved under fascism is truly a victory; it’s just a deferred defeat.
Because the Falklands War was the Argentinian dictatorships’ ultimate crime against humanity. Not so much against the Falklanders. Once more, against their very own soldiers.
The bosses of the kids, drink whiskey with the rich/While the workers gather in May Square.
The war ended in June 14th, after 74 days, almost half of which saw no combat. On paper, the British Task Force and the Argentinian Armed Forces were equally matched: The latter had to make it all the way down to the end of the World to even start deploying. Meanwhile, Argentina had a very powerful navy at the time, including a goddamn aircraft carrier equipped with top-of-the-line French Super-Étendard jets, four Exocet anti-ship missiles, and much shorter logistical lines, not to mention over 11,000 soldiers deployed on the islands.
Except they weren’t really soldiers, but conscripts barely in their twenties. Famously, the Argentinian draft was something not even privileged boys could dodge, but of course, there were different assignments according to social class. The reality is that those kids had barely received any combat training and were mostly abused by their superiors, many of which had, by then, probably taken part in the dictatorship’s crimes.
As you might’ve noticed, the war was fought in the midst of the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn, on an island where temperatures range from an average of 2º C to 8º C with a generous side of wind and freezing rain.
The majority of the kids they sent came from the inner provinces of the Great Chaco: Misiones, Corrientes, Formosa, and Santa Fe. A subtropical region of palm trees, savannas, and warm rain, poor kids who had probably never been too far from their hometowns. Imagine takings kids from Alabama, Louisiana, or Southern Texas, and sending them to fight in the Scottish Highlands. In November.
They sent them with just a crappy parka, scant food rations, crappy rifles, and no extra changes of clothes. I remember my grandma telling me how haphazardly the regime started organizing clothing drives and collections to send to the kids, way too late.
As for the true, professional soldiers, they had been deployed near the border with Chile to prevent a potential invasion.
And somehow, the Argentinians gave the British hell. In the “Butcher, Baker, Candlestick Maker” arc of The Boys comics, we are told about Butcher’s background as a veteran of the Falklands War. In a single bubble, Butcher recaps effectively how this war, which in the scope of British history seems so small and almost like an anecdote, was more dramatic, more theatrical with its sinking ships, exploding planes, and charging of machine-gun nests. It was as close as you would get to a World War III type of scenario, just on a smaller playing field. There was the battle of San Carlos, which saw three brand-new frigates and destroyers sunk and several damaged, as the Argentinian Air Force flew one daring bombing raid after another, and that’s after most of their bombs failed because the altimeters hadn’t been properly calibrated. A further three ships would be sunk, including a destroyer and a troop transport. But the British had already struck the deadly blow in early May with the sinking of cruiser Belgrano, which accounted for half of Argentina’s combat deaths and, most importantly, led its Navy to pull out of the conflict before suffering any more losses. Yeah, that’s something that can happen in Latin America alright, a whole-ass branch of the armed forces noping out of their own war.
If you put aside the deaths of the Belgrano, the gap between Argentinian and British deaths comes within striking distance, 326 against 255. But on the ground that the reality of this war began to show up: hundreds of Argentinian units would simply surrender because they were kids, because they were cold and hungry and they were facing professionals. The macho bravado that is so typical of Latin American men, but which Argentinians have turned into an art form, was confronted with the stark reality that they probably had what it takes, but their government didn’t. At every land battle, outnumbered Royal marines would capture dozens if not hundreds of conscripts, including almost a thousand at Green Goose. Those kids were, without a doubt, better treated as prisoners of war than by their commanders.
The General in command of the Argentinian forces surrendered on June 14th, realizing his men had given everything they could possibly have, preventing a further blood-letting. Galtieri was probably fuming, but he wouldn’t last long at the top. This war had the exact effect the US hoped for when defeating Saddam Hussein both times: It actually ushered in the return of democracy to Argentina.
I don’t want to go that crazy.
Argentinians must have gone through the bends, from the patriotic euphoria of the successful invasion to months being bombarded with official propaganda in which most mainstream outlets happily acquiesced, (including this infamous cover by Gente claiming “WE ARE WINNING”) and then, just a day after surrendering, reality swept in, the drunken general acknowledged the defeat in a long-winded, slurred speech. Riots and protests began, probably by the same people who weeks earlier were celebrating.
On the 17th, Galtieri “resigned”. Legend says that he was actually removed in his own seat, drunk and pissing himself. Yet another provisional junta took over, but the opposition had seized the chance to demand the return of democracy.
Elections were held in 1983. This wasn’t the end of Argentina’s woes, a country in constant economic crisis, occasionally interrupted by periods of stability and growth. But to claim that a country that doesn’t do well in democracy should turn to authoritarianism is a criminal thing to say.
At the very least, the Juntas were prosecuted and sentenced early on, then given amnesty by this motherf**ker, and just recently were re-sentenced, with many of those monsters dying in prison. Galtieri died a free man.
In a cruel political twist, maybe Argentina won and the UK lost. Argentina got to recover its democracy, for better and for worse, and they defanged and defunded the military, a smart and necessary move. Meanwhile, Galtieri served Thatcher a most welcome victory, securing her, until then, unstable position. Yep, the Argentinian dictatorship ended up saddling the U.K. with 8 more years of Maggie, consolidating the global dominance of rampant neoliberalism. You know I’ve never learned to live.
The veterans of the Falklands-Malvinas? As it is usual with veterans, they got the shaft. Turned from kids to broken men in just a couple of months, they were shunned by society the minute they arrived back home and by a succession of governments who were keen to put the national embarrassment behind them.
PTSD is the accrued interest all soldiers are forced to pay back home, but when you arrive after a defeat, one that was so swift and brutal, you are even more alone, more isolated. And then there’s the whole macho patriarchal culture in Latin America, which is more lenient on expressing emotions, but harsher on saving face.
Veteran’s organizations have lost track of how many Falklands’ survivors have committed suicide. In the British case, it’s perhaps harder to parse out, considering many of those who served there also served in the Gulf War or in the former Yugoslavia, so you know, more chances to catch PTSD. But it should be much easier with the Argentinian survivors, being pretty much the only proper war veterans living in Latin America (that’s not counting the many low-level conflicts, of course). There is a consensus that there were at least 300 to 500 suicides among Argentinian veterans, probably the same number of KIA. Or at the very least, 10% of all those who were deployed, not including premature deaths. Argentinian media mostly ignored them until a landmark piece in the local edition of Rolling Stone by Daniel Riera, poignantly titled “Our Vietnam”.
The discourse on the pointlessness of war can come across so empty, so detached from any insight after endless replays of f**king “Imagine.” But just like the Falklands War resulted in such a perfectly self-contained narrative, it’s also a perfect distillation of the pointlessness of war.
I’ve spread several references to Argentinian Rock classics here, but it’s a song by ABBA from about the same time that feels more suited: Don’t go wasting your emotions. Of course, Latin America isn’t any more irrational a society than Europe or the US, and many times, way less genocidal about it. The problem is we put emotions and sensibility on a pedestal; it’s our language, after all, but we tend to confuse the richness of its tropes for the soundness of its content. Sometimes it entraps us into cycles of hopelessness, sometimes into bursts of creativity, but too often, those passions prevent us from taking a step backward, look at our own discourse and say: Wait, what are we even thinking?
Argentina, being part Italian, part Spanish, and all South American, is by far the most Latin of Latin American countries. Their unique form of religious fervor — the one for football — they apply to just about everything. Most times, it gives us unique scenes like 300,000 people showing up to a recital by ballet dancer Julio Bocca. An unparalleled way of showing up for their icons, even though they’ve never been short on them.
The downside is their steadfast fixation on certain lost causes, where that same awesome energy goes to waste, and in doing so, any drive towards improving the country out of their cycle of corruption and turmoil. The Falklands-Malvinas War is among the top ones. But then again, I’m from a country that successfully seized foreign lands. Also true is that the Falklands-Malvinas are not the cause of Argentinians’ problems, and most certainly not all they have.
Recently, a mini-series project on the Falklands War was announced, to be developed by both British and Argentinian producers, including Axel Kuschevatzky, the producer behind hits like The Secret in Their Eyes and Wild Tales. They seem to have optioned pretty much every single published book and memoir on the war. Projects about the war have been few and far between in British and Argentinian media, with exceptions being Blessed by Fire (2005) and the mini-series Combatientes (2013). I’m looking forward to it because we need that one big choral project about the conflict, regardless of the end product is flawed. Something that trumps over the rhetoric of defeat on one side and the oblivion on the other; if not, at least to represent those tens of thousands of kids forced into becoming veterans.
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