Thirty Years Later: The Importance of the Malvinas
Thirty Years Later: The Importance of the Malvinas
On April 2, 1982, Argentina and the United Kingdom started a brief war over two small islands off the Argentine coast. Beyond national pride, why do both countries continue to let this dispute affect bilateral relations?
Today marks the 30-year anniversary of the start of the 74-day Malvinas War. Although control of the islands is often seen as an issue of national pride, the Malvinas (known as the Falklands outside of Latin America) are also important geostrategic and economic assets.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, rhetoric over the islands' status has yet again escalated in the lead up to Argentina and the United Kingdom marking the hostilities and the 900 soldiers (including three islanders) who died during the conflict.
The Malvinas are two small islands of 4,405 square miles (11,400 square kilometers) a mere 403 miles (650 kilometers) from the Argentine mainland. They remain sparsely populated-about 2,500 islanders in addition to 1,700 British military and civilian personnel at the Mount Pleasant military base. But after the 1982 war the United Kingdom invested $90 million in infrastructure and granted the islanders citizenship. Today, the Malvinas has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world ($52,000)-higher than that of Britain ($40,000) and Argentina ($11,000).
Diplomatically, Argentina, in 1965, successfully argued before the United Nations Committee for Decolonization that the dispute be framed in terms of a bilateral conflict over territorial integrity rather than the islanders' self-determination. The defining Resolution 2065 states that the islanders' "interests"-rather than their desires-are to be taken into account. The ambiguous diplomatic language made clear that self-determination was not the principle for the conflict and opened up room for intermediate solutions.
Future UN resolutions have asked the United Kingdom to sit with Argentina and negotiate a bilateral solution to the dispute. At times it has done so and in different points in the past 50 years it has seemed like a breakthrough was possible, only to fall through. Lately, however, the United Kingdom has argued-in contrast to UN precedent on the issue-that the islanders should be at the table. Still, in the past decade there has been no dialogue at all.
The result is continued chest-thumping on the issue without progress to an eventual solution. Some of the rhetoric has been borderline nonsensical, as when UK Prime Minister David Cameron during a session of the House of Commons accused Argentina of "colonialism" over its sovereignty claim.
Click here to read the full article at AmericasQuarterly.org.
Ivan Petrella is a Harvard PhD and the academic director of Fundación Pensar in Buenos Aires. Follow him on Twitter: @ipetrella.
