John Shakespeare: Falklands ... The Land That Time Forgot
John Shakespeare served as a diplomat in Argentina from 1973-77.
On the eve of the First World War, Argentina enjoyed the third-highest standard of living in the world. Today, after a hundred years of woeful misgovernment, this wonderful and immensely rich country is in 45th position. The great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges once lamented to me that his country had not been colonised by the British. "If only your invasion of 1806 had succeeded," he said, "today we would be like Australia."
I spent four years there from 1973 to 1977, one of the most tumultuous periods of Argentina's tumultuous history and the one in which it was worst misgoverned. As a diplomat at the British embassy in Buenos Aires, I was successively consul general and minister, and for two years chargé d'affaires. I arrived a few days after the return of Juan Perón from his long exile in Madrid. On his death in 1974, he was succeeded as president by his widow, Isabelita, a former cabaret dancer. She ruled the country for a year with the help of her sinister lover, José López Rega. It was a period of creeping anarchy and soaring inflation. The military finally put an end to the Perónist regime in March 1976 by mounting a coup, which was greeted at first with general relief.
The army restored order and firm government and took action against left-wing terrorist groups such as the Montoneros and the ERP, which had proliferated during the increasingly lawless years of the Peróns. Neither I nor any of the other foreign diplomats in Buenos Aires was aware of the extent of the military's anti-terrorist operations at the time or the beginning of the long "dirty war", though perhaps we should have been alerted to it by the occasional sounds of shots in the night.
Since its emergence from the ruins of the Spanish empire in 1816, Argentina had claimed the Falkland Islands as part of the new republic even though Spain had ceded the uninhabited islands to Britain in 1771. Despite protests from Buenos Aires, Britain formally settled the islands in 1833 and has occupied them ever since, with the exception of 74 days in 1982. Argentina has never relinquished its claim and although it never pursued it with any vigour until the junta took over in 1976, it became part of Argentine mythology. The Islas Malvinas, as they are called in Spanish, are shown on Argentine maps as being part of Argentina and at all schools in the country, even the highly regarded Anglo-Argentine ones such as St George's and St Andrew's, the day begins with the raising of the national flag and recital of the mantra that "las Islas Malvinas son argentinas".
Generations of Argentines have been brainwashed in this way...