It has been forty years since Argentina briefly re-took the Islas Malvinas – as Argentina refers to the Falklands – sparking an international conflict in 1982 that the country had not seen in more than a century. But from the perspective of Buenos Aires society today, the military’s optimism and the popular euphoria with which the adventure was received at the time are hard to understand.
Although the vast majority of Argentinians still see the islands as a legitimate national claim, the cause does not awaken the passions it did during the war and even years before it. Headlines in the latest milestone anniversary were more focused on which politician appeared with whom in the different commemoration acts, trying to decipher the always complex internal Peronist conflicts rather than remembering what happened or what it means looking forward.
So what changed in Argentinian society from 1982, when the war was fought, to today’s relative indifference?
And what was Argentina’s military junta thinking when it embarked on the seemingly fevered project of fighting the West’s superpowers with a worn-out and barely trained army that knew little outside of internal repression?
The country’s military dictatorship was in crisis since 1981, with three presidents in less than one year, a financial implosion that was leading to a debt, banking, and inflationary crisis, and pressure from traditional political parties for a democratic reopening beginning to pile up.
The new junta chief, Army Commander Leopoldo Galtieri — who took office during the 1981 Christmas season — had been building a strong alliance with the U.S. throughout that year.
Gen. Galtieri successfully improved on the somewhat conflictive bilateral relation during the Jimmy Carter years, when Argentina broke the anti-USSR embargo by selling wheat to the Soviet bloc while Mr. Carter pressed the dictatorship with regards to its massive human rights violations.
The neoconservative turn steered by Ronald Reagan’s win in the 1980 U.S. elections opened the door to multiple collaboration efforts between Washington and Buenos Aires, including the export of some of Argentina’s most senior state terror practitioners to prop up the West’s brutal anti-communist efforts in Central America.
Locally, however, the never-ending stalemate between Army and Navy meant that...
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