By Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein
Cordoba, statue to the 650 Argentine troops killed in the Malvinas War. photo: Bill Hackwell
In 1982 I was in Nicaragua. It was the first years of the Sandinista revolution and I was working in the Army. One day in April, someone whose name I unfortunately could not remember asked me if I was willing to go to the Malvinas to fight alongside the Argentine people in the struggle to recover the islands from British colonial rule.
I was just over 25 years old and I had never before been forced to face an ethical dilemma of such dimensions. It was a question of making a contribution to the just Argentine aspiration to rescue the sovereignty of a territory that by history and justice belongs to it, but it also meant putting myself at the orders of the military dictatorship, extreme violator of human rights and therefore repudiated by the vast majority of decent humanity on the planet.
Although the incorporation into combat of the contingent that had been given the go-ahead for its participation in the conflict did not materialize, it was impossible to avoid the internal controversy that emerged from the need to resolve the controversy that in moral terms plagued us for several weeks.
The resolution of this intimate struggle provided valuable political management tools for the future. One of them was to understand that the tactical dimension must always be subordinated to the evaluation and sense of the strategic. In this case, the strategic was the Argentine and Latin American responsibility to recover the Malvinas as an imperative of our own condition as men and women of this time.
The ethical contradiction that faced the decision on what was the correct behavior to assume in this situation, pointed out and points out unequivocally that there is no impediment or known limit to the need to fight colonialism and imperialism in all its manifestations and with any method within our reach.
We Latin Americans of this era cannot live in doubt as to the behavior that must be adopted in the face of certain facts and situations. In this sense, critical conscience obliges us to refute the colonial imposition that in Latin America still exercises -in the 21st century- control over the Malvinas, Puerto Rico and other Caribbean countries and territories.
Waking up every day knowing that the colonial scab continues to spread like a cancer in some areas of a continent that decided to be free more than 200 years ago, circumscribes the idea that the task has not yet been completed.
During that early morning of April 2, 1982, Ronald Reagan and General Leopoldo Galtieri had a tense telephone conversation that lasted approximately fifty minutes. The Argentine dictator did not feel comfortable or satisfied once the interview with the U.S. president was over. Galtieri had the secret hope of obtaining a clear backing from Reagan, or at least an effective and complicit neutrality that would contribute to prevent a British reaction in which he could use all the power of his weapons. On the contrary, the U.S. president had repeatedly tried to convince the general to refrain from a war operation in the Malvinas, and warned him that an “aggression”, as he called it, would provoke a sure and energetic response from Margaret Thatcher. Finally, he would have offered to mediate in the face of the imminent international conflict.
On June 16, 1982, a month and a half after the United States announced its unrestricted support to Great Britain, Galtieri publicly acknowledged in a message to the country the defeat of the Argentine troops at the hands of the British forces. A few days later, Galtieri himself, in an interview granted to journalist Oriana Fallaci, admitted with bitterness and disappointment, among other things, the role of the United States in the defeat, describing the American actions as a “betrayal”.
On the same day and month of June, Nicanor Costa Méndez, a career diplomat, inveterate anti-communist, very close to the United States and Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Argentine government, had to recognize the defeat which he attributed to the military and technological superiority of Great Britain and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), accepting with bitterness the decisive participation of the United States, which acted more as a member of that military alliance that unites the two countries, than as a member of the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR). Then, the Argentine Foreign Minister surprisingly announced the dismantling of the hemispheric defense system and pact in view of the U.S. government’s disregard of its resolutions.
The bitter and painful dismay suffered by the Argentine generals in the face of U.S. abandonment, which even led Galtieri to call them traitors, showed that their training prevented them from understanding the imperialist essence of U.S. foreign policy, in which there is a long history of ties with the countries south of the Rio Bravo, invariably based on their economic interests, expansion and domination, before obeying ethical and political principles and commitments.
For the first time in the history of inter-American relations, the essence of “Pan-Americanism” and its supposed conception of regional defense against an extra-continental power, in this case Great Britain, acting against one of the nations of the Americas, was put to the test. In the Malvinas conflict, the complexities of international relations created after World War II and the intentions of the military to solve the serious internal situation based on the just national claim for the Malvinas, had deconstructed an international scenario long built by the United States against communism and the countries of the socialist camp. To America’s regret, in the Falklands War it was not precisely the Soviet fleet that acted artfully on the American continent.
In addition to becoming the death knell of the TIAR, the Falklands conflict questioned the foundations on which the integration model for our continent was built. The contradiction between the Monroist and Pan-American idea clashed once again and in an ostensible manner with the Bolivarian idea that proposes the integration of the peoples of the territories that José Martí grouped under the name of “Our America”.
Geographical belonging to a region of the planet is not a sufficient element to generate true integrationist motives and solidarity in the face of an external enemy. Other components, cultural, identity and economic ties, contribute to the construction of an integration process that has in the constitution of a regional security mechanism among equals, one of the fundamental pillars to maintain peace and guarantee a harmonious coexistence among peoples.
The TIAR should disappear, as should the OAS, because they do not represent the interests of the region inasmuch as a power can impose a hegemony that is not formally accepted in the constitutive documents of these organizations. The need to give way to new mechanisms of integration among the peoples of the region south of the Rio Grande had in the Falklands conflict a turning point in the path to follow. Governments and peoples of Latin America, overcoming the obvious differences with a subordinate government and violator of human rights, came to the defense of Argentina’s interests, which were an expression of Latin American principles of law that were the pillars for the construction of the national States of the region, using all the political, diplomatic and even military instruments at their disposal. With the sole exception being the dictatorial government of Augusto Pinochet, the rest of the countries of the region showed their spirit of solidarity and their Latin Americanist roots. The cry: “The Malvinas are Argentine” was a slogan that crossed valleys and mountains, rivers and seas enveloping a feeling that surpassed and surpasses Argentines as a cry of solidarity from all of us who were born and live between Mexico and Patagonia.
Only a rapprochement between our countries and the realization of integration in instruments that safeguard the sovereignty and self-determination of the peoples and that have the capacity for political, diplomatic and military response without the need to resort to extra-regional powers, augur a new era that will never repeat the ignominy that the imperial invasion of the Malvinas meant for our region.
When that has been achieved, we will be closer to true Independence and in justice we will have to look back to remember those young Argentines who in those fateful days of 1982 gave their lives for the dignity and honor of all Latin Americans and Caribbeans and who raised very high a flag that will forever fly high throughout the territory of this, Our Great Homeland.
Source: Portal Alba, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English