An interesting report on the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom

@ElentirENG ES 7·23·2022 · 18:55 0

This year marks four decades since the outbreak of the Falklands War (known as Guerra de las Malvinas by the Argentines) in April 1982.

When the Falklands were Spanish and the British were expelled from those islands
Spain did not commit any genocide in America: what it did was to end one

Spain had presence in the islands for 45 years

As we saw here last year, by virtue of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, that archipelago belonged to Spain. However, France was the first country to create a permanent settlement on the islands in 1763. In 1766 France sold the islands to Spain, which began its occupation a year later. After the sale treaty between France and Spain, the United Kingdom secretly settled in Port Egmont. In response to this illegal settlement, Spain expelled the British from the islands in the Battle of the Malvinas in 1770. Following the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain abandoned the Falklands in 181

The islands was under British rule since 1833

In 1820, four years after its independence, Argentina took possession of the islands, but only managed to keep them for 13 years, since in 1833 the British took possession of them. Thus, when the Falklands War broke out, 150 years of its possession by the United Kingdom were about to be completed. About this war, Academia Play has published an interesting report that explains its causes and its development, in a brief, entertaining and rigorous way. The video has a script by Alberto Menéndez Engra (the video is in Spanish, but you can activate the automatic subtitles in English in the bottom bar of the player):

The precedent of the conflict with Chile in 1978

It should be noted that the Malvinas War was not the only territorial conflict that this Spanish-American country had at that time. In December 1978, Argentina was about to invade Chile in the so-called Operation Soberanía, after not recognizing the international arbitration that recognized Chilean sovereignty over the Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands, located in the Beagle Channel. The mediation of Pope Saint John Paul II managed to avoid the war. However, that conflict largely motivated Chile to support the United Kingdom in the Falklands War, through intelligence work.

The similarities between the case of the Malvinas and that of Gibraltar

In Spain, the Malvinas War generated a lot of support for Argentina, since many Spaniards considered the cases of those islands and the Rock of Gibraltar to be comparable. However, there is a nuance to take into account: Gibraltar was part of a territory that had been part of Spain for more than 200 years before the British occupation, and it is governed -at least theoretically- by the Treaty of Utrecht, signed in 1713 and signed by the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Spain.

The UN considers Gibraltar and the Malvinas as non-autonomous territories pending decolonization, which is why Gibraltar was never able to join the European Union when the United Kingdom was part of it. The British population of Gibraltar and the Malvinas have settled there for many generations, and in both cases they are mostly reluctant to stop belonging to the United Kingdom, so both conflicts have a difficult solution, unless all parties accept for both colonies the same end as for Hong Kong: incorporation into Spain and Argentina under a special situation.