T
en years ago I wrote an article
in a Spanish newspaper
arguing that if the
Argentinians had any
gratitude or basic courtesy
they should build a statue in
Buenos Aires in honour of
Margaret Thatcher. By
winning the Falklands war
and reclaiming British
sovereignty over the southern Atlantic
islands, she had done the Argentinians
an immense favour, precipitating the
fall of a brutal military junta and paving
the way for the restoration of
democratic rule.
The response in Argentina was
hysterical. I had committed an outrage
against a massively underachieving
nation’s ever vehement, ever fragile
national pride. One eminent Argentine
writer went bonkers, raging that it would
make as much sense for the Americans
to put up a statue of Adolf Hitler in
thanks for having helped propel them to
global supremacy after the Second
World War. Others proposed that
Thatcher and Leopoldo Fortunato
Galtieri, the junta leader, were “two
sides of the same coin”. Just last week I
heard the same widely held view from a
retired lawyer in Buenos Aires. Galtieri
was Dracula and Thatcher was a
werewolf, he said.
Forty years after Galtieri’s invasion of
the Falklands I reject the comparison as
idiotic; I stand by my position on the
credit Thatcher deserves. Not out of any
love for her but out of hatred for a
military regime that tortured, murdered
and disappeared an estimated 10,000
left-wing political opponents, some of
whose family members I got to know
well. I had been living in Argentina for
two and a half years when I learnt of the
invasion, a moment I remember as
clearly as if it were yesterday.
It was 5am on April 2, 1982. A
colleague at the paper where I had just
begun my journalistic career, the Buenos
Aires Herald, woke me up with the news.
My first reaction was fury. My second
and third ones too.
I didn’t give a damn whether the
“Malvinas” were Argentine or British,
despite the best efforts of my
schoolteacher in Buenos Aires, where I
grew up between the ages of three and
ten. Señorita Cora had sought to
brainwash me, as every history teacher
in Argentina did every child, by
characterising los Ingleses as piratas
and drumming home the Pavlovian
battle cry, “Las Malvinas son
Argentinas.” It didn’t work with me,
thanks largely to my father, who worked
at the British embassy. But it worked
with everybody else.
In all other respects Argentina
marked me deeply. To this day the
country enchants me and drives me to
despair, as it does most Argentinians. So
much human talent wasted, so many
natural riches squandered, so beguiling,
bright and beautiful a people. I have
always wanted them to win at football,
not least during the 1978 World Cup,
held in Argentina, which I followed on
television at university in England,
joyous when they won.
One year later, having just completed
my degree, I bought a one-way ticket to
Buenos Aires. In part I went because I
did not like living in a country governed
by Mrs Thatcher, whom I saw as shrillThe country was in the doldrums
when Argentina invaded a group
of obscure islands in the South
Atlantic on April 2, 1982. A narrow
victory transformed the mood of
the nation — and empowered its
prime minister. Four decades on,
Max Hastings, the first reporter
into Port Stanley, remembers a
conflict we should be proud of
The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 21
TELAM/AFP/GETTY IMAGESter of the rotors: “Oh well, who dares
wins!” He really said that.
The yomping — those interminable,
overladen marches across the island —
was bloody. The lack of helicopters swept
away early high-command fantasies of
airlifting the Marines and Paras. Instead
they tramped for miles, ever more prey
to trench foot as their service-issue boots
fell apart. I did less walking than most,
and was cosseted by my own footwear,
bought in an expensive moment from
Lobb of St James’s Street. “If anything
unpleasant happens to you on this expe-
dition, Hastings,” said Colonel Hew Pike
of 3 Para, “I know which bits of you I shall
remove from the corpse.” Some units
went days without rations. The nights
were worst of all: we shivered relent-
lessly, prayed for the dawn... and to get
the whole thing over.
We knew good moments, such as
when 2 Para captured Goose Green, and
bad ones, such as when a destroyer and a
container ship were sunk. “There goes
Thatcher’s government,” Colonel Tom
Seccombe, deputy commander of 3 Bri-
gade, observed to me laconically that
night. There were plenty of Thatcher
sceptics in the South Atlantic, not least
because they saw that yet again, as so
often throughout history, thousands of
men had been sent to fight and die to pull
politicians’ chestnuts out of the fire.
Tom was not alone in believing that the
British people’s will for the war would
crumble amid an ever-increasing toll of
losses.
This was why London — or
rather, Downing Street and Fleet
Headquarters at Northwood —
sustained relentless pressure on the task
force for speed, speed, speed. They were
terrified we would become bogged down
in the mountains; that the Americans
would enforce a diplomatic compromise,
as they had at Suez in 1956, and as Presi-
dent Ronald Reagan again attempted
when British troops approached Port
Stanley — to be sternly rebuffed by the
prime minister.
One important point about that war,
alongside today’s ghastly saga in Ukraine.
By comparison with Putin’s war, the scale
of the conflict was tiny. There were
almost no civilians in the line of fire —
only three deaths of islanders. And we
were spared such unspeakable specta-
cles as disfigure every day of the current
war.
Let us be frank, the Argentinians were
a third-rate enemy in every department
save that of their fast jet pilots: the war
flattered our side, because the enemy
seldom showed the initiative to punish
British mistakes and commanders who
fumbled. The destruction by air attack of
the landing ship Sir Galahad, with the loss
of 48 lives, was a culpable blunder. But I
can never forget Jeremy Larken saying to
me that night: “Well, we’ve taken six risks
like that this week and got away with five
of them. Our luck just ran out.”
Was it all worth it? We could have given
the Falkland Islanders £10 million apiece
to move, for a total much smaller than
the cost of the war and of fortifying the
islands since.
And yet, and yet. I am among those
who believe that the Falklands war was
worth fighting, because it empowered
Thatcher, as a victress, to achieve the
astonishing transformation of Britain
over which she presided in the years that
followed.
It still seems today a sort of miracle
that the country proved capable of
assembling a fleet at scant notice and tak-
ing it to war, narrowly achieving a victory
on the far side of the world. But good-
ness, we were lucky. The merest tweak of
fortune — for instance, the lifting of the
fog that shrouded the sea on our heart-
stopping approach to the landing at San
Carlos — would have enabled Argentine
aircraft to sink Canberra or an aircraft-
carrier.
Such a disaster would almost certainly
have required the British to sail home
with their tails between their legs, and
doomed Thatcher. As it was, our armed
forces achieved something in the South
Atlantic of which, four decades on, they
should continue to cherish the memory.
And forget professional objectivity:
I, too, still feel proud that as a journalist
I was there to watch my country, for a
change, do something triumphantly
right.
The Battle for the Falklands, by Max
Hastings and Simon Jenkins, with a new
introduction, is published by Pan (£12.99)gpy
sceptics in the South Atlantic, not least
because they saw that yet again, as so
often throughout history, thousands of
men had been sent to fight and die to pull
politicians’ chestnuts out of the fire.
Tom was not alone in believing that the
British people’s will for the war would
crumble amid an ever-increasing tollof
losses.
This was why London —or
rather, Downing Street and Fleet
Headquartersat Northwood —
and heartless, but mainly what drove me
was nostalgia, the quintessential
Argentine sentiment expressed in the
aching lyrics of the tango. I loved hearing
that music again and reconnecting with
the smells of my childhood, the Italian-
accented Spanish, the fat beefsteaks, the
bright blue skies. But then I looked
below the surface, and the darkness set
in. I’d live soon afterwards in El
Salvador, covering death squads and
civil war; I’d live in South Africa under
apartheid. Argentina under the generals,
who had seized power in 1976, was more
sinister than both.
On TV I’d see the fat, boozy Galtieri
and his pencil-mustachioed
predecessor, Jorge Videla, caricatures of
banana-republic thugs. Their plain-
clothes people-snatchers drove green,
unlicensed Ford Falcons. I’d spot one
marauding the streets, like a shark on
the prowl, and quickly look away. I was
lanky with long hair, the subversivo look,
and time and again the police would stop
me and ask for my ID. I learnt never,
ever, to go outside without my British
passport, my real-life get-out-of-jail card.
I met a medical student, Silvia. We
started going out. One sunny afternoon
we were walking in the city centre with a
friend, Ricardo. Four men with guns
emerged from a Ford Falcon, forced
Ricardo and me up against a wall and
roughly frisked us. They let us go, but
Silvia did not stop trembling for a week.
Her sister, Norma, had disappeared a
year and a half earlier, the week after the
World Cup final. They had celebrated
the 3-1 victory over the Netherlands as
wildly as everyone else. Silvia and her
widowed mother lived, as so many did,
with the inexpressible anguish of not
knowing whether the person they loved
was alive or dead. The only possible
hope, so far as it went, lay in a rumoured
report from a prisoner who had
supposedly bribed his way out that she
had been seen in the hands of a torturer
known as el Francés, the Frenchman.
I went to see the British ambassador.
He offered little hope and less comfort.
An image he used never goes away. He
said the military put their victims
through “a sausage machine”. It was no
metaphor. As it later emerged, el
Francés and his like would use electric
cattle prods on their prey and clubs to
jam into their body cavities. That was
stage one, to get the names of other
alleged subversivos. Then they murdered
them and hurled them with cement
around their feet from helicopters or
planes into the River Plate.
After breaking up with Silvia, whom I
still know and who is forever scarred, I
met Cintia, a painter whose uncle, aunt
and three cousins had been dragged
from their homes, never to be seen
again. The brother of another friend of
mine killed himself with a cyanide tablet
moments after his arrest. And then out
on the streets, on the buses and bars, I
had to hear people defending the virtues
of “the military process”. I’d see stickers
on cars signalling that Argentinians were
“upright and human”, a riposte to
President Carter, who condemned the
military’s human rights abuses.
The frustration of knowing the truth
that the majority were unaware of, or
did not wish to see, ate me up. The
newspapers barely mentioned the word
“disappeared” in any context, except the
Buenos Aires Herald. Being in English,General Galtieri’s Falklands invasion
transformed him into a hero who
drew 100,000 people to the Plaza de
Mayo on the first day of the conflictthe Herald had a latitude denied the
others, though not much. The editor
before I arrived, Bob Cox, left the
country after his nine-year-old son
received death threats on the phone. His
immensely brave successor, James
Nielson, who hired me in October 1981,
took a different route home every night.
At last I had a chance to vent my feelings.
I seized on the Meryl Streep TV series
Holocaust to draw out the parallels with
Nazi Germany. I was the lone reporter at
tiny demonstrations in big squares by
relatives of the disappeared, the Mothers
of Plaza de Mayo.
In March 1982 the people began to
lose their fear. I went to the first big
street protest against the military in six
years, with about 30,000 people. A few
days later I covered a concert by a daring
woman with a big voice called Mercedes
Sosa, a political more than a musical
event during which people laughed and
wept, smelling freedom in the air, and
after each song a drunk or suicidally
courageous individual bellowed: “Down
with the military junta! Down with the
military junta!” It was Galtieri’s turn to
be president now: bad timing. He was
reported to be drinking even more
heavily than usual; his days, it seemed,
were numbered.A
ll of this and much more was why I
reacted with fury on receiving the
news at dawn on April 2, 1982, that
a contingent of Galtieri’s troops
had overrun a small British
garrison and raised the Argentine flag
over the Falklands. Patriotism had been
the last refuge of these sons of bitches.
Playing the Malvinas card, Galtieri and
his gang sought to stir the nationalist
fires ten thousand Señorita Coras had lit,
to appease the ancient pain and conquer
the boggy, distant, wind-scoured islands
— human population, 1,800; penguin
population, one million.
It worked. On the day of the invasion,
at the Plaza de Mayo, where groups of 15
or 20 mothers had stood for six forlorn
years seeking news of their missing
children, 100,000 people cheered and
sang and chanted slogans in praise of
General Galtieri, who waved and gushed
on the presidential balcony.
Thatcher sent the fleet, and I started
receiving anonymous threats on the
phone at night. Six weeks into the
Falklands tragi-farce I left the country.
There wasn’t long to go. It was obvious
that after the British soldiers set foot on
the islands, the war would soon be over.
The hapless Argentine recruits, Galtieri
and co’s last victims, stood no chance
against a professional army. The war was
over in 74 days with 649 Argentine
soldiers dead, 255 British soldiers and
three ill-starred Falklanders.
A couple of weeks ago an Argentine
TV channel asked me about the
similarities between the Ukraine and
Falklands wars. I was stumped. I did not
see any, I said, among other things
because the first one had been an old-
fashioned affair, on battlefields far from
civilian centres, while Vladimir Putin’s
forces were bombing cities and killing
children. In 1982 Buenos Aires had been
as free from danger as London.
Later I thought a bit more and did find
a parallel between Galtieri’s and Putin’s
wars: both initiated by tyrants whose
chief purpose was to remain in power.
As for the Galtieri-Thatcher analogy, I
don’t think so. Thatcher did not sit still
when the bosses of the Ford Falcon
assassins, the ones who killed Silvia’s
sister, invaded the islands. By
dispatching her troops, Thatcher put an
end to them once and for all.
A statue? Unlikely. But should there be
any Argentinians out there who are deaf
to the Pavlovian Malvinas bell, they
might wish quietly to acknowledge that a
debt of thanks is long overdue.I left Britain for Buenos Aires because
I hated Thatcher — but Argentina
should be building a statue of her
Galtieri’s torturing junta was worse than
apartheid South Africa. Britain’s response to
his foolhardy invasion saved the country
from years more misery, writes John CarlinDissidents
were killed
and hurled
in the river
with cement
around
their feet