"Britain Forced Galtieri Into Invading Falklands"

Britain Forced Galtieri Into Invading Falklands

Sophie Arie in Buenos Aires
Last Updated: 14/03/2007
2:21am GMT
Telegraph

Britain forced Argentina to invade the Falkland Islands, the members of General Leopoldo Galtieri's family said yesterday in their first interview since the 1982 conflict.

The widow and children of Argentina's former military ruler claimed that the war was engineered by Britain to avoid negotiations that could have led to the loss of sovereignty over the islands.

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph in the Buenos Aires apartment where Galtieri lived with his wife Lucia until his death in 2003, his son Carlos said: "I am convinced the English wanted the conflict to happen. They had realised they were going to have to negotiate (under the aegis of the United Nations). So what did they do? They made Argentina look like an aggressor."

A UN resolution was passed in 1965 asserting that the Falklands constituted a colony and calling on Britain and Argentina to negotiate. But the 1982 conflict extinguished all hopes of negotiations.

After weeks of growing tension, Argentina sent a force to occupy Port Stanley on April 2, 1982 and, in the weeks that followed, Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister, sent a task force to win back the islands. By the time Argentina surrendered on June 14, 255 Britons and 655 Argentinians had died. But the family insists that the widely accepted version of events - in which Galtieri figures as a wicked, drunken dictator who started a war to distract an increasingly discontented nation - is wrong.

"History is written by the winners. But the losers know the truth," said Mrs Galtieri, sitting alongside her son.

..."Now is the moment to take action to see if it is possible to resolve the last example of traditional colonialism that exists in Latin America."

Using coffee table ornaments and a pot of plastic tulips to demonstrate movements by both countries around the islands, the family claimed that Britain deliberately overreacted to the arrival of a group of Argentinian scrap workers on South Georgia in March 1982, creating a diplomatic stand-off and a military build-up that left Galtieri with "no option" but to invade.

If Galtieri had accepted the British demand that the workers have their passports stamped to remain on the islands, he would effectively have been dropping Argentina's 150-year-old claim to sovereignty over the islands the Argentinians known as Las Malvinas, they said.

"He rang me in the morning to tell me they had recovered the Malvinas," remembered Mrs Galtieri, smoking nervously as she spoke.

Related Articles:

1. Note That Launched Falklands Conflict:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/22/wfalk22.xml

2. Timeline: The 1982 Falklands conflict

3. 13 March 2007: The 1982 Falklands conflict

4. 28 February 2007: Argentina in Falklands service snub

5. Profile: Leopoldo Galtieri

External Links:

6. The Falkland Islands Conflict 1982