The Gamble

By late 1981, Argentina's military junta was in serious trouble. Three successive juntas since 1976 had presided over an economic catastrophe: annual inflation exceeded 130 percent, the peso was in freefall, unemployment was climbing, and the trade unions that had been brutally suppressed during the Dirty War were stirring again. General Leopoldo Galtieri seized power in December 1981 knowing his government faced existential pressure from a population that had grown weary of military rule. He needed a distraction — something to generate nationalist feeling and unite the country behind the flag.

The Malvinas had long been a live wire in Argentine political culture. Every schoolchild learned that the islands, seized by Britain in 1833, were Argentine by right and geography. The junta's planners calculated that seizing the Malvinas would produce a wave of national pride so powerful that it would overwhelm domestic discontent. They also calculated — disastrously — that Britain would not fight. The islands were 13,000 kilometres from London, home to only 1,800 people, and Britain had been signalling its declining interest in maintaining a South Atlantic presence for years. Galtieri's advisers were confident that diplomacy would lock in their gains.

In the early hours of April 2, 1982, Argentine special forces — the Buzo Tactico — landed near Stanley and advanced on Government House. Sixty-nine Royal Marines of Naval Party 8901, commanded by Major Mike Norman, resisted fiercely. In a firefight that lasted several hours, the marines killed several Argentine commandos before Governor Rex Hunt — in his full ceremonial uniform — ordered them to surrender to avoid further bloodshed. The Union Jack came down over Stanley for the first time in 149 years. Hunt was flown to Montevideo and the islands were renamed the Islas Malvinas under Argentine military administration.

In Buenos Aires, 100,000 people gathered in the Plaza de Mayo — the very square where protesters had demonstrated against the government just 24 hours earlier. Galtieri appeared on the balcony of the Casa Rosada to roars of approval. The gamble had produced exactly the nationalist surge the junta had hoped for. What none of them anticipated was the reaction in London, where a prime minister nobody had expected to fight had already decided, with cold fury, that fighting was exactly what she intended to do.