Page:The Future of the Falkland Islands and Its People.pdf/34

 recover the Islands if it adopts a "tough" policy. Most politicians from both major political parties, as well many professional diplomats, engage in this type of lie, even if they are somewhat subdued with the present economic and political crisis of Argentina. Crisis notwithstanding, however, when it comes to issuing opinions about the Falklands they will usually agree that to attempt to “seduce” is a waste of time, that the Islanders must be disregarded, and that the costs to Britain of not transferring sovereignty to Argentina must be increased.

This is a malign, arrogant, macho-type lie because it propounds a policy of confrontation that, if implemented, would be dreadfully costly to Argentina herself, and would never succeed in recovering what was lost as far back as 1833, and which the war of 1982 made irrecoverable

This second type of lie is also perversely naïve. It proposes to increase the British costs of remaining in the Falklands, without taking account of the fact that in order to increase the British costs one must augment the Argentine costs, and without realizing that Britain has infinitely more economic, diplomatic and military resources than Argentina. There is no way of making Britain "spend more" without Argentina herself spending more as well. And the increased British costs will always represent a much smaller percentage of total British resources, than the increased Argentine costs vis-à-vis total Argentine resources. Thus, increasing the British costs of not transferring sovereignty is necessarily a worse deal for Argentina than for Britain. And last but not least, these increased costs to Argentina will be felt much more dramatically by Argentina’s increasingly poor masses than by the well-off elites who would profit emotionally and politically from such a reckless policy.

Why then is this malign lie consistently repeated when the issue of the Falklands is debated? The answer would appear to be that, in Argentina, a perverse political dynamics is at work whereby professional politicians fear that to say the “painful” truth about the Falklands (i.e., that they will never again be Argentine) will make them lose votes to politicians who continue to engage in the fantasy that the Islands will be recovered. If politician A admits publicly that the Falklands will not be recovered, he or she will lose votes to politician B, who by continuing with the lie will succeed in reaping political profits from primitive popular emotions.

The end result, of course, is to the detriment of the country itself. But when politicians consistently sell their souls to the popular vote, that is of little or no import.