Buenos Aires (April 2, 12.00) A little more than 30 years have passed since that April 2 of 1982 where the Malvinas Islands were recovered, and in Argentina there are still many unanswered questions left; but there is one that divides most opinions: Was the Malvinas War a patriotic feat or was it the last attempt to perpetuate the power of a dictatorship that languished?
Apart from the political parties and the spokesmen of the system, which are always so servile to imperialism that deliberately disqualifies the Malvinas War, there are also some sectors of the Left that question it as a mere adventure of the military dictatorship.
This anti-war stance takes an irrefutable fact: the armed conflict was led by the same dictatorship that imposed a genocide on the Argentine people. But it also chooses to forget a fundamental fact: the feat was a warlike confrontation between a quasi-colonial country attacked more than 150 years ago and an imperial power usurping of territory that declared the war.
The reconquest of the islands was an open challenge to the colonialist and imperialist global order and for this objective reason it is clear that it was a just, anti-imperialist cause, beyond whose circumstantial directed it. Give or take some obvious differences and without trying to impose on the reader incontrovertible parallels, this is what is happening now in the Syrian conflict, where the Syrian people and their authorities fight against global imperialism and its ambitions.
Today, 35 years after the war, there are 4 claims that remain as valid as June 14 1982 when the last artillery shell was fired:
Memory first; not to forget and pay homage to all the soldiers who gave their lives in defense of our territory that our islands deserve. They fell under the fire of the bullets of British imperialism, which had the American support and still continues occupying our islands. Also to those who returned mainland and were hidden for years because of Anti-Malvinas governments.
Justice, so that the government can listen and take care of the needs of ex-combatants since the state has neglected all these years which has led hundreds of them to depression and even suicide.
True, to reject and mark the demaligning attempts that led successive national governments after the fall of the military dictatorship, from Raul Alfonsin, to the present day with the appeasement of Mauricio Macri and his Foreign Minister Malcorra.
After all this time and despite all the attempts to erase them from our memory and hide our heroes, there is a sentence of their hymn that today is more valid than ever and commits us not to lower our arms, their is no more beloved ground, in the extension of our homeland . Malvinas tierra Argentina.
Santiago D’Lucca is an Argentine Spanish translator. You can follow him on Twitter: @rojoparanoico
The views of the author do not necessarily reflect those of Al-Masdar News.
