In the days leading up to the 42nd anniversary of the start of the Falklands War, hundreds of Argentine tourists, many from the provinces, visited the Malvinas museum, opened in 2014, during the government of Cristina Fernández, located within the sinister complex of buildings. of the Navy Mechanic School, (ESMA) torture center during the military dictatorship (1976-83).
The museum tells through texts, photographs and videos the history of the various British invasions of the islands in the 19th century, the attempts to recover Argentine sovereignty, and the fateful war that began on April 2, 1982 and ended nine weeks later. with a balance of 649 Argentine soldiers dead.
Being inside the ESMA, a complex of buildings that, like Auschwitz, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for the horror it symbolizes, the museum invites visitors to relate the atrocities of the dictatorship and the war against British.
The blurry black and white images of the military’s victims hanging on the walls of the ESMA merge in the visitor’s gaze with those of the young Argentine soldiers defeated and humiliated by the British and by their own officers exhibited in the museum of the Falklands. “It is no coincidence that the museum is on the ESMA campus. There is a common thread; We were victims of the dictatorship too,” says Victor Hugo, a former combatant in that war. “The majority of us who went to fight were doing mandatory military service; many were tortured by the military.”
A group of former combatants from Tierra del Fuego have filed a lawsuit against 200 soldiers before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for alleged crimes against combatants.
The relationship between the Malvinas and the crimes of the dictatorship is so important that everything indicates that the first review of the history of the dictatorship planned by the denialist government of Javier Milei and his ultra-conservative vice president Victoria Villarruel has been to appoint a military man – Colonel Esteban Vilgré Lamadrid- in command at the Malvinas museum.
Under the influence of Villarruel – daughter of a military man and apologist for the crimes of the dictatorship – Milei has incorporated into his government program a plan to rewrite the history of the crimes of the dictatorship and the state terrorism that caused the disappearance of some 30,000 people. , a figure agreed upon by most historians but disputed by the new government.
At the same time that the military is whitewashed, the attempt is made to convert the memory of the war into a story of heroism lacking political background, says Hugo. “To date, the museum has not been a war story but a way of expressing with museology the historical data that supported the historical claim of Argentine sovereignty rights over the Malvinas” he explains… At the same time, the ordeal of the common soldiers at the hands of the officers. “Now they are going to create a Hollywood-style narrative and Saving Private Ryan,” says Hugo ironically.
The decision is important. The museum received almost 10,000 visits last year. “It is an educational museum; Many school students go and that is a double-edged sword,” says Hugo.
In an interview with the newspaper Página Doce in February, Vilgré Lamadrid responded that his plan is to rectify a pro-British bias in the museum’s narrative that – according to him – reinforces a victim narrative towards Argentine soldiers instrumentalized by the British intelligence services. The British “created a series of plans to demonstrate that the war was a product (…) of the military man Leopoldo Galtieri,” says Vilgré. From this perspective, Margaret Thatcher “had to intervene to save the kelpers” [as the inhabitants of the Falklands are known].
The plan of the museum’s new management is to eliminate this pro-British bias and criticism of the dictatorship from the history of the war.
With the new government, historical revisionism advances. At the war commemoration events, on Tuesday, April 2, both Milei and Villarruel paid tribute to those who fell in the war with appeals in favor of the military of the dictatorship. Milei called for “reconciliation” with the armed forces. “There is no international respect if the political leadership does everything possible to tarnish the name of our Armed Forces,” he even said.
Curiously, although the government intends to combat the supposed pro-British narrative in the museum, Milei appears willing to accede to British demands for the future. A fervent admirer of Margaret Thatcher, the new president met British foreign secretary David Cameron in Davos. “There is a lot of British interest in hydrocarbons, fishing, resources in the South Atlantic and Antarctica,” said Daniel Guzman of Agenda Malvinas, a Tierra del Fuego geopolitical analysis group. “Instead of having an aggressive policy at the UN, this government has been accommodating with Cameron’s visit to the islands in February and the meeting in Davos served to talk about facilitating British investment.”
