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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/10/why-fernandez-reopening-falklands-wounds?newsfeed=true
Why is Cristina Fernández de Kirchner reopening old Falklands wounds?
The popular Argentinian president has no need of nationalistic stunts. The reason may lie partly in her Patagonian roots
Rory Carroll and Uki Goni in Buenos Aires
guardian.co.uk, Friday 10 February 2012 15.16 GMT
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was a young crusading lawyer when she watched anxious military conscripts tramp through the cold and wind of her adopted home town, Rio Gallegos, on their way to invade theFalkland Islands.
She was from La Plata, a city near Buenos Aires, and had moved to this Patagonian outpost because it was the home of her husband, Nestor, a fellow lawyer. It had been originally settled in the 1880s by British settlers from the Falklands, 300 miles offshore, and now Argentina’s military junta was sending traffic in the other direction.
Ten weeks later, in June 1982, British forces expelled the Argentinians and Britain’s prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, gloried in her reputation as the Iron Lady. Fernández made her way to Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires to join protesters in front of the presidential palace against Argentina’s blundering dictators.
Three decades later time wrought its ironies. Thatcher returned to Argentina this week not on television news as a triumphant conqueror but in cinemas as a pitiful, senile character played by Meryl Streep. And Fernández, 58, used a new crisis over the Falklands to strut the presidential stage as a powerful leader at the height of her powers.
“I have instructed our foreign minister to protest at the UN the militarisation of the south Atlantic which implies a grave risk for international security,” she told generals, senators, business leaders and war veterans at the palace’s Hall of Latin American Patriots. “I want to ask the British prime minister to give peace a chance; give peace a chance, not war.”
The speech flashed around the world as the latest escalation of a row which has seen Argentina apply an intense diplomatic and commercial squeeze over the disputed south Atlantic islands it refers to as Las Malvinas.
It followed Britain’s “routine” decision to send HMS Dauntless to replace an older ship, as well as Prince William, a search and rescue helicopter pilot. “There is no other way to interpret the decision to send a destroyer, a huge and modern destroyer, to accompany the royal heir, whom we would have loved to see in civilian clothing instead of a military uniform,” said Fernández. She recently herded much of Latin America into banning ships flying the Falkland Islands flag from their ports.
David Cameron, on a visit to Sweden, felt forced to reiterate Britain’s sovereignty over the territory. “As long as the people of the Falkland Islands want to maintain that status, we will make sure they do and we will defend the Falkland Islands properly to make sure that’s the case.”
Despite heated political rhetoric and media coverage from both sides analysts agree the odds of renewed military conflict are negligible.
So why is Fernández reopening old wounds on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the conflict?
Unlike the junta generals, who launched their adventure to distract from economic and political woes, Fernández has no obvious need for nationalistic stunts. “She is the most popular and most powerful president since the return of democracy in 1983,” said Graciela Romer, one of Argentina’s leading political analysts.
She buried rivals in last October’s election, winning a second four-year term, and is cruising on 70% support in latest polls. Her popularity rests largely on wage improvements and social subsidies, notably universal child allowance, pension increases and unemployment benefits, introduced during her first term. “People feel their pocket money has kept ahead of the real yearly inflation rate,” said Romer.
Why, then, pick a fight over a distant, windy archipelago of 3,000 souls who enjoy Marmite and fish fingers and quietly go about their business? Many Argentinians, especially those born after the war, do not give priority to reclaiming islands Britain has held since 1833.
One reason is Fernández’s roots in Patagonia, which traditionally has cared more about the issue than cosmopolitan Buenos Aires. She moved there soon after marrying Nestor, her law school boyfriend, in 1975. Both active in the Peronist youth movement, they kept a low profile in Rio Gallegos during the 1976-83 dictatorship. She said this week she did not join jubilant crowds in the main square to cheer the invasion but certainly felt pity for the conscripts. “We saw many soldiers leave from Rio Gallegos and some didn’t return.”
While Nestor became mayor of Rio Gallegos in 1987 and then governor of the surrounding province, Santa Cruz, his wife was elected to congress and acquired respect as a fiery anti-corruption legislator. She was more famous and dashing than her husband but in 2003, as Argentina reeled from economic collapse, it was Nestor who catapulted to the presidency over a divided field. Cristina, as she was known to the nation, became first lady.
Nestor scorned orthodox IMF prescriptions and international creditors and presided over a vibrant recovery fuelled by soy exports to China. Generous social subsidies and the reopening of trials for dictatorship-era human rights violations clinched his popularity.
He was favourite to win re-election but stepped aside to let his wife run in 2007. “She is better at communicating with the people than her opponents,” he told Horacio Verbitsky, a leading journalist and close ally. Verbitsky was sceptical at first. “I personally didn’t expect her to be so successful when she ran … but Nestor Kirchner used to tell me she would prove even more capable than he had been, and he was right.”
Fernández inherited not only a popular government but a relatively united Peronist movement, reconstructed by her husband, while the opposition remained fractured and demoralised.
For all her stern demeanour – she refuses all press interviews and shuns opposition figures – the president can be disarmingly open about private matters. She once surprised an audience relating how she and her husband had just rediscovered the joys of eating pork. “Well, you know, incredible! Everything went very well all weekend. Plus, having a little roasted pork is better than taking Viagra.”
She stumbled, however, in 2009. An economic downturn and clashes with farmers and media barons lost her a congressional majority in mid-term elections and hammered her approval ratings down to 19%. Nestor’s death from a heart attack the following year prompted immense public sympathy and, amid her grief, a comeback. To this day the president wears only mourning black in public. A recovering economy did the rest, restoring her congressional control and ratings in time for re-election.
Like a certain former British prime minister, showing weakness, in any context, is anathema. When she tripped in front of TV cameras last year, causing a nasty gash on her head, the president immediately bounced back up to her feet. “Luckily I got up fast so they couldn’t film me on the floor!”
Patagonian roots aside, the president’s main interest in escalating the Falklands row may be to deflect looming domestic difficulties. The government is attempting to untangle expensive state subsidies which will hurt its blue-collar base. Analysts say inflation is more than double the official figure. The government is so desperate to massage the numbers it has prohibited economic consultancy firms publishing private inflation estimates.
Compounding that unease, a constitutional ban on a third term means Fernández could soon be embroiled in a fraught effort to change the constitution so she can run again. The alternative will be to watch her authority gradually ebb.
“A Peronist president without the chance of re-election becomes a lame duck. Once the Malvinas issue fades back into the background, the fight of succession will come to the fore and her monolithic power could reduce her flexibility when it comes to dealing with the Peronists,” said Romer, the analyst. “Her great strength could become her greatest weakness.” Tapping semi-dormant passions over the Falklands is a largely cost-free way to consolidate her base and deter would-be successors from moving too soon.
Fernández has also been emboldened by the zeitgeist: South America has discovered it can, perhaps for the first time in its history, safely challenge the old colonial powers. A “pink tide” of nationalistic leftwing governments senses the region’s time has come after centuries of marginalisation. China’s rapid rise as a trading partner has further weakened European leverage.
“South America doesn’t have the respect it used to have for Europe. It feels it is on top now and is flexing its new muscles,” said a senior European diplomat.
Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva made a global splash railing against western bankers, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez did the same railing against western imperialism and the Falklands gave Fernández her own cause, said Romer. “She is using Malvinas to expand her visibility on the international arena.”
Lucrative fishing concessions have made the Falklands wealthy, and when in 2010 four British companies announced they were going to search for an estimated 8.3bn barrels of oil in Falkland waters, it added resource nationalism to the combustible mix of history and wounded pride. London’s blunt dismissal of Argentinian concerns over financial and environmental implications aggravated Fernández all the more.
Rio Gallegos remains cold and windy but nobody expects to see a new generation of conscripts tramping aboard Falkland-bound planes. Fernández is not desperate or stupid. She is simply extracting advantage from a clump of islands her compatriots consider unfinished business. And in the process becoming, for many, Argentina’s own iron lady.
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