Tales From a Small Planet

It is to my shame that upon arrival in Buenos Aires in 2009 I knew and cared quite little about the Falklands/Malvinas conflict. To my mind it had been a short war over a tiny archipelago in the South Atlantic of little or no importance, in which British casualties had been fairly minimal, and it had all happened before I was born. And yet this did not mean that I felt no sense of trepidation upon embarking on my Argentine adventure – I was far from certain about how an Englishman might be received by the local population given the two countries’ history of acrimony.
It took maybe a week for Buenos Aires to seduce me entirely. I fell in love, like so many others, with the cultural mosaic of the European and the ‘Latino’, the wide avenidas lined with romantic architecture and the warm breeze that pervades the city in spring. None of my fears regarding Anglophobia came anywhere close to being realized until my second weekend. Speaking with a group of young Argentine men at a party I told them that I was from the UK, at which point one of them uttered the word “Malvinas” and the mood of the conversation suddenly turned frigid. Despite my insistence that I had no opinion on the matter, they glared at me and told me quite aggressively that they had some very definite opinions. My alarm must have shown on my face because they glanced at each other and began to laugh, and the subject quickly changed to that great Argentine passion, football.
I had a similar experience some four months later as I was crossing the Argentine border into Bolivia. Having been confined to my seat on a cramped bus for almost thirty hours and then made to stand in line at security and passport control for another three, my wits had all but deserted me. When it was finally my turn to present my UK passport to the Argentine official, I felt a dread that he might bring up the Malvinas – and that was just what he did. Exhausted, I gave him what must have been a defeated, pleading look. The official chuckled, gave me a knowing wink, and sent me across the border into the Bolivian wilderness.
The point of these anecdotes is this; I have always believed that whatever dispute exists between our governments over foreign policy, and whatever our feelings about it, it must not and need not affect how our two peoples regard and treat each other. But in my interactions with the people of Argentina I came to see that, more often than not, it does not affect it either.