Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on April 2, 1982, and Britain took them back ten weeks later. Neither event touched the underlying argument over who owns the islands, which is the same argument the two countries were having before a single shot was fired. The war changed who governed the islands day to day. It changed nothing about who has the stronger legal claim to them.
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That gap between military outcome and legal settlement is the whole story. Britain proved it would fight to keep the islands. Argentina never withdrew its claim. Both things are still true today.
Why did Argentina invade in the first place?
Argentina’s military government, led by General Leopoldo Galtieri, was presiding over a deep financial crisis. The junta hoped a short, successful war would divert attention from the economy. The Falklands, which Argentina calls the Malvinas, had been a grievance in Argentine schoolbooks since President Juan Perón revived the formal claim in the late 1940s. A dispute over a contract to scrap a disused whaling station on South Georgia gave the junta its pretext, however undignified.
Galtieri also had reason to think Britain would not fight back. Britain had shown little willingness to devote resources to the islands, and the junta sensed a lack of British commitment. Argentina had also lost a 1977 arbitration to Chile over the Beagle Channel. The Guardian suggested Galtieri may have wanted Argentina installed in the Falklands before the Antarctic Treaty expired in 1991.
Whose claim to the islands came first?
Nobody can say for certain who saw the Falklands first. Credit sometimes goes to Esteban Gómez, on Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of 1519 to 1522, and sometimes to the English navigator John Davis in 1592. The first sighting nobody disputes belongs to the Dutchman Sebald de Weerdt around 1600. English captain John Strong made the first recorded landing in 1690, naming the sound between the two main islands after the First Lord of the Admiralty, Viscount Falkland.
French, Spanish and British settlers each took a turn at the islands over the following century, and few of them much liked the place. In 1771, the British government commissioned Samuel Johnson to write a pamphlet dismissing the islands as land “thrown aside from human use.” The forerunner of modern Argentina declared independence from Spain in 1816, and four years later it claimed the islands. Britain reasserted its own claim in January 1833, when a British warship arrived and its captain sent the Buenos Aires-appointed governor away. Britain made the Falklands a Crown Colony in 1840, and has administered them without interruption since, aside from the ten weeks of 1982.
What did the fighting actually decide?
Very little, on paper. Argentina’s initial landing overwhelmed the token British garrison of Royal Marines within hours, and Britain’s governor on the islands surrendered before Argentine reinforcements had even finished coming ashore. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher then ordered a task force to sail 8,000 miles to retake the islands, overruling defence officials who doubted it could be done. British forces recaptured the Falklands and South Georgia by June 14, 1982.
What the war settled was a question of will, not a question of ownership. Britain showed it would commit ships, troops and money to hold the islands rather than negotiate them away. Argentina’s claim to sovereignty rests on inheritance from Spain’s former South American empire. A 1965 United Nations resolution had recognised the existence of a dispute and invited both countries to negotiate.
Why has the dispute outlasted the war by more than four decades?
At the time of the invasion, the islanders numbered about 1,800, and they wanted to remain British. Britain held that the islanders’ wishes had to come first. Argentina was never prepared to accept British soundings of their opinion as valid. Forty years after the war, History.com reported that the tensions over who owns the islands still simmer.
The war did settle one practical question. To Argentina’s surprise, Britain proved it was prepared to fight for the islands.
