MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Families' Commission Group Arrives in Islands
A group representing the families of Argentine servicemen killed during the conflict in 1982, arrived in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) today, Saturday 12th March, without incident.
Regular passengers on the weekly LAN Chile flight to the Islands from Santiago, via Puerto Montt and Punta Arenas, are accustomed to the stop that is made on the second Saturday of every month in the southern Argentine town of Rio Gallegos; normally the plane is re-fuelled, but no one gets on or off and the process is repeated a week later but this time during the return leg to Punta Arenas.
What might have been forgotten until today, was that the purpose behind this rather extraordinary time-tabling, a consequence of the July 1999 Agreement between the Argentine and British governments, was to allow regular groups of the next of kin of Argentine war dead to visit the Islands once a month for a week, without the need to travel via Santiago.
The financial crisis in Argentina put an end to the next-of-kin visits, but the plane continued to make the stop, for no apparent reason, until today, when for the first time since 2003 a group of twenty-two members of the Comision de Familiares de Caidos en Malvinas e Islas del Atlantico Sur stepped resolutely aboard LAN flight number 993 at Rio Gallegos.
Waiting on board for the group, the majority of reasonably advanced age and obvious respectability, was a two man team from Chile's TVN, but otherwise there was no great fuss and if the other passengers, a mixture of Peruvian fishing crew, Falkland islanders returning from holiday and a few end-of-season tourists, had anything on their minds other than a desire for the plane to take off, it did not show.
What was of interest to some was that the in-flight announcement of our destination made by the LAN Chile crew, did not mention either "The Falkland Islands" or "The Malvinas" but simply the less controversial "Mount Pleasant", which is the name of the Falklands' military base and home of its international airport.
Traveling with the group of family members, who are due to stay in the Islands for a week and will make their first visit to the Argentine Cemetery on Sunday are an interpreter, a priest and the architect of the monument to the Argentine war dead, which was erected at the Darwin cemetery last year.
One of the younger members of the group and Treasurer of the Commission, Leandro Martin de la Colina, whose father was among the crew of a Lear jet shot down on Pebble Island, explained that the principal purpose of the visit was to check that the monument commissioned by the Commission and erected at Darwin by Falklands-based Morrisons Ltd. had been constructed to specification. Although they intended to hold a service at the cemetery, it would not be either an "inauguration" or a "dedication" as had been wrongly reported elsewhere.
Mr. de la Colina explained to Mercopress that the members of the families group visiting on this occasion were all members of the Family Commission's Board of Directors and all had specific responsibilities within the organisation. Because of their long association with the Commission, some of the directors, like himself and the group's leader, Mr. Hector Cisneros, had visited the Islands on previous occasions.
Mr. Cisneros said that the group had a full programme ahead of them and confirmed that Mr. Eduardo Eurnekian, the businessman responsible for the funding of the monument project, would be arriving in the Islands on Tuesday.
John Fowler (MP) Stanley
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