MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina and Uruguay ladies love and celebrate the Falklands

Lawmaker Silvina Perez Bonavita with British Ambassador to Uruguay Faye O’Connor during the Commemoration of the Independence of Uruguay last Wednesday (Pic Twitter)

Ladies support for the Falkland Islands in the River Plate is expanding. As happened just a few weeks ago in Buenos Aires when two historians, one of them with an international reputation, acknowledged the Falklands belong to the Falkland Islanders and doubt Argentina's claim, in Uruguay a member from a ruling coalition junior party last 14 August twitted the hashtag “HappyFalklandsDay”.

Lawmaker Silvina Perez Bonavita finally had to erase the hashtag following on a challenge from a member of her own party and a letter from the Argentine ambassador in Montevideo, Alberto Iribarne. In effect, lawmaker Elsa Capillera twitted a reply stating, “Malvinas...a Great Mother-land cause”.

In his letter the Argentine ambassador rejects the happy FalklandsDay and remembers that the Malvinas question is highly sensitive for Argentina, to the extent that it is a standing and unrenounceable objective of the Argentine people enshrined in the Constitution, and which “our Uruguayan brothers have also accompanied”

Further on the ambassador underlines that Argentina has sustainedly claimed the Islands sovereignty, since 1833, and during the following 188 years, and Uruguay's support has been decisive in the different scenarios. “Argentina values and is grateful to Uruguay for sharing its position”.

The letter was accompanied with the gift of two books with Uruguayan writers who support Argentina's claim, and a week later the head of the junior party of the coalition, Manini Rios, said that the “incident is over” since Perez Bonavita erased the hashtag.

Anyhow Manini Rios and his party Cabildo Abierto, underlined the significance of the UN resolution calling for negotiations and a peaceful solution to the dispute regarding the Malvinas Islands, and also praised the longstanding firm and coherent position of Uruguayan diplomacy in the defense of Argentine rights over the Malvinas.

“We belong to something larger than our countries politically divided and that is why the Argentine claim over the Islands involves all of us”, concluded Manini Rios.

However this did not prevent Silvina Perez Bonavita for again referring to the Falklands issue by praising the British embassy in Montevideo for inaugurating a site with information on the Islands in Spanish.