MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

President calls Argentines to hold war veterans where they belong

Argentina will recover the Malvinas through peaceful means, Alberto Fernández insisted

President Alberto Fernández called Argentines to “feel proud” and “put the ex-combatants in their rightful place” during the celebration of the 41st anniversary of the landing in Stanley (then renamed Puerto Argentino) by the South American country's troops which kicked off the 1982 Falkland/Malvinas war.

Fernández also insisted his country would double down its “efforts in international organizations to claim that sovereignty that is ours”.

”We will never stop debating and claiming in every international forum the right we have to prevent the disintegration of our territorial sovereignty; we have always done that: Néstor (Kirchner), Cristina (Fernández) and I did it,“ the head of state said from Almirante Brown, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires.

Fernández also underlined that the Cambiemos administration of former President Mauricio Macri did ”nothing“ to favor the war veterans and even vetoed a double early retirement bill passed by Congress.

The President also described how his government ”gradually dismantled“ the 2016 Foradori-Duncan agreement between Argentina and the United Kingdom. ”It was a shameful pact that allowed the United Kingdom to have continental flights again, from Malvinas to Sao Paulo, and what was worse was that it enabled Malvinas to exploit all the surrounding maritime space when those lands are Argentine,“ he argued.

”Since we arrived with [Foreign Minister] Santiago (Cafiero) we have been working to dismantle that agreement and little by little we have been dismantling it and recently we said 'that agreement no longer exists' and the British do not have the right to fly to the continent whenever they want nor to exploit Argentine waters whenever they feel like it.“

”We are Argentina, the people of Malvinas. Malvinas unites us,“ President Fernández also posted on his Twitter account.

He also criticized PRO Chairwoman and presidential hopeful Patricia Bullrich for her statements during a TV appearance in 2021 when she said regarding the then-ongoing negotiations with the laboratory Pfizer to buy Covid-19 vaccines that they ”could have been given the Malvinas Islands“ as collateral, a statement for which she had to recant in the following days.

”There was someone who wants to be president now who dared to say: 'What are we going to discuss the Malvinas Islands for, if they want to keep the Malvinas Islands, let them keep the Malvinas'. We have to remember,“ Fernández pointed out while stressing Argentina would ”recover“ the Malvinas Islands by ”peaceful means.“

”Let us strengthen more than ever our commitment to Malvinas, more than ever let us say the Malvinas were, are, and will be Argentine; the struggle we undertook was meaningful and has not ended, and we will recover our islands by peaceful means and we will continue to raise our voice until the world listens to us,“ he went on.

”As every April 2, and 41 years after the beginning of the South Atlantic Conflict, the Argentine Government and people honor our compatriots who fought with courage and heroism for the recovery of the effective exercise of sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia, South Sandwich Islands, and the surrounding maritime areas,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Vice President Cristina Kirchner published a message through her social networks with a video commemorating the 41st anniversary of the beginning of the war.