Tierra del Fuego Governor warns Milei against possible drop in Malvinas claims

Tierra del Fuego Governor warns Milei against possible drop in Malvinas claims

In a column published this week in Buenos Aires daily Clarín, Gustavo Melella, Governor of the Argentine Province of Tierra del Fuego which technically includes the South Atlantic Islands over which the South American country claims sovereignty, stressed that the future Libertarian administration of Javier Milei should not enact a U-turn in the state policies on that particular matter.

“The vindication of Argentine sovereignty over the islands is an issue where there can be no Copernican changes in our foreign policy,” Melella wrote while insisting the 1994 Constitution provided for the Argentine people to recover “those territories.”

That year, the Malvinas Question became “a State policy, ensuring its shielding from any kind of sectorial interest of the politicians of the day,” the Governor argued. He also claimed that “in more than 190 years of history no Argentine government has failed to claim or protest for our legitimate rights” and denounced the weakness of national governments that “have advanced in agreements and policies that only benefited the United Kingdom,” particularly under former President Mauricio Macri, whose line is somehow returning to power with Milei.

“The immobilism and the naivety of pleasing the British with the fantasy that at some point they will decide to sit down to negotiate the fundamental solution to the dispute have no logical or historical basis,” Melella insisted. The governor also criticized “the placement of a dual-use British capital radar in our own noses” in his province while warning against the possible downgrading of the Malvinas Secretariat after Dec. 10. “Malvinas is a priority in our foreign policy,” he underlined.

Melella did not rule out “improving commercial, cultural and any other kind of relations with the United Kingdom and the inhabitants of the islands” so long as “the central and unrenounceable objective of recovering the full exercise of sovereignty over the Malvinas Islands and other southern archipelagos” remains in place.