Malvinas War, Argentina, and the Cinema of the Vanished – Frontline Magazine

The just-ended World Cup saw Lionel Messi and his team, along with thousands of Argentines in the stands, repeatedly invoke the killing of “our brothers” in Las Malvinas 44 years ago to deepen world consciousness against British brutalities and violations of the Geneva Convention governing prisoners-of-war. What Messi did was to continue with the frenzied calls for justice first put into practice on the playfield by Diego Maradona.

There was a war, or rather a non-war, in 1982 between Argentina and Britain over a few dots of land in the south Atlantic, which Latin Americans call Las Malvinas and the British, the Falklands. Thinly populated and meaning nothing to the outside world till hostilities erupted, the Las Malvinas has more sheep and cattle than human beings and is composed of hard, cold rocks and craters of lunar dimensions. Argentina suffered an ignominious defeat, and the extent of British atrocities on Argentine prisoners-of-war subsequently became clear with the publication of newspaper testimonies by several former officers on both sides saying that they saw executions or heard of them.

A book written by a British soldier and published in 1991, close to the tenth anniversary of the war, spoke of Argentine prisoners being pushed off steep cliffs or, to save time and trouble, simply shot in the head. From time to time in the past four and a half decades, Argentina and Britain have ordered inquiries into reports that Argentine soldiers were summarily executed by British officers and men, but nothing came of their findings. Many of the accusations are to be found in former Lance Corporal Vincent Bramley’s book, Excursion to Hell: Mount Longdon, referring to a critical battle on a craggy 700-ft. hill, 5 miles outside the Malvinas capital, on June 11 and 12, 1982.

The Malvinas war gave rise to several burning questions which agitate many people even today. Why should Argentina, then under military rule, have suddenly shown renewed interest in proclaiming its ownership of Las Malvinas? Why did Margaret Thatcher swiftly respond to the challenge, putting it down with severity bordering on savagery? These questions need to be answered for the sake of history if for no other reason.

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The tyrannical rule of the generals had, by the beginning of the 1980s and even prior to that, made a mess of Argentina. Democracy and the rule of law had been throttled by strong-arm methods. Thousands of dissenters belonging to the political parties, the trade unions, the universities, the intelligentsia, and a section of the church had just “disappeared” (desaparecidos). Where the army did not wish to be seen, armed rightist thugs did the job. Unemployment was rampant, the economy was in a shambles. True, the Argentines had always laid claim to Las Malvinas, a claim supported by many Latin American nations, but the timing of its occupation of the islands which had been usurped and colonised by the British, had everything to do with a sinister design to divert the attention of the restive Argentine masses from the growing hell at home. To stay in power, the military junta was prepared to undertake any gamble.

As to the British reaction, Thatcher saw in the Malvinas issue a god-sent opportunity to touch up her sagging image in a vital election year. The net outcome of the war for her was that she returned to power with the largest post-Second World War majority. She successfully played around with the average English citizen’s intense admiration for the victorious in battle. Never mind the fact that Britain had been relegated to a second-rate military power on the world scene, the typical Englishman’s colonial instinct was in a state of perfect preservation, resulting in a thumping approval for the incumbent Prime Minister and her Conservative Party. While it might be somewhat of an exaggeration to say that Thatcher, the grocer’s daughter who rose to the status of the so-called Iron Lady, loved the sound and scent of war, this much is certain that in her election speeches she heavily capitalised on the outcome of the Malvinas war. Indeed she sought and secured political gain in human misery.

Perhaps no one did more than Gabriel García Márquez, who turns 100 next year, to let the world know about the many tragedies of the Malvinas war. In April 1983, to mark the first anniversary of the Argentine take-over of the Malvinas and the ruthless British retaliation, Márquez wrote a long article in the Spanish daily El Pais which shocked millions of readers.

According to Latin America’s best-known literary statesman, who received the Nobel Prize the year that saw the Malvinas eruption, the Argentine conscripts on the islands were so poorly clothed and sheltered against the bitter cold that 92 of them had to be castrated, their testicles having been badly frostbitten. Immediately after being operated on, they had to go back to their trenches. Others were shod only in tennis shoes which tore off strips of gangrenous flesh when removed after weeks in the cold and wet. Snow glare blinded 500 Argentine soldiers who lacked protective glasses. Officers drugged enlisted men before combat, first through chocolates and later by injections, to dull hunger and keep them awake. Many died of cold in their sleep—luckier than colleagues who died of hunger while trying to get out meat paste that had solidified in its tins.

Márquez reported all this from unpublished letters circulating among Argentines in their own country and abroad among communities of exiles from military rule. He began his article with the story of an Argentine recruit returning to Buenos Aires after the war and phoning his mother to ask whether he could bring home a colleague who had lost two limbs and been blinded in battle. The horrified woman told her son, no, she couldn’t bear to have such a mutilated creature in her house. The son hung up and promptly shot himself, for he was the wounded blind man.

Predictably, the British media pretended not to have noticed Márquez’s El Pais article in which he had also mentioned that among the Argentine prisoners released after the war, there were 50 who had to be treated for anal lesions caused by rapes perpetrated by Britishers who had captured them in the Darwin area of the Malvinas. Indian readers would in all probability have remained innocent of Márquez’s chilling, revelatory piece but for the Bombay monthly Imprint (no longer in publication) carrying it in the summer of 1983.

Understandably, what should be of added concern to Indians and other peoples in our part of the world, Márquez also reported that Gurkhas were in the vanguard of the task force’s overland push on Port Stanley, “yelling and cutting off heads… one head every seven seconds. They would hold up a head by the hair and cut off the ears”. So frenzied were the Gurkhas, the account went on, that when the battle was over, they continued their killing among the British and were only stopped by being tied up. Of the 700 Gurkhas who disembarked on the Malvinas, only 70 survived, which tells its own tale of the South Asians being used as cannon fodder in the service of the queen who could not care less about them once they had done their job. If the British used the Gurkhas as expendable material in the Malvinas war, the generals in Buenos Aires inflicted a similar fate on Argentines of indigenous stock who formed a large part of the casualties.

One of the fallouts of the Malvinas debacle was that after years of brutal “governance”, the military junta had to go and democracy returned to Argentina, albeit in slow, faltering steps. The deeply divided society, nursing its wounds in anger, humiliation, and utter confusion, did not seem to be interested in the leadership of the elderly Raul Alfonsin who had little to offer by way of instant correction of the evils that afflicted Argentina. Instead, the people swiftly voted for Carlos Saul Menem, the son of Syrian immigrants and a convert to Catholicism for reasons more to do with convenience than conviction, as it became clear in the course of time. The constitution of Argentina stipulates that no non-Catholic may become President of the country. Menem claimed to have suffered torture in jail for being a human rights activist in the dictatorship years. After his release, he fought and won the Presidential elections, cleverly casting himself in the role of a resurrected Peron, a friend of the working class, and a model family man. But little did Argentina or the rest of the Latin American family know that this man of immense charm and glib tongue would have a secret understanding with the generals not to bring them to trial. Little did the parents and grandparents and spouses and comrades of the disappeared or those fallen in battle in the cold and hunger of the Malvinas know that Menem would renege on his promises to the nation and the people.

At least one of Menem’s betrayals left many Indians deeply disappointed. Menem had promised that Argentina would continue to be one of the leaders in Latin America of the non-aligned movement to which India was pledged. But when it came to hard politics, he easily buckled under American pressure. The United States, which had actively supported the generals in their reign of terror while preaching democracy and human values to the world, got Menem to pull Argentina out of the non-aligned movement on the plea that it had outlived its relevance. Bush and Menem had calculated that others on the continent would follow suit and thereby contribute to isolating Cuba, but it proved to be of no avail.

Once the military dictatorship in Argentina ended, scores of artists, including many filmmakers, got down to informing the world about not just the Malvinas war but countless other horrors that the nation had to endure in those dark days when the defence forces did as they wished in the name of “god, family, and country”. Luis Puenzo’s La Historia Oficial (The Official Story), which won the Palme d’Or for the best film at Cannes in 1984, took the lid off the secret disappearance of thousands of opponents to the junta and the distribution in many cases of their infant children among powerful childless supporters of the regime. Puenzo’s early distinguished effort opened the floodgates to scores of fictional features rooted in ghastly realities, as also to many times more of well-researched, authentic documentaries. So many decades after the return of democracy, many people in Argentina are still looking for secret files and other clues to know how their dear ones died or where their mortal remains were hurriedly buried. Meanwhile, Márquez’s writings on the Malvinas war have played no small role in keeping the issue alive till today.

India’s own cinema of the vanished

In this context, considering the growing number of political activists and even ordinary citizens who have been made to disappear in India, India too should have had its own Cinema of the Vanished. In fact, it does, but especially the documentaries addressing the issue have been effectively prevented from being screened at our film festivals and other sites of public exposure. Arguably, the Kashmiris have suffered the most when it comes to their sons and daughters being whisked away at night by the army and paramilitary forces, never to be seen again. The Mumbai International Film Festival of Documentary, Short and Animation Films (MIFF) has suffered from political interference ever since the days of Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s prime ministership. Any film trying to tell the truth about the Gujarat genocide or Kashmir disappearances has been roundly rejected by selection committees composed almost wholly of elements promoting the RSS ideology and agenda.

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The sharp decline of MIFF from a first-class artistic event in its first editions during the 1990s to one that no artist of skill and conviction takes seriously today is to be attributed to the mindless saffronisation of the exercise. The Cinema of the Disappeared, India chapter, is sadly destined to collect cobwebs and the dust of calculated discrimination.

Postscript: A mother’s reproaches are not to be treated lightly. Just because every mother is, by nature and practice, a philosopher of patience, don’t think that she will take it lying down all the time. When she is convinced that she has had enough, she’ll come out in all her fury, like Estela de Carlotto in Buenos Aires, who spent more than half her life looking for her disappeared daughter and the child she had in army detention. Or Fatima Nafees, who brought to this earth the vanished JNU biotechnology student Najeeb Ahmed. Praised be her tribe, Fatima Nafees knows how to work up within herself the necessary anger to wake up the government at the Centre, which she feels hasn’t done enough to trace out her missing child. She expresses her pain in words difficult to forget: “I will tell those mothers whose children are going missing, who are facing police encounters and being killed, to come and stand with me. I will become their strength, and they will become mine. Our prayers and curses will affect directly, and this BJP government will end soon. Other mothers of children whom they lost—Rohith Vemula and Junaid Khan, will march with me. We will wake up this barren government.”

The wounded mother’s use of the word “barren” is particularly telling, emphasising, as it does, the gulf separating mothers who “bear” and raise with love and care from politicos, “the conmen, admen, musclemen of war” who know only how to kill and destroy.

Vidyarthy Chatterjee writes on cinema, society, politics.