The issue with Britain over the [Falkland] islands arouses deep and passionate feelings in Argentine hearts. Footnote 1
Introduction
In April 1982, an archipelago of approximately 4,700 square miles (12,200 km2) located in the southernmost part of the Atlantic Ocean gained international notoriety when it became the primary setting of a war between Great Britain and Argentina. Known as the Falkland Islands to the British, the Islas Malvinas to the Argentines, they have been controlled by the British crown since 1833 as ‘overseas territories’ (formerly ‘colonies’). Since that time, first the Buenos Aires authorities, and later Argentina's national government, claimed sovereignty over the Islands, asserting that British control was the consequence of an illegal invasion carried out against the then Governorship of Buenos Aires, legitimate heir to territories belonging to the former Spanish colony.
The war lasted 45 days. On 14 June, with 649 Argentine and 255 British lives lost, the defeated Argentine troops began the evacuation of the Islands. As a result, they returned to British rule, the United Kingdom granted the Islanders full British citizenship and the Argentine military, in power since 1976, found themselves forced to begin a democratisation process at home. The history of the Malvinas has been widely covered by journalists, essayists and academics, focusing primarily on the armed conflict and its aftermath. This coverage includes the political causes that impelled the Argentine military to occupy the Islands in 1982, the memories of the survivors and the roles of officials, institutions and stakeholders. ‘Justified cause, unjustified war’ is the dictum that today best summarises Argentine feeling about the Malvinas.Footnote 2 Disassociating the cause and the war absolves the former and disconnects it from the latter.
This article examines the Malvinas as a national cause, that is, a cause amongst the handful of symbols into which a population believes its national identity is condensed. At the time of the war, the dream of recovery of the Islands was part of the national imaginary. That dream had a history linked to the political and cultural elites. However, it also had a popular dimension that is frequently overlooked. In a pioneering work written six years after the war, Carlos Escudé argued that Argentine ‘Governments are caught in a perverse cultural and political trap in which public opinion, elite opinion, military interests and the potential manipulation of public opinion by the opposition are all intervening variables.’ For Escudé, the dream of recovery was an elite one because ‘clearly, more-educated people tend to have greater territorial sensitivities’.Footnote 3 In the same vein, in his analysis of Argentine–Chilean rivalry, Cameron Thies established that territorial nationalism ‘was nurtured and given ideational form by academic and political elites’.Footnote 4 Yet by changing the focus of analysis, I find that long before 1982 nationalism played a significant role in popular culture as well and, far from being a mirror image of elite nationalism, it was at times both more intense and more forceful.
Drawing on the conceptual framework advanced by historian Barbara Rosenwein, I consider that Argentine song about the Malvinas can be analysed as an expression of what I will call an ‘emotional community’ around the Malvinas issue. ‘A researcher looking at them [emotional communities]’, Rosenwein argues, ‘seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling’, to establish ‘what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them’.Footnote 5 An emotional community is not necessarily governed by elites or determined by social structure. Rather, it is moved and then strengthened and expanded by shared feelings. Hence, it becomes a useful concept when the goal is to address a socially transverse entity such as a nation.Footnote 6
Scholars have expanded the limits of our historical imagination by analysing crucial sources such as photographs and popular songs that had previously gone unobserved.Footnote 7 In the Argentine case, folklore has proven to be a useful way of accessing representations of popular culture.Footnote 8 In this vein, I analyse here the imprint that the Malvinas left on Argentine song from the 1940s – when the Sociedad Argentina de Autores y Compositores de Música (Argentine Society of Authors and Composers of Music, SADAIC) started to register musical works – until the Argentine capitulation on 14 June 1982. This valuable corpus, I argue, allows us to explore the emotional community surrounding the issue of the Malvinas and the role that non-elite individuals – in this case the composers of popular songs – played in it. By examining the emphases, constants and changes in the songs emerging from that community, we get a clearer picture of how the ideas about the recovery of the territory – one which a great majority of Argentines, both then and now, believe had been seized illegally – were modified over time.Footnote 9
Three reasons explain my methodological choice. First, in the cultural realm of the decades before April 1982, the Malvinas in Argentina were much more the subject of song than of cinema, painting, theatre, novel or essay, a trend that would change in the post-war period.Footnote 10 Secondly, the art of composing song is comparatively more popular than other modes of artistic expression, because it does not require sophisticated cultural tools or abundant economic resources. Finally, many of the musical works on the Malvinas are accessible in books on the subjectFootnote 11 and, more importantly, in the SADAIC archive – a scarcely explored resource.
Founded in 1936, SADAIC began its registry of musical works in the late 1940s.Footnote 12 In total, its archive contains 276 musical works with titles that make reference to the Malvinas, 92 of them registered before the end of the war. Songs written after June 1982 (184 songs) differ from those written in the previous decades in two significant aspects. Firstly, in the post-war period, the preferred musical genre transitions from folklore to rock. Secondly, after June 1982, the war itself and its aftermath becomes the almost exclusive subject of the songs, replacing the pre-war emphasis on the dream of ‘recovering’ the Islands and the fulfilment of that dream.
As the purpose of my research is to investigate the place that the Islands occupied in Argentine popular culture before the armed conflict, I focus on the most prominent topics of the songs registered in the period prior to June 1982. The process of registering a song was simple, inexpensive and decentralised; SADAIC did not impose any controls over the format of the music or lyrics (though most of the entries do state the genre/style of the song). There was no requirement for the songwriters to provide sophisticated scores; they registered the lyrics and, if they could write music or get someone to write it for them, the notation of the main melody of the song.
The fact that a clear majority of the songs devoted to the Malvinas in the pre-war period belong to one of the Argentine folkloric styles (zamba, chacarera, chamamé, triunfo, cielito and milonga) endows the material considered here with a multiregional character. By the 1950s, the popularity of folkloric music, already widespread in the provinces, began to rival that of tango in Buenos Aires.Footnote 13 By the 1960s, the legitimacy of folklore had reached all social sectors and the sale of records of that genre and the radio and television programmes dedicated to it experienced a boom.Footnote 14 Although in the 1970s rock music would partly eclipse it, folklore continued to be a musical genre capable of addressing a wide variety of audiences, both in large cities and in the interior. While this is a study of the songs rather than their reception, it is worth noting that folklore, the genre favoured by those who sang about the Malvinas in the pre-war period, had established itself as the musical expression of nationality.Footnote 15
The material I analyse comprises a heterogeneous universe of songwriters, ranging from the famous to the less well known. We can infer that the famous had a large audience, but it is difficult to know the figures for others; when possible, I include information on the dissemination of the works discussed. Many of the songs were broadcast on the radio and, from the 1960s, also on TV and at the cinema.Footnote 16 After the Argentine occupation of the Islands, on 2 April 1982, several were played regularly in the media. With the Argentine defeat most composers stopped including them in their performance repertoire.
The National Cause Becomes Song
The first major work on the Islands that helped turn the territorial dispute into a national cause was that of Paul Groussac (1848–1929), entitled Les Îles Malouines: Nouvel exposé d'un vieux litige (The Malvinas: A New Briefing on an Old Dispute), published in French on the centenary of the emancipation of the Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata, in 1910. This work combined arguments and historical documents favourable to the Argentine position.Footnote 17 Nearly a quarter of a century after the publication of Groussac's work, socialist senator Alfredo Palacios introduced Law 11,904 decreeing that a complete edition be translated into Spanish and an abridged version distributed in schools.Footnote 18
In the 1930s, two other factors contributed to spreading a national consciousness about the Malvinas: the rise of nationalist groups, such as the Fuerza de Orientación Radical de la Joven Argentina (Force of Radical Orientation of Young Argentina), and the efforts of public institutions, such as the Comisión Nacional de Cultura (National Culture Commission). In 1936 that institution financed high-school teacher Juan Carlos Moreno's trip to the Malvinas with the mission of carrying out the first Argentine field study of the Islands and its population. Nuestras Malvinas, the book that resulted from that trip, was first published in 1938, saw seven editions in the following decades and, on the order of Oscar Ivanissevich, Minister of Education in the Peronist government (1946–55), became a must-read in all the country's state schools.Footnote 19
In the 1940s, especially after the rise of Peronism, demands for the ‘repatriation’ of the Islands intensified. In December 1946 Peronist diplomacy issued a reservation to the inclusion by the UN General Assembly of the Malvinas/Falklands within the 43 non-autonomous territories under British administration – a reservation that was reiterated in subsequent years.Footnote 20 On the home front, the expansion of social rights promoted by Peronism was combined with nationalist policies, such as the nationalisation of public services that until that time had been mostly in British hands. In 1948, Juan Perón promoted the establishment of scientific bases in Antarctica, members of which visited schools, lecturing and screening nationalist documentary films.Footnote 21 School textbooks joined forces to convert the Malvinas national cause into popular sentiment.Footnote 22 Some events, such as the opening of a Uruguayan consulate in Port Stanley (the capital of the Falklands) in 1952, hurt Argentine nationalist sensibilities.Footnote 23
The national cause was from its beginning linked to the patriotic imperative to recover the territory and so 1939 saw the creation of the Junta de Recuperación de las Malvinas (Malvinas Recovery Board, JRM), an official organisation among whose members was Moreno and whose first president was Palacios.Footnote 24 The anthem ‘Marcha de las Malvinas’ by lyricist Carlos Obligado and musician José Tieri achieved major recognition when it won a contest sponsored by the board.Footnote 25 Although it was registered by SADAIC only much later,Footnote 26 the song was released in a public ceremony on 3 January 1941, on the 108th anniversary of the British occupation of the Islands. Widely disseminated in schools, this anthem addressed three topics that would be frequently revisited in Argentine songs about the Malvinas, i.e. geography/landscape, emotion and recovery: the archipelago is fully Argentine and the very landscape expresses the national colours, blue and white; the Argentine nation is emotionally fully tied to the Islands, and its rights are inalienable and the usurpation unforgivable; finally, the expression of the national sense of a territory stolen from Argentina (‘the lost southern pearl’), implying a need for a recovery.
The other outstanding work from this period is by Luis Ortiz Behety. In 1946 he published his Cancionero de las Islas Malvinas.Footnote 27 In almost religious style – several are prayers to Nuestra Señora de la Soledad (Our Lady of Soledad, the patron saint of Soledad or East Falkland) – the songs (more than 20) narrate significant milestones in the Argentine version of the Islands’ history: the expulsion of the British by the Spanish in 1770, the acquisition of the Islands in the name of the government of Buenos Aires in 1829, Argentina's expulsion from the Islands in 1833.
Ortiz Behety's image is one of a ‘crucified, captive’ land.Footnote 28 In the Christian creed, the crucifixion holds the promise of redemption. The last song in his songbook, entitled ‘Destino’, could be read in this light: ‘And some day, Lord, not very far off / Argentine siege forces / Will have to rescue our Malvinas / If the light of Your hand will guide us.’Footnote 29 It can therefore be said that the dream of an armed recovery, although accompanied by divine light, was tacitly present in the 1940s.
One of the first songs referring to the Malvinas that appears in the SADAIC archives was composed in 1952 by the musician and actor Mario Clavell.Footnote 30 Unpublished and hitherto unknown, it is distinguished by being the only piece of music in which an Argentine political leader is placed at the head of the vindication process. ‘Argentines, souls united / … let's swear by all our heart / To defend our sovereignty guided by Perón!’ The song urged Argentines to ‘join forces united by the ideal [of] seeing the foreign flag fall and the national flag rise’. Judging by his memoirs, Clavell's support for Perón and his wife Eva seems to have been a constant.Footnote 31 But beyond Clavell's personal views, as Vicente Palermo has pointed out, ‘Peronism played an important role in retaking and refining the populist tradition of nationalism and made effective the transfer of the elite nationalist discourse to education.’Footnote 32
Apart from Clavell's song, four other works on the Malvinas were registered by SADAIC in the 1950s. In 1954, composer Alfredo Luque Cabrera registered a song which claimed that ‘the Malvinas are and have always been Argentine since the birth of this homeland of mine’.Footnote 33 This ontological dimension implies that the Malvinas were ‘born’ Argentine or, more precisely, that Argentina was born with the Malvinas as a part of its being. ‘Our rights are truly legitimate and there is abundant proof of that’, say the lyrics, ‘for more than a century our cries have gone unheard’. As in other songs,Footnote 34 the events of May 1810 (the revolt that opened the path to the declaration of independence six years later) had made an archipelago in the southern Atlantic as ‘Argentine’ as the rest of the territory that would finally bear this name.Footnote 35 For the composer, Britain is the usurper, Argentina the usurped; Britain has power, Argentina right: ‘The argument for force they offer us is lame and worthless; only those [arguments] which my homeland offers carry the force of reason.’ The most outstanding aspect of this composition is the allusion that Luque Cabrera makes to Argentine ‘patience’, which was running out: ‘By not ousting the British who enjoy its benefits with right neither in custom nor in law / This noble and honourable land of mine shows how patient it is or was [emphasis added].’Footnote 36
In January 1955, Carlos Vassallo registered a song in which the claim of sovereignty over the Islands emerges in the context of a kind of second national Independence: ‘History's strident bugle / Proceeds from the memory of patriots.’Footnote 37 The mention of independence leaders Manuel Belgrano and José de San Martín, respectively ‘redeemer’ of the land under Spanish colonial rule and ‘father of the Argentine homeland’, reinforced that meaning. This second Independence is not presented as the wild idea of a vanguard group. For Vassallo, ‘It is the essence of the Argentine people, lovers of the land bequeathed to us by the leaders who embraced their dreams by breaking chains in pursuit of liberty.’ He writes that the father of the homeland, in reference to San Martín, ‘offered his blood for a virile America’. This association between masculinity (virility) and struggle for liberty (of the homeland, when it is referred to in the past; of the Malvinas, when it is referred to in the future) would become a recurring topic in the coming years.
Towards the end of the 1950s, the belief that restitution of the Islands was the only acceptable remedy for injured national honour begins to appear in the lyrics, increasingly linked to a patriotic imperative to take action to resolve the injustice. The lyricist Manuel Wilkinson and the young musician Jorge Calandrelli, in a military marching song that would later be adopted by the JRM, wrote that ‘Argentine honour immediately demands that our Islands be covered by the national flag’, emphasising the ‘martial affirmation of the rights we inherited from Spain’.Footnote 38 In the 1960s, the march was recorded by the Banda Sinfónica Nacional and released as a single bearing the national coat of arms with the logo ‘Comandancia de Malvinas y Adyacencias’ (‘Malvinas and Adjacent Territories Command’) on the cover. It was broadcast nationwide in schools, public institutions, and on national radio.Footnote 39 Calandrelli would achieve international fame as a composer in the 1980s.
Another song from the late 1950s focused on restitution. In 1957, Gabino Coria Peñaloza – author of famous tangos lyrics such as ‘El clavel del aire’ and ‘Caminito’ – joined forces with flautist Luis Teisseire to compose a song in which ‘the cry of the homeland’ represented by the Malvinas obliges ‘all Argentines [to] vow, one day, to redeem them’.Footnote 40 Here the usurpation takes a violent form: ‘Our Islands were raped opposite the coasts of the national sea.’ That violation damaged national dignity, so responsibility for avenging the crime belongs to the nation as a whole. ‘We Argentines will rescue / Our Malvinas for [the sake of] dignity’, say Peñaloza and Teisseire, and the Islands ‘Will one day hear our national anthem / With its three cries of liberty’, an allusion to the Argentine national anthem.
In the 1950s, then, in tune with the anti-imperialist discourse invigorated by Peronism, some musicians began to express a derogatory and, in some cases, sinister image – not of the Islanders, whose existence is omitted from the songs, but of Great Britain, the nation on which the Islands depend. The fact that the usurpation is now being equated with rape introduces the attributes to be cultivated if the nation is to avenge the injury inflicted by the rapist.
In Praise of Bravery and Virility
By the 1960s, ‘the Malvinas’, as a national theme, occupied a prominent place in Argentine public debate. School history and geography textbooks reflected the process of indoctrination about ‘the country's territorial losses’, above all that of the Malvinas.Footnote 41 But school or – in a broader sense – state indoctrination never quite managed to reconcile what individuals did with the doctrine that the schoolteachers taught them. As Eduardo Archetti proposes in his research on nationalism and masculinities, there are always ‘free zones of creativity’.Footnote 42
In contrast to the position of elites from the Arturo Illia administration (1963–6), who explicitly bet on the diplomatic path, from 1964 several songs dedicated to the Malvinas were more radical in tone. More intensely than before, lyricists began to demand a firmer commitment from the Argentine people. Their songs referred to bravery and courage as determining values, laid a mantle of suspicion over the path of peaceful negotiation and celebrated unauthorised raids on the Islands by compatriots who turned words into deeds.
In 1964, José Adolfo Gaillardou, a popular poet with ‘a deep fervour for the people of the countryside’, registered a zamba which opens with a spoken recitation calling on the whole nation.Footnote 43 ‘Argentina’, said Gaillardou, accompanied by musician Mario Valdez, ‘I raise my guitar / Invoking of your glories / The bravest that history / Shows me in its clutches today.’ The ‘invoked glory’ alludes to the armed struggle to expel the British and to defend national territory. The song is about ‘Men and women of this soil / Who when fighting under this sky / Rejected the invasions’, a reference to the failed British military expeditions against the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata in 1806 and 1807. The songwriters make a further historical reference, this time to the period of the formation of the Argentine nation-state: ‘With a masculine cry / Forged in the chuzas montoneras / In my pride as an Argentine / Your flags were left as trophies.’ In this passage, they underline the masculine character of the claim over the Malvinas and invoke the ardour of the irregular militia (chuzas montoneras) who fought against the central authority in the nineteenth century. Another zamba recorded in the same year, composed by husband and wife Guillermo Pelayo and Amelia Cabeza, affirms that ‘the time to protest’ has arrived: ‘Our rights demand justice / Because the Malvinas are not English / And the people cry out: give them back!’Footnote 44
One man made that demand in person. On 8 September 1964, the same day that the UN Decolonisation Committee began discussing the Malvinas/Falklands issue, Miguel Lawler Fitzgerald landed his single-engined Cessna 185 – named the Don Luis Vernet, after the Governor of the Islands appointed by Buenos Aires in 1829 – in Port Stanley. Upon raising the Argentine flag, Fitzgerald made an announcement directed at ‘the representative of the English occupying government’, Sir Edwin Arrowsmith, demanding that the ‘occupation’ cease.Footnote 45 Among the tributes to Fitzgerald – ‘The Gaucho of the Malvinas’ – is a chacarera composed by folkloric musician Juan Ponce and lyricist Fernando Panet, also known as Mariano Leyes.Footnote 46 It was registered just two months after Fitzgerald's feat.
Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the gaucho has been one of the popular embodiments of Argentine identity.Footnote 47 As Adolfo Prieto has shown, criollo literature became an important part of the nascent urban culture,Footnote 48 with the cult of the famous gauchos Juan Moreira, Santos Vega and Martín Fierro, celebrated for their prowess and courage. Moreover, public declamations of this literature were frequently interspersed with song. In the Panet and Ponce piece for Fitzgerald, the prowess and courage demonstrated by the pilot and his aerial audacity are associated with the gaucho's daring. The use of gauchesco poetry reinforces this analogy: ‘Unexpectedly / He arrived on the Malvinas / Riding a small plane / And occupied the Islands.’ Thus both the form and the style of the verses place the Malvinas issue in one of the traditional domains of Argentine literature: the pampas and the gaucho. The landscape of the Malvinas is ‘argentinised’ by the association with the pampas, while the role played by gauchos in their history is underlined.Footnote 49 Fitzgerald, an Argentine of Irish descent, is seen here as a true son of the pampas, skilful, courageous and virile, as befits the tradition. All of these traits are exhibited when he boldly plants the Argentine flag on Malvinas soil in an action that anticipates the military landing on 2 April, 18 years later:
The British reaction is caricatured: ‘Out came a fellow with a little beard / Asking what he wanted.’ Later, the opposition athletic gaucho vs. cowardly gringo is reaffirmed in a different light: ‘Beautiful gaucho of my land / Valiant and courageous / Who shook the manes / Of the lions on the [British] coat of arms.’ Panet solemnly stated: ‘I want the memory to remain / Of this brave man who once / Proved that he was not a fool / In this topsy-turvy world.’ Here we find ideas that will become a part of the future vindication of the Malvinas cause: actions taken with posterity in mind (‘I want the memory to remain’), courage (‘this brave man’), the preference for direct action over longer-term, diplomatic, options (‘proved that he was not a fool’), and the absurdity of a South Atlantic archipelago under British rule (‘this topsy-turvy world’).Footnote 50
Another song from the 1960s would underline the urgency of the Argentine claim. Francisco Ríos and Pedro Vettori sang: ‘Insist, insist, insist / That they return, return [the Malvinas to us] / Demand, demand, demand / Our homeland urges us / To die [for her].’Footnote 51 On 28 September 1966 a group of young nationalists with political ideas oscillating between right-wing nationalism and Peronism – proscribed since 1955 – hijacked an Aerolíneas Argentinas DC-4 flying from Buenos Aires to the southern city of Río Gallegos, forcing it to change course towards the Islands.Footnote 52 Once the plane landed, the group dispatched a message: ‘Today, we consider it time for those civilians who are former soldiers of the Nation to demonstrate what they learned during their journey through military life.’Footnote 53 In its press coverage the incident, known as ‘Operation Cóndor’, achieved greater popularity than Fitzgerald's feat two years earlier, and was in sharp contrast to the policy of diplomacy being carried out by the ‘Argentine Revolution’ (1966–73) under the military regime of General Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70); indeed, at the time the Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Elizabeth's consort, was on an unofficial visit to Argentina, as the planners of Operation Cóndor well knew.
The well-known poet Miguel Tejada turned this event into a poem. In 1952, Tejada was presented by his publishers as the author of ‘powerful Peronist poetry’ opposed to the formalist poetry of the oligarchic ‘old Argentina’.Footnote 54 In 1966, the situation of Peronism had changed dramatically. Perón was in exile and Peronism was oscillating between collaboration with the ‘Argentine Revolution’ and the clandestine working-class ‘Peronist Resistance’. While Onganía condemned the hijacking, affirming in a statement that ‘the recovery of the Malvinas cannot be an excuse for criminals’ (unlike Fitzgerald's flight, this mission was an armed operation affecting innocent passengers), Perón sent a letter congratulating those same ‘criminals’ on their ‘brave act of patriotism’.Footnote 55
Emulating Perón's line, Tejada wrote that ‘The fact that the Argentine flag was flown for 36 hours continuously [in the Malvinas] / Is an act that has shown what we are capable of in life.’ He asserted that the Malvinas were Argentine ‘By supreme decision / Of Argentines who govern / The Nation in a virile way’, implying that when the rulers of the nation looked like the leaders of Operation Cóndor, the Malvinas would again be under Argentine control.Footnote 56
Meanwhile, Argentina's official negotiations were following a different path. Within the framework of the decolonisation process promoted by the United Nations since 1960 and the creation one year later of a Special Committee in charge of monitoring that process, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 2065 on 16 December 1965. This recognised the existence of a dispute between the two powers over the Islands and invited them ‘to proceed without delay with the negotiations […] with a view to finding a peaceful solution to the problem’.Footnote 57 From that moment, books and newspaper articles began to forecast a favourable outcome for Argentina.Footnote 58 The television news programme Sucesos Argentinos, for example, in December 1968 aired ‘the most important graphic document about the Malvinas’, a history of the Islands that ended with the statement ‘soon our flag will again fly over them’.Footnote 59
Contemporary songs about the Malvinas also recorded the advances in Argentine diplomacy. A year after the UN Resolution, Juan Carlos Pérez Corrado registered a song in which he said ‘The Malvinas are Argentine. / Now no one can deny / That they are and have always been / In the eyes of the whole world our national soil.’Footnote 60 For this famous composer, whose work was recorded by such folkloric celebrities as José Larralde and Los Chalchaleros, the UN's decision would seem to justify Argentina's claim to the Islands in the eyes of the world. The resolution stated that negotiations should consider ‘the interests of the population of the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)’. That demand appears tacitly contradicted by Pérez Corrado, for whom in the Islands there was no such thing as people with interests but rather ‘foreign guests’ who, when ‘Justice’ triumphs, will have to ‘take down their flags’ and ‘give [the Islands] back’.
The songs that made reference to the diplomatic negotiations, however, were not always celebratory. In 1968 Isidoro Juan Dávila and César Jaimes, a musician identified with Peronism and a founding member of the Teatro Obrero Argentino (Argentine Workers’ Theatre),Footnote 61 registered ‘El triunfo de las Malvinas’, a song which reaffirmed the hope that good news would come soon while also highlighting the slow pace of the negotiations.Footnote 62 (The triunfo is a folkloric dance which emerged in the nineteenth century during the struggle to gain independence from the Spanish crown.)
The lyrics of this song suggest frustration with diplomacy: ‘The wind has already blown away many words.’ The final verse goes on to say: ‘The dagger of dispossession will be ripped out with courage and entitlement’, a sentence that reinforces the sentiment that victory would not be achieved by peaceful negotiations alone. Similarly, in November 1968, Eduardo Díaz Blasco and Enrique Flocken – who in 1943 established the first radio programme dedicated to folkloric music – registered a song that created an image of ‘emotional’ islands breaking into tears upon seeing themselves on the brink of being rescued by Argentina: ‘Malvinas … Malvinas … / With emotion you will cry / When we rescue you from the thieves / Who stole you a century ago!’Footnote 63
These songs appear to privilege recovering the Islands by force rather than by peaceful negotiation, ‘ripping out the dagger of dispossession’ from the body of the homeland – an act that requires not only entitlement but also courage. This potential act of force is justified because it remedies an earlier act of violent usurpation. Bravery and virility are seen as the necessary virtues that Argentines must cultivate to achieve this end.
‘The Time Has Arrived’
After the fall of the Illia government, Onganía's military regime continued to bank on diplomatic channels to resolve the Malvinas issue. The talks between Great Britain and Argentina inspired hope in the press, which in some cases even asserted the existence of a ‘definitive understanding’.Footnote 64 Such an understanding came close to achievement during 1968, when the two governments jointly drafted a memorandum of understanding, according to which the United Kingdom would recognise the sovereignty of Argentina over the Islands once it was satisfied with the ‘safeguards and guarantees’ offered to the Islanders.Footnote 65
In the end, however, the memorandum was not endorsed at government level, but conversations continued and, in mid-1971, the two nations signed a Joint Statement on Communications that for the first time enabled regular contact between the Islanders and the Argentines.Footnote 66 Within a few years, the Argentine state had a significant presence in the archipelago: the air force built a temporary airstrip and managed the air bridge, and the state oil and gas companies, YPF and Gas de Estado, began to supply Port Stanley. During the Peronist (1973–6) and the military ‘National Reorganisation Process’ (1976–83) governments, in spite of some incidents which generated tense moments with the United Kingdom, communications continued uninterrupted until the invasion on 2 April 1982.Footnote 67 Even as the invasion was under way, dozens of Islanders were studying in bilingual schools in Argentina and Argentine teachers were teaching Spanish on the Islands.
Songs about the Malvinas, however, registered a certain distrust in the path chosen by government elites. Some demanded that the official approach towards the Islands be hardened and that the diplomatic route was, if not irrelevant, at least insufficient. Some also warned that national patience had come to an end. As early as 1964, Panet and Ponce had written in their tribute to Fitzgerald that the Malvinas were under British control because the Argentines were being very patient, implying that things could change if they stopped being so: ‘If until today we have left the Malvinas [to the British] / And have eased up on the brakes / It is because we are staying calm / And we have territory in abundance.’Footnote 68
The desire to recover the archipelago by force and the belief that national bravery would guarantee victory acquired more traction. In 1968, musician Orlando Zanier and lyricist Orlando Punzi – a popular and prolific poet known for his use of lunfardo (urban working-class slang) – registered a song asserting that sovereignty would be regained and all soon return to its rightful place: ‘The distant Malvinas resonate with the echoes of a triumphal anthem … Auspicious sun illuminating the foggy Islands / Detached from the homeland's constellation.’Footnote 69 In their song, Argentines are featured as brave people and the Malvinas intone a ‘war march’, reminiscent of the early nineteenth-century battles for Independence: ‘The Malvinas seem to sing […] a war march invoking / The deeds of immortal May [1810] with the Argentine triple demand: Liberty, liberty, liberty!’
In ‘Malvinera cautiva’ and in ‘Las Malvinas son nuestras’, registered in 1968 and 1969 respectively, the topic of recovery takes the form of an imperative that will enjoy imminent success. In the latter, María Elena Damiano writes that ‘The continent demands them [and] Argentina claims them’, thus ‘Soon these simple verses / Will turn into a sweet harmonious hymn.’Footnote 70 The song ends by ordering Argentines to recover the Islands: ‘Let's win back the Islands / For the honour of the Nation.’ In the former, a zamba in which the Malvinas are personified as a captive little girl, Army Captain Federico Eduardo Mittelbach and popular folkloric singer Gabino Correa intone, ‘In order not to see you prisoner / They will assemble the squadrons’ and ‘The day will come when we join hands and raise our flag’, in the knowledge that the Islands are ready for liberty, and the singer for war: ‘Get ready, lovely girl, / Put on your Sunday best / Your courage and my sword / Are more than enough to expel a gringo.’Footnote 71 The feminisation of the Islands, reflected in this zamba in ‘lovely girl’, and in other songs in the form of figures such as mother, girlfriend or sister, reinforces the patriarchal view that their recovery is primarily the responsibility of males: ‘Malvinera, Malvinera, zambita of men’.Footnote 72
In ‘Barajando las Malvinas’, Catalino Domínguez, a notable exponent of the chamamé and author of famous songs such as ‘El Puente de la Tradición’, explicitly states that the archipelago must be taken by force; moreover, the idea that the Malvinas must be recovered by fighting, with a gaucho's courage, appears more explicitly in this song than in earlier ones. Diplomacy clearly appears as a waste of time and patience, something to be abandoned.
For Domínguez, the ‘liberty’ of the Islands is to be won by fighting; gaucho blood guarantees victory: ‘Enough of stories and / Diplomatic consultations … The Malvinas are ours / By valid right. … Let us cry, “They are Argentine.”’
In 1970 Julio Riveros and Hernán Ríos, a lyricist known for songs dedicated to the founders of the nation, such as ‘Oiga, mi general’, registered a zamba that reinforces the verses of Domínguez's milonga: ‘Singers and poets of my people / It is time to pluck [the strings of] our guitars’, they begin by saying in the first verse, and towards the end of the second they twice sing, ‘If singing is not enough, damn it! We will attach a spear to the guitar.’Footnote 74 In addition, the lyrics underscore the Argentine duty to recover the Malvinas without delay: ‘Let's raise our voices, the time has arrived / To dedicate ourselves completely to the homeland. / May they know once and for all that our people / When the moment arises have the guts to fight.’ More than ten years before the military landed on the Islands, some of the songs dedicated to the Malvinas recorded not only the desire for such an action to take place, but also the conviction that the Argentine people would be willing to fight to make it happen.
The archetypal figure of the struggle depicted in these songs was not that of the heroes of Independence but of the gaucho Antonio Rivero, probably born in Entre Ríos province and taken to the Islands as an employee by Luis Vernet in 1827.Footnote 75 In August 1833, eight months after the arrival of the British, Rivero led a rebellion the aims of which were unclear,Footnote 76 and which resulted in the death of five people. The figure of Rivero remained forgotten until 1956, when professor of chemistry and amateur historian Martiniano Leguizamón Pondal attributed a patriotic character to his rebellion;Footnote 77 from then on the legend of an Argentine gaucho resisting British occupation grew. In 1966, the Rivero legend was discredited by the National Academy of History. In response to a plan for a monument to Rivero, the Academy released a report stating that ‘the documentary evidence available thus far is not favourable enough to grant Rivero a title that justifies such a homage’.Footnote 78 In the eyes of the Academy the famous gaucho of the Malvinas had been not a hero but a common criminal. The press published articles about the report but Rivero's popularity remained undiminished even for some who accepted the historians’ verdict.Footnote 79
In 1969, a saga attributed to Rivero would become the subject of an Argentine epic ballad.Footnote 80 Composed by Juan de los Santos Amores (pseudonym of the singer Eduardo Díaz Blasco, mentioned above) and Enrique Flocken, it was dedicated to Leguizamón Pondal and prefaced by Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen, who in 1959 had become only the second Argentine to write a book about a visit to the Islands and the first to produce a film about it.Footnote 81
Rivero continued to feature in popular songs. ‘Gaucho Rivero, brave warrior’, Pérez Corrado wrote in ‘Nuestras Malvinas’ (1968). In ‘Barajando las Malvinas’, Domínguez dedicated his final lines to him: ‘Honouring Rivero's memory of those genuine lands / The Malvinas are rightly and legitimately ours / With the soul of Rivero let's shout: They are Argentine!’ In 1969, the folklore group Los Diablos del Bombo recorded, on the banks of the Río de la Plata, a special set for a television news programme in which they presented a triunfo dedicated to Rivero. ‘There goes Don Rivero at a gallop / Carrying the idolised flag / With an air of triumph in his throat’, they recited, looking south as if the gaucho were riding the Atlantic waters towards the Islands.Footnote 82 In 1972, Mario Ponce, joined by the popular musician and singer Carlos Di Fulvio, who in 1973 visited the Islands and recorded a video-clip entitled ‘Variaciones sobre vidalita’,Footnote 83 registered a milonga dedicated to Rivero entitled ‘Capitán de las Malvinas’: ‘The gaucho Antonio Rivero / I summon from heaven / And my throat beats / Breaking the light with its shout. / Your courage rose to its feet, / Surly colt of the pampas.’Footnote 84 The cult of courage and the allusion to the gaucho's physical prowess to carry out patriotic missions reappears, although this time decidedly with a warrior emphasis.
This song refers to the loss of life in Rivero's rebellion: ‘Antonio Rivero, strike / To the bone and inflict agony.’ In addition to the title of ‘Captain’, in the song's name, these verses bestow upon Rivero that of ‘Redeemer’. As we saw previously, according to the Argentine narrative the Islands had been waiting for redemption since 1833. In 1946, Ortiz Behety had spoken of a crucified land and announced the coming of a redeemer. Almost 30 years later, Ponce and Di Fulvio imagined that coming as Rivero's return, portraying him as a gaucho Christ: ‘An autumn of seagulls / Festival of grey and winds / You will come to the Malvinas / To teach them a lesson.’Footnote 85 In previous years, as we have seen, songs imagined an immoral enemy, capable of violating a part of the homeland. Now, the myth of the gaucho Rivero is updated not only to recover the territory but also to promise punishment for the immoral.
Rivero inspired many more songs. A feature that stands out in those from the 1970s is that he was not simply part of the past but also of the future. In praise of the ‘patriot gaucho's’ bravery and ‘indomitable blood’, a piece written by the well-known musician, lyricist and actor Héctor Marcolongo claims: ‘But the actions of that Malvinas hero / Will burn in my guitar for as long as I live.’Footnote 86 Using the Guaraní language, a chamamé registered in 1975 would call him ‘Gaucho Rivero, [member of a] gente porá’, meaning ‘admirable people’, and would announce his return ‘victorious from the cue [mythical] time’.Footnote 87 Extending the gaucho's range from the pampas to the rocky southern Atlantic Islands,Footnote 88 these lyrics turn Rivero into an icon of resistance to the British occupation of 1833, at the same time embodying him in the prophecy of the emancipation of the Islands.
Not all songs of this period were aggressive in posture. In this sense, perhaps the song that stands out the most is ‘Las Malvinas Rock’, by the protest musician Jorge Durietz, whose partnership with Miguel Cantilo (in their duo, Pedro y Pablo), is today considered a pioneer of ‘Rock Nacional’ (also known as ‘Rock Argentino’). Composed in 1974, it was the only rock song registered by SADAIC about the Malvinas in the pre-war period.Footnote 89 With hippie rhetoric, Durietz imagines the Islands ‘Passing the time fooling around in the sea / Humming tunes with the English locals’. In 1971, Atahualpa Yupanqui, one of the greatest exponents of Argentine folklore, also dedicated a song to this ‘issue that hurts us all as criollos’.Footnote 90 In collaboration with the virtuoso musician Ariel Ramírez, in ‘La hermanita perdida’ Yupanqui sings what is almost a prayer for the Islands – the lost sister of the homeland – to return home.Footnote 91 But even in songs like these, which do not call for violence, certainties shared by the emotional community around the Malvinas were reiterated. Durietz denounces British wickedness and plundering of resources: ‘The English want to increase their fishing catch’; the Islands are ‘Little sodden parcels of national territory / Usurped, uprooted, without permission / … What barbarity!’ Yupanqui, for his part, also denounces the usurpation (‘Malvinas, captive lands / Since the days of the blonde pirates’), and adds the desire to see an Argentine flag ‘nailed’ to that territory, ‘To fill you with criollos, to tan your face / Until you look like a real Argentine’.
Singing amidst War
Towards the end of the 1970s, the Argentine authorities, including Foreign Ministry officials and military leaders, became convinced that talks with Great Britain would not lead to a recognition of Argentine sovereignty.Footnote 92 Misinformed as to the British reaction, Argentine armed forces landed on the Malvinas in the early hours of 2 April 1982.Footnote 93 Within three days of the occupation, Ismael Orozco and Juan José Galati dedicated a song to the event.
In addition to its timely appearance, this composition resonates with the wishes of earlier songs: the dream of glory had finally been realised due to the courage of the Argentine soldiers.
On the first morning of the occupation, whilst waiting for the British governor of the Islands to surrender to the Argentine authorities, Lieutenant Commander Pedro Giachino died at the hands of British guards and immediately became the first martyr of the ‘recovery’ – a symbol of the level of sacrifice that Argentines were willing to endure in order to retake the archipelago.Footnote 95 On 15 April, the first song to be dedicated to Giachino was registered by Gerardo Ferradas.Footnote 96 The lyrics trace the Argentine view of the events that had transformed ordinary, daily life throughout the country: ‘Soldier boy who went to the Malvinas with no desire to kill / And received in the chest that mortal bullet.’
The song reverses the typical image of earlier lyrics. If previously the desire had been to convert the guitar into a spear, and to see heroes of the Independence in wild and violent battle, this song portrays soldiers inspired by pacifism and moved by love: ‘Soldier boy who remains alive in our uncommon pain / Full of new joy, of faith, pity, and love / Love that lay dormant in these lands of God / And without love one dies, and you have died for love.’ Unlike the gaucho Rivero, whose patriotic virtue lay in his willingness to kill for his country, the first songs after 2 April 1982 emphasise the willingness of Argentine soldiers to die for it.
Also on 15 April, Domingo La Valle and Damián Ficarra, a musician known for his ‘orquesta típica’, registered a tango picturing the Malvinas joined to Buenos Aires, with the Islanders respectfully referred to for the first time as the ‘Malvinense people’ – no longer usurpers, intruders, foreigners or pirates. Somewhat fancifully, they imagine that the British occupation of the Islands prevented its inhabitants enjoying the music of Buenos Aires: ‘a century and a half during which the tango couldn't cheer the hearts of the Malvinense people’. The Malvinas and its small, mostly rural, population (it had just one town of 800 people) are portrayed here as a city bound to Buenos Aires's iconic ‘Obelisco’ by the ‘imagined bridge’ of a tango: ‘From the proud Obelisco in Buenos Aires to the majestic Malvinas / The tango unites through the bars of its music two cities kissed by the green of its sea.’Footnote 97
The time between the landing and the beginning of armed confrontation roughly three weeks later witnessed an overall change in the songs about the Malvinas. In this tango, for example, La Valle and Ficarra referred to the previous years not as a time of ‘usurpation’, but as one in which a ‘bridge of brotherhood’ was constructed – a bridge that joined ‘the city in front [Port Stanley] and my city [Buenos Aires]’.Footnote 98 The English were now Islanders; the former usurpers had become compatriots.
Some of the songs composed during this period constitute a testimony to the depth of emotion that took over Argentine cities and towns. In this sense, no song surpassed that of Cacho Castaña, a popular composer, singer and actor. Ideologically positioned on the Right of the political spectrum, Castaña defines himself as a singer for the people, one who brings popular sentiment to song. Castaña's fantasy had probably never been closer to reality than in April 1982. The lyrics and melody of ‘Oé, oé, oé, las Malvinas son nuestras’ are simple and catchy;Footnote 99 they are typical of football supporters’ songs, a style used here for the first time in connection with the Malvinas. Beyond the lyrics, the musical style itself references the passionate masculine culture of soccer in Argentina, where the World Cup had been held four years earlier and won by the hosts.
At least for a majority of Argentines, Castaña's choruses reflected much of the atmosphere of April 1982: ‘Oé, oé, oé, the Malvinas are ours / My people are celebrating, let's dance / … The people are celebrating, let's sing.’Footnote 100 That atmosphere included street celebrations, town squares packed with people, horns honking throughout cities and villages, and thousands of volunteers collecting food, clothes and cash for the soldiers, designated as ‘heroes’ by both the press and the people.
The songs written during the hostilities themselves did not have a festive tone. They were characterised by four features: a return to the representation of the ‘English’ (Islanders and troops) as pirates; a reappearance of the parallels between the heroes of Argentine independence and the gaucho Rivero; a celebration of the soldiers and in some cases also of the Argentine armed forces, who at that time were still in charge of the government of both the Malvinas and of the mainland; and an explicit belief that there was no turning back from an Argentine presence in the Islands, no matter what the cost.
In their chamamé Ramón Méndez and Leopoldo Almada wrote, ‘The Malvinas: it was a pirate traitor / Who robbed from Argentina a piece of its being.’Footnote 101 In his ‘Ode to the Malvinas’, composer Ángel Guevara evoked the patriotic legacy of San Martín, Belgrano, Vernet and ‘the great gaucho Rivero’, joining them in their resistance to the British attempt at reconquering the Islands: ‘The Malvinas are our land / A piece of our Argentina / And whoever once wants to usurp them / Will die of their own injustice.’Footnote 102
During the war, military information was under the control of the armed forces. This may explain, at least in part, the optimism of some lyricists regarding the development and probable outcome of the conflict. In ‘Malvinas Heroicas’, Demetria Rodríguez, Ángel Bassani and Nicolás Costantino praised the skill and courage of the armed forces in facing the enemy, portrayed the British forces as usurpers surprised by the invincibility of their opponent, predicted a combat supported by both military and civilians and ruled out any possibility of British victory:
Our heroic armed forces / Grasping justice and reason / Showing ability and courage to contain the fatal enemy …
Astonished were they in their boldness / To usurp and cowardly assault / But they found an invincible adversary / Defending his homeland and his honour …
Argentine fervour reaches the sky, in close national unity / Everyone together, civilians and military, until the end tirelessly will fight …
The Malvinas by Argentine law / Are, have been, and forever will be / Rescued at the price of bloodshed / Usurped? Never, ever again.Footnote 103
In an even more outspoken way, folklorist Víctor Corvalán celebrated the fact that the fighting would signify a turning point: ‘Yes, we must fight for the Malvinas! / And the courage of the people / Will change lives.’Footnote 104 As do other songwriters, Corvalán includes references to the founding fathers as well as to the gaucho legacy, which inform his final, uncompromising, verse: ‘We will all fight together / Against the colonial force’, offering up ‘Each and every life to death / For our national sovereignty’, whether the battle costs ‘few or many lives’.
Conclusions
The war ended on 14 June 1982. Many of the songs composed during the war would no longer be performed, and were soon forgotten; but they can be read as documents from an era in which the hopes which had surrounded the Malvinas as a national cause for decades were fulfilled with the invasion of 2 April.
Many Argentines saw the surrender as an act of cowardice. Over time, a significant number began to question the competence of a military that had led the country into an absurd war. Following the defeat, Argentine songs about the Islands continued to be written, but the war and its consequences displaced the recovery of the Islands as a topic, except in a few folkloric compositions. The war precipitated the popularisation of ‘Rock Nacional’, which suddenly flooded the broadcast channels,Footnote 105 and folklore ceased to be the preferred musical genre for singing about the Islands. Famous rock musicians, such as Charly García, Raúl Porchetto, León Gieco, Alejandro Lerner and Fito Páez, and rock groups such as Los Abuelos de la Nada, Los Violadores, Ciro y Los Persas and Los Redonditos de Ricota, wrote songs related to the Malvinas war. General Leopoldo F. Galtieri, the country's de facto president and commander-in-chief of the armed forces during the war, became the face of the events of 1982. ‘For the fallen ones and for those who wake up / Disturbed by dreams of bullets and misery / Drunk with power, among absurdities and shit / Don Galtieri and his ego sent them to war’, Federico Pecchia wrote in 2014.Footnote 106 The idea that the Malvinas war was a military misadventure that forced a defenceless nation to send their sons to die became the master narrative of the post-conflict songs.
Before the war folkloric lyricists envisioned as a dream what rock composers would denounce as a nightmare. The zambas, chacareras, chamamés, cielitos, triunfos and milongas analysed here show that the dream of recovering the Islands spread out across the country and began gaining momentum in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the 1950s, the idea that ‘Argentine patience’ regarding the Malvinas issue was coming to an end appeared in song for the first time. Songwriters began to demand a firmer commitment from the Argentine people to recover the Islands. Bravery and courage were extoled as indispensable values to achieve that purpose. Many composers would invoke past glories: resistance by the city of Buenos Aires to the British invasions during the Viceroyalty, the heroes of the Latin American independence movements and, finally, the legend of the gaucho Rivero, who would be reincarnated first in Fitzgerald and later in the young nationalists who hijacked the Aerolíneas Argentinas DC-4. The actions of these ‘heroes’, in the singers’ eyes, embodied physical prowess, gaucho courage and affirmation of sovereignty. Rivero ceased to be just a hero of the past. He became a metaphor for the present, and was ultimately transformed into an exemplary figure for the future.
Paradoxically, that transformation coincided with the time when Argentine diplomacy started to make concrete inroads into the issue of sovereignty at the United Nations. Peaceful negotiations were interpreted by some composers as lacking in virility, audacity and conviction; radical and tough attitudes, associated with truly masculine behaviour, became the path to follow. Even in the 1970s, with the Joint Statement on Communications signed between Great Britain and Argentina enabling an unprecedented flow of people and goods between the Islands and the mainland, the notion of original usurpation ended up driving some singers to prophesy what was, from their point of view, a justified invasion of the Islands.
After the 1982 invasion, the songs dedicated to the Malvinas radically changed their content. For first time they took notice of a population with the right to inhabit the territory. Like a majority of Argentines at that time, the singers celebrated the recovery of the Malvinas. But unlike previous composers, they started to depict the ‘peaceful spirit’ of the Argentine troops and their willingness to be killed rather than to kill. When armed confrontation started, this new tone disappeared. From that time until the war ended, the lyrics resumed their derogatory references to the British and the Islanders, supporting the soldiers and the armed forces and promising that Argentines would fight until the end, no matter what the consequences. That history has followed a different path does not diminish the relevance of unfulfilled desires.
No song about the Malvinas makes light of or even expresses doubt about Argentina's claim to the territory. This indicates that, at least since the 1940s, it was far from being a claim made purely by official government or political elites. Equally significant is that, at least as far as we know, the songs dedicated to the Malvinas were not included on the censorship lists of any government.Footnote 107
The emotional community around the Malvinas, captured by the songs analysed here, does not explain the 1982 invasion. Rather, it leads to a better understanding of both the unanimous popular support that the invasion aroused and the subsequent pervasive disappointment that followed the surrender – a disappointment so deep that it could not be effectively countered by the military regime, already facing charges of human rights violations. In March 1983, the military dictatorship, now very much in retreat, declared 2 April a national holiday, called ‘Malvinas, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands Day’. The following year, Raúl Alfonsín's democratically elected government (1983–9) moved the holiday to 10 June, the day that, in 1829, Vernet was appointed by the Buenos Aires government as Commander of the Islands. However, in November 2000, under the Alianza government (1999–2001), parliament redeclared 2 April a national holiday, designating it ‘Veterans and the Fallen in the Malvinas War Day’. The return of the national holiday to the anniversary of the invasion, albeit with a change to its name, suggests the continuity of the emotional community captured in the songs examined here.
Acknowledgements
I must thank the National Humanities Center of the United States, where the writing of this work began (2016–17). Previous versions of this article were presented at the Social Science Research Seminar at Wake Forest University (2017), and at the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies, organised by Duke University and the University of North Carolina (2017). I appreciate the comments received in those forums, as well as those of the JLAS anonymous readers and editors. I would like to thank the SADAIC authorities, especially María Lía Bagnoli. My warmest thanks go to Lynn Di Pietro, to whom I dedicate this article.
