From the Times a couple of days ago.
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, President of Argentina, has taken out an advertisement in British newspapers that offers a new year history lesson on an old theme: she asserts that on January 3, 1833, the British Navy expelled Argentinian citizens from the Falklands Islands and began 180 years of illegal rule.
“Argentina was forcibly stripped of the Malvinas Islands”, she states, “in a blatant exercise of 19th century colonialism.”
In Argentina, this is the accepted view of the islands’ history, but it requires some modifications: no force was used in 1833, and so far from kicking the settlers out, the British tried to persuade them to stay; Britain’s claim to the islands begins long before 1833; some of the islands inhabitants were undoubtedly Argentinian cowboys, but there were also Uruguayan Indians, two Germans, a Frenchman, a Jamaican and at least two Britons, one of whom was the leader of the settlement and the other its storeman.
And Argentina was not yet Argentina, but the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata.