April 2nd, 1982: The start of Malfklands

I got up at 5.30 am, like every morning, to go to school. My memories of that day are memories of night - the hour it took me to get ready, the hour-journey on the bus, and the first stunned faces.

We've invaded the Malvinas?! What? 

The word passed between strangers on the bus. Expressions of confusion, incredulity, people talking to each other, a collective feeling of 

What the hell have they done?

A poll taken shortly after the invasion would show 90% support for the military Junta, but I remember days of concern and scepticism. I was beginning my third year of secondary school. It would take only two weeks of propaganda to transform relatively rational individuals into jingoistic hell-raisers.

After reading the newspaper in the school canteen that morning I went to the empty playground and cried. Sammy found me and consoled me with the sensitivity that would later make him a great classical composer. I mumbled that I didn't want a war and he reassured me that nothing was going to happen. He was 17, a fifth-year. Boys in the year above would be called into compulsory military service. 

I started hearing rumours that some parents had sent their sons to Uruguay to avoid enlisting. Most boys were not that lucky. We heard that most of the conscripts sent to the Malvinas were from the northern provinces - poor, subtropical, far from the capital in every sense of the word, and the least prepared for nearly Antarctic climate conditions.

One morning, during break, someone grabbed me by the arm and shoved me into a classroom with other kids from my year. It was one of the toughest monitors in the school, a woman you did not argue with. Our school had missing students. Desaparecidos. Some of our monitors were military cadets. You did not mess with discipline or mention politics there.

The famous blonde newsreader from Channel 11 was in the classroom with her camera crew. A few from different form groups in our year had been selected - for looking neat and docile? - to pretend we were in class and only found out what we were supposed to do when she smiled and held the microphone to my face, ordering:  

“Send your personal message to the soldiers.” 

The monitor was watching us through the glass of the classroom door, with an expression of 

Don’t you dare mess this up.

I cannot remember my exact words but I remember the exhilaration of daring to say the opposite of what I sensed was wanted from me - an empathetic message to kids barely older than me, against war. Then Pablo spoke, and Fabiana, and students I barely knew. They moved me. They said more than I had, and more eloquently. One of them shared the story of her grandmother, a WW2 survivor, as his reason to stand against wars. Others looked directly into the camera:

Don't fight. Come back alive.

Maybe ten of us were asked. Two said something vague about patriotism. One encouraged the kids to fight for their country.

After school, our group of friends ran to the closest home to see ourselves in the news. With our mouths open, we, the seven pacifists, saw we had disappeared from the segment in which students of the Superior School of Commerce Carlos Pellegrini sent messages to the soldiers. Only three students appeared on the screen - you know which ones.

In a matter of two weeks I had watched the adults around me change. From the initial rejection of that first morning of April 2nd, to jingoism in all its variations; from the restrained, to the fanatical. The process was so fast and so visibly media-led that it changed what I would study at university. Literature had my heart, but during the Mal-fklands War I started to understand that what many call Communication can be the most dangerous Manipulation.

The war was over quickly and it didn’t reach our precious Capital, but I felt a bitter sorrow for the boys unfairly sent there. The stories began to emerge: Argentine officers subjecting conscripts to abuse, hunger and torture. And the black market the military had organised to sell what people had collected for these kids with so much love.

That summer, away in southern Brazil, I met young landowners from Corrientes and their friends - cadets from the military academy, who had not been sent to the Malvinas and confirmed to me that no one in the academy had been. Inexperienced conscripts who didn’t know the cold, yes. Army officer cadets, adults (sort of) with a vocation for war, kept at home, groomed for the important tasks of that time: signing foreign debt, torturing and killing journalists, union leaders, academics, students, catholic and political activists - their own people.

Years later, while studying Communication at university, I met Toshiro - the Argentine son of a Japanese immigrant, Philosophy student, lead singer of a great band and a veteran of that war. He shared what it had meant to him. And I understood that for those boys who were forced to be soldiers in no time, the Malvinas had to become a cause worth the trauma, worth the losses. I respect their sacrifice, it’s not my intention to challenge their lived experience with my own.

More than a decade after that war, without planning it, I found myself in London and fell in love with the city, it’s people, the cheap workers' cafes, pubs, dogs in pubs and the tube, and the fact that I could safely approach a policeman in uniform to ask him directions, and the relief that he didn’t carry a fire arm. I fell in love with every inch of the world in London streets.

Soon after arriving, a man shared his side of the Falklands story - told as the memory of an eighteen-year-old English boy from 1982: Thatcher’s government had lost popularity, the invasion was the opportunity to stir the country with jingoism and recover the Conservative vote. She rushed to send ships with minimal parliamentary debate.

The Englishman’s take: British citizens had not chosen war. Propaganda had gained their support. The working class that hated Thatcher and her industrial closures wrapped themselves in flags and the Conservatives won another election. 

In 1982, no common citizen on either side chose an armed conflict. They were taken there by governments that needed one. Luckily for the Argentinians, the defeat and deaths of 649 soldiers accelerated the end of a dictatorship that had tortured and disappeared 30,000 people. Its horrific human rights abuses research and report, Nunca Más is a tough but necessary read to get a sense what it means to lose democratic guarantees anywhere. 

(By the way, only a week ago, it was the 50th anniversary of the beginning of that dictatorship, and every year, huge crowds gather in the square opposite the office of government to remember it, so that Argentinians never again experience a dictatorship.)