Argentina Gov’t Refers to Malvinas Islands as Falkland, Again

Argentina’s right-wing government referred to the Malvinas Islands as Falkland on Monday in a cultural map published by the Ministry of Culture. 

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"We demand the map to be immediately taken down from the institution's website,” former secretary for the Malvinas Islands Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Daniel Filmus, tweeted, adding that it “threatens Argentina's historical claims about the sovereignty of the Malvinas, expressed in the Constitution, in the unanimous agreements of the National Congress and in the heart of all the inhabitants of the country." 

This is not the first time President Mauricio Macri’s administration has “mistakenly” unrecognized the islands. In 2017, the then-Ministry of Modernization and the state-owned state company Radio Television Argentina called the disputed islands, Falkland. 

While the Ministry of Health and Social Development sent a new year greeting with the map of Argentina without any allusion to them, just as the National Administration of Social Security did later that year. 

And this can be traced to Macri himself. Back in 1997, the current head of state said that he “never understood the issues of sovereignty in a country as big as ours," warning that "the Malvinas Islands would represent a heavy deficit for Argentina." 

Known to the British as the Falkland, the Malvinas have been held by the United Kingdom (U.K.) since 1833, when British warships seized the archipelago. Argentina has long disputed British claims to the islands. In 1982, tensions boiled over into a short war that claimed close to 900 lives and ended with the U.K. holding on to the islands.

In 2016, the United Nations (U.N.) decided to allow Argentina to expand its maritime territory in the South Atlantic Ocean by 35 percent, taking in the waters surrounding the long-disputed Malvinas. Yet the U.N. commission’s decision acknowledges the unresolved diplomatic dispute between the two countries.