It is hard to escape the war in Puerto Argentino. At the city's tiny airport, a gigantic mural commemorates the soldiers from the mainland who lost their lives. Beside the old Anglican cathedral, now draped with a massive blue-and-white flag, the statue of General Leopoldo Galtieri gazes impassively out to sea. In recent years, there has been talk of opening a garden of reconciliation to mark the sacrifice of the enemy troops, too.
Yet even today, almost 30 years on, the island's authorities are nervous about re-opening old wounds. On the Malvinas, history is a touchy subject.
Most historians now agree that Britain could never have won the war for what people in 1982 still called the Falkland Islands. To expect victory after an amphibious assault on a handful of tiny rocky islands, thousands of miles from home, with supply lines stretched over the South Atlantic, was the stuff of fantasy. After the false dawn of the recapture of South Georgia, reality soon broke in on the British public.
The sinking of HMS Sheffield marked the beginning of the end, and after the disastrous failure of the San Carlos landings, the game was up. Thatcher managed to persuade her friend Ronald Reagan to act as a go-between, but the Washington peace talks were no more than a fig leaf to preserve Britain's last shreds of respectability. As all the world could see, after years of economic decline and under-investment, the imperial lion was no longer capable even of defending its own territory.
For Thatcher herself, the results were calamitous. Although her government seemed to be regaining popularity just before the war, its ratings collapsed afterwards and her own leadership was fatally discredited. The backbench rebellion that finished her off a year later was only a matter of time, although the principal assassin, an obscure young MP called John Major, is entirely forgotten today. The Tory vote held up surprisingly well in 1983, but the Whitelaw-Owen government of the late 1980s was a very different proposition from the hard-right administration likely to have emerged had Thatcher survived.
Few British schoolchildren today know the first thing about the Malvinas war, but it is clear that it marked a watershed in our history: the moment when dreams of empire and great-power status were banished for good. Under the Tory-SDP administrations of the 1980s and 1990s, Britain became perhaps the guiding spirit behind the new Europe, and a posterboy for post-imperialism. But in the late-night tango bars of Puerto Argentino, nobody cares about Britain any more. The "Stanley" signs are long gone. Only a few red postboxes remain to remind visitors of the old days.
