“We value the gesture of the Chancellor of the UK (United Kingdom) Cameron to include Argentina in his view of the region (Malvinas Islands). We will be happy to receive you, on the next occasion, also in Buenos Aires,” Mondino wrote in a post on the X network that the local press interpreted as irony.
David Cameron’s tour includes, in addition to the islands, Paraguay and Brazil. Hours earlier, the spokesperson for the Argentine government, Manuel Adorni, had referred to the British official’s visit to the Malvinas as “an agenda item for David Cameron and – in that case – the English government.”
“We do not have to give an opinion on the agenda of other countries,” he added, although he reaffirmed Argentine right to sovereignty over the islands. Cameron arrived in the Malvinas this Monday, a month after meeting with the Argentine president, Javier Milei at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Argentina, which fought a war with the United Kingdom over the Malvinas in 1982, continues to claim sovereignty over that South Atlantic archipelago. The conflict left 649 Argentines and 255 British dead.
Cameron: “persona non grata” in Tierra del Fuego
During his visit to the islands, Cameron said that he hopes that they will want to remain under the administration of the United Kingdom “for a long time, possibly forever,” according to the Press Association (PA) agency.
The governor of the Argentine province of Tierra del Fuego, Antarctica and the South Atlantic Islands – which includes the Malvinas -, Gustavo Melella, considered Cameron’s visit a “provocation.” He also declared Cameron persona non grata “in the entire territorial extent” of his province, the southernmost in Argentina and which includes the Falklands, the South Sandwich Islands, South Orkney and South Georgia.
The governors of Buenos Aires, Río Negro, Santiago del Estero, La Rioja, La Pampa and Formosa, all opponents of the current government, joined in the repudiation. The United Nations Decolonization Committee requests each year that the two countries open negotiations on the Malvinas sovereignty dispute, but London has systematically refused to do so.
The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office of the British government issued a statement in which they reaffirmed that the United Kingdom “is determined to maintain the islanders’ right to ‘self-determination’.”
