Las Malvinas is a political tool that became a religion. However Catholicism and cult of Gauchito Gil make more sense than the cult of Malvinas. If Argentina really cared it would have launched more than one 'recovery' attempt in 2 centuries. The more obvious Argentina's decadence became the more important the Islands have become to Argentina. Funny that. Britain made the most effort to claim and establish itself on the barren unpopulated Islands and did so without armed conflict. So Britain took the prize. Meanwhile Argentina systematically murdered, enslaved, subjugated, raped and displaced it's original inhabitants. Whatabout Britain in Africa and India?! = whataboutism.
Every single border in the americas today is directly or indirectly the result of European colonialism.
Let's not forget Argentina only stopped being a colony in 1816. Britain seized the islands and made them part of theirs in 1833.
When people here argue "colonialism" but fail to recognise how they themselves are privileged by, or the consequence of, the colonialism of others, it is an argument that can only go in vueltas about whose colony or ex-colony is more deserving of the others colonial or ex-colonial lands, rather than focusing on how the parties can peacefully cooperate to enjoy mutual economic benefits in a modern context.
I think what makes the Falkland-Malvinas issues less "picante" when it comes down to real actions from the Argentine side is because there are not Argentine communities and families separated between the two territories, meaning beyond "what-ifs" there is very little, if any, urgency to get results to resolve the claim. There are however 5th and 6th generation local inhabitants with their own cultural identity who would rather have self-determination or British protection over integration with Argentina giving them, and their security guarantors, plenty of urgency to protect their counter-claims. Simply imagining these people don't exist or telling those people to "go home" after so many generations is the same as telling white (non-indigenous) Argentines they are not
real Argentines or to go back to Spain or telling Argentines in Chaco they are now subjects of Bolivia. It's not going to achieve anything.
From my own outsider perspective and curious observation, the way Argentina remembers this war often appears to blur the lines between asserting a legal territorial claim and remembering the dictatorship era combatants in a consistent and appropriate way. When many celebrate the combatants as "heroes" who acted on this claim, rather than as mislead victims of an Argentine dictatorship that willingly ordered them to engage in violence against another state (and, at the same time their own people.) I can see how such a perceived fetish in popular sentiment for glorifying militarism and authoritarianism does more to hinder Argentine progress on their claim than help gain the trust of the other side to find peaceful solutions. For example, if modern German society would refer to national socialist era soldiers who fought "reclaiming" what were seen as Germany territories as "heroes" rather than mislead victims of their own dictatorship, people in the Czech Republic or Poland would be very nervous to see that. And no doubt they would have been less cooperative with Germany than they are in the present reality without such emotional "noise" having gotten in the way of mutually beneficial progress.
