Argentina complains about British military flights between Brazil and Falkland Islands

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Argentine embassy in Brazil expressed its concern to the chancellery of Jair Bolsonaro’s government about the significant increase of British military flights between the Brazilian territory and the Falkland Islands.

The Argentine government detected that between January 4 and 28, there was unusual traffic of seven British military flights connecting the islands and Brazil. The planes departed from Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre, and five of those seven flights were round trips.

The acceptance of those flights to the Falkland Islands could mean, in practice, an alleged consent of Brazil to the British military presence in the South Atlantic, a matter rejected by the members of Mercosur and considered contrary to the search for a peaceful solution for the sovereignty of the islands.

“Argentina will appreciate that the Brazilian government tries to restrict the granting of permits for British military aircraft coming from or bound for the Malvinas Islands, only in strictly humanitarian cases”, reads the note that the ambassador in Brasilia, Daniel Scioli, delivered to Pedro Miguel Costa e Silva, Itamaraty’s secretary for bilateral and regional negotiations in the Americas.

“To allow this frequency of flights means to accept a military base in the region as something normal,” said a diplomatic source in charge of the presentation.

The embassy led by Scioli seeks to close the way for the British authorities to eventually use air traffic to legitimize the military presence in the islands. The United Kingdom usually justifies the flow of flights due to the beginning of the Antarctic campaign in the south. Still, the unusual volume of air traffic caught the attention of the Argentine authorities.

On January 21, for example, in one of the last recorded flights, a Boeing C-17 Globemaster III aircraft landed at Porto Alegre airport to refuel and departed the next day for the Falklands, less than 24 hours later. The 53-meter-long, four-engine aircraft are generally used for heavy military transport.

The presentation of the Argentine embassy in Brasilia comes two days after the Argentine Foreign Ministry rejected in a note the British military deployment in the South Atlantic.

The San Martin Palace, aware of Scioli’s presentation, complained on Saturday about the recent installation of a new generation air defense system called Sky Sabre. According to the Foreign Ministry, this was an “unjustified show of force” that diverts the United Kingdom from the search for a peaceful solution to the dispute over the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands and poses a threat to the region.

The expansion of British weapons capability in the South Atlantic is in contravention of two United Nations General Assembly resolutions, which urge states to recognize the region as a zone of peace and cooperation and also call on both Argentina and the UK not to take unilateral decisions demanding that the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands go through a process of negotiation.

Diplomatic sources explained that the United Kingdom usually uses Brazil as a base for landing and departure points for humanitarian flights to the islands. Likewise, Uruguay is often the arrival point for supplying ships that later continue their journey to the islands. However, the unusual volume of military flights registered in the last month caught the attention of the Argentine authorities, who, on Monday, January 31, expressed their concern to Bolsonaro’s Foreign Ministry.

Earlier this month, Argentine Foreign Minister Santiago Cafiero announced the launch of the “Malvinas 40 years” agency. The Argentine government expects to deploy a hundred activities in Argentina and the world to claim sovereignty over the islands on the fortieth anniversary of the war.

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