El conflicto del Atlántico Sur:

del ascenso de Galtieri a la recuperación de las Islas Malvinas

Abstract

The decision of the Argentine de facto government to recover militarily the Malvinas Islands on the morning of April 2, 1982, was a fact that surprised the world. The distribution of power favorable to the South American State in the South Atlantic meant that it did not need to balance the power of Great Britain or maximize power through the conquest of territory. In this sense, we ask ourselves, why did the Argentine de facto government take the decision to recover the islands? The attempt to answer this question leads us to question the validity of strictly systemic theories to analyze this case, since the country of the Southern Cone did not make the decision under the structural pressures of the international system. In this way, taking the regional distribution of power as an enabling factor, we will analyze the particular worldview that the Argentine military government had of the international system as a domestic variable that has explanatory power to understand why the Junta made the decision to recover the islands via military action The consideration of this variable will allow us to see the position of the de facto government against the presence of Great Britain in the regional distribution of power in conjunction with the exaggerated interpretation that was made of the changes in said distribution. Finally, the work will seek to show how these two factors conditioned the decisionmaking process and foreign policy actions of the Argentine military government that led to recover the Malvinas Islands militarily.