As you heard last episode, Admiral Jorge Anaya had begun to plan an invasion of the Falklands by 1979, shortly after Argentina won the Soccer World Cup of 1978.

Anaya had been commander-in-chief of the Argentine Navy and a member of the military junta that controlled the country since 1976. But by far the most important player in this saga was General Leopoldo Galtieri who became president shortly before Anaya was installed as navy chief. 

Incumbent president Roberto Viola’s health had been deteriorating.

One of the more hawkish members of the Argentinian government was Admiral Anaya who was the longest serving member of the junta and some suggest he made the recovery of the Falklands a condition of his support for Galtieri as President. Some military leaders say this was a fallacy – it was in fact the other way around - that both Anaya and Air Force member of the Junta, Brigadier Lami Dozo, were approached by Galtieri to select a choice military project. This was not necessarily the Malvinas, but history will show that whatever the initial idea was, the islands were at the heart of propaganda campaigns. 

The military junta was in a rush. The top of the list for their foreign policy was the resolution of what they called the ‘Malvinas problem’. And of course, without the Navy’s full support there would be no resolution one way or the other. 

There was another significant event however before that year – and this the arrival on the international scene of someone called Margaret Thatcher. In May 1979 Labour was voted from power. While this initially led to more of the same when it came to the perception of the Falklands inside Whitehall by government technocrats, even Thatcher did not regard the islands as of great interest at least at first. 

Enter Constantino Davidoff an Argentine Businessman, who’d asked the Edinburgh-based firm of Christian Salvesen in 1977 whether it would sell the scrap material in four abandoned whaling stations in South Georgia. IT would. 

By 1979 he had a signed agreement and senor Davidoff paid one hundred thousand pounds for the rights to remove material before the end of March 1982. He’d only managed to leave Buenos Aires in March 1982 to collect his scrap metal but he had to check in at Grytviken first for permission from the all-powerful Steve Martin before salvaging at Leith and two other places called Husvik and Stromness. 

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