Island Tango -- Foreign Policy
With their afternoon tea, brogue accents, and fields of diddle-dee, just who do the Falklands Islanders think they are?
To the rest of the world, the Falklands War may have seemed like a bizarre blip on the geopolitical radar screen. But in the Falklands (known to Argentina as "Las Islas Malvinas"), the 74-day conflict is remembered rather differently. It started on April 2, 1982, when more than 1,000 Argentine special forces landed near the capital city of Stanley, and it ended 10 weeks later when Argentina surrendered after a massive British naval task force left 649 Argentine soldiers dead. Families in both Stanley and outlying farm settlements remember that they were herded like sheep by invading Argentine forces and imprisoned in their own homes for weeks. If a settlement wasn't invaded, the Argentines simply cut off all communication and supplies.
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My Comment: The sentence that caught my attention was the following ....
In the past month, British exploration companies have resumed oil-drilling operations in the North Falklands Basin, where Shell estimates there may be up to 60 billion barrels of hydrocarbon deposits.
With oil selling at $80/barrel, this means there is almost $4.8 trillion dollars of oil for the taking.
No wonder the Argentinians are jumping. With a bankrupt economy and a corrupt government, they have few if any options to get themselves out of the mess that they have created for themselves.
If these oil deposits are only a fraction of what Shell and others believe is there, expect political tensions to heat up.
For more detail information on where the oil leases and oil exploration areas are for the Falklands, go to this link.
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