According to what the Diario La Nación informs us (5/9/23), the Panamanian-flagged refrigerated cargo ship “Frio Marathon” arrived in Mar del Plata, from the Argentine Port of Malvinas, where it had operated since 2014, without the permission of the Authority. of Argentine Application, which is why the Prefecture initiated a summary "for violating Decree 256/10 which establishes that all ships that intend to transit between the ports of the Argentine continental territory and ports located in the Malvinas Islands, South Georgia and Sandwich del Sur ( hereinafter Malvinas ), or crossing Argentine jurisdictional waters in the direction of the latter and/or loading merchandise to be transported directly or indirectly between those ports, must request authorization for the Argentine State to authorize the operation. , says the media, that the penalty could be several million pesos, which as “Agenda Malvinas” says could be a few dollars.

Since the aforementioned Decree came into force, the Prefecture, according to the publication, would have " detected 683 vessels in alleged infringement and sanctioned them." financially to 371 of them. In parallel, the authorization of more than 1,200 permits has been managed for foreign flag vessels to call at the aforementioned ports and for vessels with 37 flags, including those of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (RUGB), to indirectly recognize, through this process , the sovereignty of the country over our Islands by requesting authorization from our country.

So far the news does not specify what is the “million dollar amount” that could be applied, nor the reasons why only 54% of the vessels in apparent violation were fined and what would have been the total amount of the fines applied. and if they are firm and have been deposited in favor of the State. It is also not indicated whether the arrival in Mar del Plata of this ship was voluntary or if it was captured somewhere in the Argentine sea and the Prefecture took it to the port of Mar del Plata, This does not appear to be an issue, judging by the photo we have taken of the ship, which is seen alone sailing to enter this port.

It is curious that the Prefecture understands that the transit permit to navigate through Argentine jurisdictional waters bound for Malvinas ports or vice versa may imply an indirect recognition of sovereignty over the archipelagos. In any case, what the Argentine State is doing is control traffic in the waters of its jurisdiction; control, by the way, absolutely insufficient, since it has been limited to verifying whether or not permission has been requested, instead of verifying the goods being transported; like the gendarmerie, the federal or provincial police would have done it to any transport on a national route or provincial road.

If the merchandise transported by the 1,200 vessels that obtained permits had been controlled, the presence of millions of tons of illegal fishing caught in the Malvinas area or coming from Argentine migratory resources originating from the ZEEA would surely have been confirmed.Likewise, about the 683 vessels that were detected in alleged infringement.

By Agenda Malvinas