By Daniel Guzmán

Director of Agenda Malvinas

The recent unanimous adoption of a new resolution by the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization (C-24) has unleashed a wave of excessive celebrations in Buenos Aires' public sphere. From government offices to libertarian online activists, including metropolitan media outlets addicted to sensational headlines, and even sectors of war veterans who should be more mindful of historical memory, there were attempts to portray the outcome in New York as a "sovereign and historic triumph."

However, this exaggerated celebration only serves to expose a dangerous conceptual shallowness or, worse, a crude attempt at political propaganda to mask, with multilateral backroom rhetoric, the absolute inaction of the Argentine government in the face of the physical dispossession happening right under our noses. Because what happened this past week in New York was not a victory; it was the unalterable repetition of an annual bureaucratic procedure that has been repeated almost identically for forty-four years.

Since the 1982 war, the Committee has consistently issued the same document urging the parties to negotiate. This demand serves only to justify trips, accumulating frequent flyer miles, receiving per diems in dollars, exotic dinners, drunken revelry and other intoxications, strolls down Fifth Avenue, upgrades to new iPhone models, photos, and applause that vanishes the moment one leaves the United Nations building.

The settlers' show and the fallacy of self-determination

In response, the United Kingdom has perfected the strategy of systematic defiance: it does not attend the sessions, it ignores the Committee's competence and it files the resolutions away in a drawer knowing that they are completely lacking in binding, punitive or mandatory character.

To complete the snub, London sends only members of the Legislative Assembly of the implanted colony to the forum as "petitioners." These delegates stage a discursive spectacle for the international audience, demanding "self-determination," which the UN General Assembly itself had already declared inapplicable to the Malvinas case, given that they do not constitute a pre-existing colonized people, but rather a population artificially introduced after the expulsion of 1833.

The UN does not grant them legal status in a dispute that is strictly bilateral between the Argentine Republic and the occupying power, but the United Kingdom uses them as political hostages and a demographic shield to avoid dialogue.

It is tragicomic, if not offensive to national sovereignty, that the Government and its media mouthpieces celebrate a document signed as a compromise in New York while, at that very moment, cranes and articulated trucks are cementing the port ramps in Puerto Argentino and the Anglo-Israeli consortium Navitas-Rockhopper is designing housing complexes and chemical mud plants with a view to starting uninterrupted underwater drilling in January 2027.

Therefore, it must be clear—given such extensive evidence—that the C-24 resolution did not and will not stop the plundering of fisheries, nor the territorial expansion in the South Atlantic, nor British claims on the Antarctic continent, nor will it reverse the oil exploitation project in Sea Lion, nor a single contract reached with the consortium, nor will it alter stock market prices in London or Tel Aviv.

The trans-Andean parody: From corridor spokesman to servile partner of Great Britain  

This diplomatic charade also coexists with another monumental regional fallacy that the mainstream press chooses to ignore: the Chilean farce. The fact that the Chilean delegation has historically been tasked with presenting and reading the draft resolution in favor of Argentina before the Committee serves as a necessary facade of automatic Latin American solidarity for the world to see, orchestrated by the British Foreign Office itself.

But behind the solemnity of the speeches in the UN halls, the stark territorial reality emerges: Chile operates in practice as the United Kingdom's largest and most efficient strategic, logistical, commercial, and Antarctic partner in the far south of the continent, and specifically with the colony established in the Malvina Islands. Its southern ports and airports continue to constitute the indispensable lifeline for resupplying the islands and sustaining the illegal fleets that plunder the Argentine Sea.

The triumphalism of the press and the trappings of libertarian capitulation

Sovereignty is not defended by garnering applause in New York during the summer while simultaneously validating the logistical and commercial ties that feed the usurper in the Deep South. The sensationalist posturing of Javier Milei's government—trapped in its own ideological subservience to the powers and globalized markets that finance the Sea Lion plunder—is merely the trappings of capitulation.

While the San Martín Palace celebrates its own inaction, the train of plunder continues its steady march, reminding us that national patrimony is defended by exercising maritime police power, applying effective financial sanctions to clandestine corporations, and severing the continental connections that enable British occupation. Everything else is just window dressing.