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Argentina’s foreign minister has said the “conditions are in place” to restart flights to the Falkland Islands from her country’s second city, as libertarian president Javier Milei adopts a more conciliatory approach with the UK over the territory.
Diana Mondino told the Financial Times that, after four years without a route between Argentina’s highly populated north and the remote British Overseas Territory, the “frequency” of flights would “have to be determined by an airline that deems it convenient”.
“What we have done as a country is to say the conditions are in place for it to eventually be done,” she said of flights between her country’s second city and the Falklands, known as Las Malvinas in Spanish.
Between 2019 and 2020 Chilean airline LatAm operated a weekly flight to the islands from São Paulo in Brazil, with a monthly stop in the city of Córdoba.
But the route was suspended during the pandemic by the islanders, who number 3,600, and did not resume afterwards owing to frosty relations between Britain and Argentina’s then left-leaning Peronist government.
Argentina had proposed additional flights operated by its flag carrier Aerolíneas Argentinas from Argentine cities, to which the islanders objected. Argentina then scrapped the Cordoba route.
Direct flights from the Argentine capital Buenos Aires to the main airport on East Falkland island are off the table for now because of opposition from islanders, who say Argentina in the past used the direct connection to exert pressure by cancelling flights at short notice.
Mondino met UK foreign secretary David Lammy in New York last month and agreed to restart talks on matters including the São Paulo flights and joint co-ordination of visits from families of Argentines who died in the 1982 war.
Diplomats said relations between the UK and Argentina had warmed since Milei took over in December from the Peronists, for whom Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands is a particular article of faith.
The libertarian — who counts Margaret Thatcher, UK prime minister during the war, among his idols for her economic reforms — said more bilateral dialogue was essential to fulfilling Argentina’s constitutional mandate to retake the islands.
“If you are in conflict, you are not going to make any progress,” he told the FT in an interview. “With what the previous government was doing, they were never going to be Argentine again.”
Noting that diplomatic negotiations had underpinned the UK’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, he added: “By that mechanism, we believe that in the long term [the islands] will become Argentine again.”
In January Milei met David Cameron, Lammy’s predecessor, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, and later defended Cameron’s decision to visit the Falklands in February, saying he had “every right”.
Milei’s strategy on the islands has caused tension with Victoria Villarruel, his vice-president, a fierce advocate for Argentina’s military whose father fought in the war.
She wrote on X in September that Mondino’s accord with Lammy was “against the interests of our nation”, saying it offered Britain “concrete advantages” while “they offer us crumbs like emotional comfort”.
Mondino said the expanded dialogue was enabling Argentina and the UK to “resolve humanitarian issues” but did “not affect our formula for safeguarding sovereignty” over the islands. “The Malvinas are and always will be Argentine. The continent and the islands should have better connections in that sense,” she added
The islands’ connectivity remains limited. The Mount Pleasant airport has two weekly flights to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, while LatAm runs a weekly flight to Punta Arenas in southern Chile with a monthly stop in the small city of Río Gallegos in Argentine Patagonia.
Mondino predicted that “Argentines’ interest in visiting [the islands] would be great initially” once Cordoba flights restart. The islanders, she added, would benefit from closer ties. Citing Argentina’s “very good” universities and hospitals, she said: “There are many reasons to want to have the best relationship possible.”
The UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said “the new package of South Atlantic cooperation benefits the UK and Argentina” and stood “alongside the UK’s steadfast commitment to defending the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands”.