Chris Oakley
Banned
Chapter 1
An old adage has it that “good fences make good neighbors”, but that hasn’t always been the case. indeed, some of the bloodiest wars in human history have been fought as a consequence of disagreements over national borders. France and Germany, India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea-- the list goes on. Perhaps one of the most unfortunate and extreme cases of the border war phenomenon is the 1978-1980 Chilean-Argentine frontier conflict, which had dire consequences for the governments of both countries. The demarcation lines separating Chile’s territory from Argentina’s had been a sore spot between the two countries almost from the very moment they gained independence in the early 19th century; a British-supported arbitration hearing in 1902 meant to settle the dispute once and for all did nothing to gain even a temporary resolution of the quarreling between Santiago and Buenos Aires-- in fact, during the era of Juan Peron the military-controlled Argentine government used the border dispute as a means to rally its people’s support whenever discontent began to rear its head.
But it was in the years after Peron’s rule that the border controversy truly heated up and took its most critical steps toward confrontation and eventual war. During the early 1970s a survey team found oil and other valuable resources on land claimed by the Chileans; eager to get its hands on the potential treasure trove this find represented, the ruling junta in Buenos Aires pressed its territorial claims with renewed vigor. This diplomatic campaign to get the border dispute settled in Argentina’s favor was accompanied by a crash program to expand the Argentine military for a possible war with Chile if Buenos Aires couldn’t get what it wanted by political means. Particular attention was paid in this program to bolstering Argentina’s air force, which the junta envisioned as being the tip of the spear in their grand campaign to win control of the riches along the border between the rival countries.
But the Chilean armed forces weren’t exactly idle either. Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who’d seized power in Chile in a 1973 coup, instructed his defense ministry to build the Chilean army and navy into, in his words, “an unbreakable stone wall” against Argentine aggression. In this he secretly received backing from Argentina’s longtime foreign nemesis Great Britain, who
feared that the stronger Argentina got the greater the likelihood of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in the near future would become. So many officials in Whitehall swallowed their distaste for Pinochet’s brutal policies and signed off on the arms needed to bolster the Chilean military against the threat from Buenos Aires. There were attempts by both the Chilean and the Argentine governments to enlist the co-operation of the United States in providing arms for the impending border war, but the White House was reluctant to make any major overseas combat commitments after the ignominious U.S. exit from Vietnam.
By June of 1978 the Argentine-Chilean frontier resembled nothing so much as a World War I-era trench network....and the buildup of weapons and troops on both sides of that frontier hadn’t slowed down a bit. In fact, judging by the endless images of marching troops shown every night on the two countries’ state-run TV networks, it was gathering steam. One Canadian attaché who was stationed in Buenos Aires at the time observed in a letter to his superiors back in Ottawa that there were so many land mines in place on both sides of the border a smoker who tossed his match in the wrong place was liable to pay dearly for his mistake. And the physical show of
force was matched by increasingly strident rhetoric coming from Buenos Aires and Santiago; a July 1978 meeting of the U.N. General Assembly intended to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis disintegrated into a shouting match between the Argentine and Chilean ambassadors to the United Nations.
But the straw that truly broke the camel’s back was an incident west of the Argentine town of Mendoza on August 3rd, 1978. A Chilean air force reconnaissance jet dispatched to photograph Argentine petroleum facilities near the town had the bad luck to get picked up by Argentine air defense radar and come under fire from surface-to-air missile batteries which had been hastily set up to defend the petroleum complex along with the town itself. One SAM detonated just six feet from the recon jet and knocked it off course; a second SAM scored a direct hit on the jet’s fuselage, blowing it to pieces. When word of the shootdown reached General Pinochet and his
military high command in Santiago, they decided it was time to take off the gloves and unleash the full force of their armies on Argentina. Within just six hours after the shootdown incident, a visibly furious Pinochet went on Chilean state television and announced Chile was declaring war on Argentina; two hours after that Chilean artillery began shelling Argentine military border posts while a naval task force departed Valparaiso to attack Argentine bases in the Tierra del Fuego region.
An old adage has it that “good fences make good neighbors”, but that hasn’t always been the case. indeed, some of the bloodiest wars in human history have been fought as a consequence of disagreements over national borders. France and Germany, India and Pakistan, North Korea and South Korea-- the list goes on. Perhaps one of the most unfortunate and extreme cases of the border war phenomenon is the 1978-1980 Chilean-Argentine frontier conflict, which had dire consequences for the governments of both countries. The demarcation lines separating Chile’s territory from Argentina’s had been a sore spot between the two countries almost from the very moment they gained independence in the early 19th century; a British-supported arbitration hearing in 1902 meant to settle the dispute once and for all did nothing to gain even a temporary resolution of the quarreling between Santiago and Buenos Aires-- in fact, during the era of Juan Peron the military-controlled Argentine government used the border dispute as a means to rally its people’s support whenever discontent began to rear its head.
But it was in the years after Peron’s rule that the border controversy truly heated up and took its most critical steps toward confrontation and eventual war. During the early 1970s a survey team found oil and other valuable resources on land claimed by the Chileans; eager to get its hands on the potential treasure trove this find represented, the ruling junta in Buenos Aires pressed its territorial claims with renewed vigor. This diplomatic campaign to get the border dispute settled in Argentina’s favor was accompanied by a crash program to expand the Argentine military for a possible war with Chile if Buenos Aires couldn’t get what it wanted by political means. Particular attention was paid in this program to bolstering Argentina’s air force, which the junta envisioned as being the tip of the spear in their grand campaign to win control of the riches along the border between the rival countries.
But the Chilean armed forces weren’t exactly idle either. Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who’d seized power in Chile in a 1973 coup, instructed his defense ministry to build the Chilean army and navy into, in his words, “an unbreakable stone wall” against Argentine aggression. In this he secretly received backing from Argentina’s longtime foreign nemesis Great Britain, who
feared that the stronger Argentina got the greater the likelihood of an Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands in the near future would become. So many officials in Whitehall swallowed their distaste for Pinochet’s brutal policies and signed off on the arms needed to bolster the Chilean military against the threat from Buenos Aires. There were attempts by both the Chilean and the Argentine governments to enlist the co-operation of the United States in providing arms for the impending border war, but the White House was reluctant to make any major overseas combat commitments after the ignominious U.S. exit from Vietnam.
By June of 1978 the Argentine-Chilean frontier resembled nothing so much as a World War I-era trench network....and the buildup of weapons and troops on both sides of that frontier hadn’t slowed down a bit. In fact, judging by the endless images of marching troops shown every night on the two countries’ state-run TV networks, it was gathering steam. One Canadian attaché who was stationed in Buenos Aires at the time observed in a letter to his superiors back in Ottawa that there were so many land mines in place on both sides of the border a smoker who tossed his match in the wrong place was liable to pay dearly for his mistake. And the physical show of
force was matched by increasingly strident rhetoric coming from Buenos Aires and Santiago; a July 1978 meeting of the U.N. General Assembly intended to find a diplomatic solution to the crisis disintegrated into a shouting match between the Argentine and Chilean ambassadors to the United Nations.
But the straw that truly broke the camel’s back was an incident west of the Argentine town of Mendoza on August 3rd, 1978. A Chilean air force reconnaissance jet dispatched to photograph Argentine petroleum facilities near the town had the bad luck to get picked up by Argentine air defense radar and come under fire from surface-to-air missile batteries which had been hastily set up to defend the petroleum complex along with the town itself. One SAM detonated just six feet from the recon jet and knocked it off course; a second SAM scored a direct hit on the jet’s fuselage, blowing it to pieces. When word of the shootdown reached General Pinochet and his
military high command in Santiago, they decided it was time to take off the gloves and unleash the full force of their armies on Argentina. Within just six hours after the shootdown incident, a visibly furious Pinochet went on Chilean state television and announced Chile was declaring war on Argentina; two hours after that Chilean artillery began shelling Argentine military border posts while a naval task force departed Valparaiso to attack Argentine bases in the Tierra del Fuego region.
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