Chris Oakley
Banned
Nuestra Patria(continued)
Chapter 7
Players on the Chilean national soccer team took to adorning their jerseys with shoulder patches that
read “Argentina’s finished!” while their fans took to carrying signs that not only mocked Argentina in
general but also trashed the Argentine army. (The patches were subsequently removed at the behest
of FIFA.)
Even some of Chile’s spiritual leaders got swept up in the patriotic fervor that followed the
Chilean victory at Los Flamencos. A prominent Catholic bishop in southern Chile drew stinging
criticism from the Vatican when he openly prayed for the entire Argentine army general staff to be
struck down. A pastor at Santiago’s largest Protestant church devoted one of his Sunday sermons
to attacking the Argentine government, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to send him a letter
criticizing what the archbishop called the pastor’s “spiritual myopia”. A shaman from Chile’s massive
indigenous community led ceremonies calling for the gods to sweep the Argentine army all the way
back to the streets of Buenos Aires. Church bells were rung to celebrate the withdrawal of the last
Argentine ground forces from Los Flamencos.
In August of 1979, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Mendoza incident that had
started the border war, the BAP Almirante Grau achieved a naval victory over the Argentines even
more impressive than the one she’d scored at the beginning of the conflict. Acting as lead vessel for
a joint Peruvian-Chilean task force, Grau coordinated a massive strike against Argentina’s second-
largest naval base that caught the base’s defenders almost completely by surprise; most of the naval
vessels docked at the base were sunk in the attack and the base itself was crippled for weeks. Even
though the Argentine government tried to spin the raid as only a minor setback for its war effort, the
stark truth was that the Chileans and their Peruvian allies had landed a jarring body blow on Buenos
Aires’ war machine. The reality of the destruction inflicted by the Chilean-Peruvian task force on the
Argentine naval base was further driven home by a photograph printed in the Times of London two
days after the raid; one corner of the photograph clearly showed massive clouds of smoke billowing
into the sky over the Argentine base, while in another corner readers could see the overturned hull of
an Argentine warship as it slowly sank into the water.
The photograph also helped stoke already blazing fires of discontent among Argentina’s civilian
population. Far from being the glorious triumph they and their leaders had hoped for, the border war
with Chile was if anything shaping up to be a fiasco; worse yet from their perspective, the conflict was
giving Argentina’s old adversary Great Britain the perfect excuse to bulk up its military presence in the
South Atlantic. Whitehall had already dispatched British Army engineers to the Falklands’ capital city,
Port Stanley, to upgrade the main runway at Stanley’s airport and the islands’ Royal Marine garrison
would soon receive an infusion of extra manpower. Two of Britain’s key NATO allies, Portugal and the
United States, made pacts with the Thatcher government to let the British military use their respective
bases in the Azores and the Caribbean as staging and re-supply checkpoints if or when the situation
warranted it.
There was even a rumor one of the Royal Navy’s front-line submarines, the HMS Conqueror,
was set to be deployed to the South Atlantic. This turned out to be more paranoid fantasy on the
Argentine military’s part than actual fact, but the notion nonetheless reflected the collective anxieties
of the Argentine people after a year of war. Those anxieties would soon become even greater: Peru,
a de facto ally of Chile almost from the second the war began, made the partnership official in early
September of 1979 with the signing of a mutual defense pact; this meant Peru was now once and for
all in Chile’s corner in the border conflict with Argentina.
Chapter 7
Players on the Chilean national soccer team took to adorning their jerseys with shoulder patches that
read “Argentina’s finished!” while their fans took to carrying signs that not only mocked Argentina in
general but also trashed the Argentine army. (The patches were subsequently removed at the behest
of FIFA.)
Even some of Chile’s spiritual leaders got swept up in the patriotic fervor that followed the
Chilean victory at Los Flamencos. A prominent Catholic bishop in southern Chile drew stinging
criticism from the Vatican when he openly prayed for the entire Argentine army general staff to be
struck down. A pastor at Santiago’s largest Protestant church devoted one of his Sunday sermons
to attacking the Argentine government, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to send him a letter
criticizing what the archbishop called the pastor’s “spiritual myopia”. A shaman from Chile’s massive
indigenous community led ceremonies calling for the gods to sweep the Argentine army all the way
back to the streets of Buenos Aires. Church bells were rung to celebrate the withdrawal of the last
Argentine ground forces from Los Flamencos.
In August of 1979, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Mendoza incident that had
started the border war, the BAP Almirante Grau achieved a naval victory over the Argentines even
more impressive than the one she’d scored at the beginning of the conflict. Acting as lead vessel for
a joint Peruvian-Chilean task force, Grau coordinated a massive strike against Argentina’s second-
largest naval base that caught the base’s defenders almost completely by surprise; most of the naval
vessels docked at the base were sunk in the attack and the base itself was crippled for weeks. Even
though the Argentine government tried to spin the raid as only a minor setback for its war effort, the
stark truth was that the Chileans and their Peruvian allies had landed a jarring body blow on Buenos
Aires’ war machine. The reality of the destruction inflicted by the Chilean-Peruvian task force on the
Argentine naval base was further driven home by a photograph printed in the Times of London two
days after the raid; one corner of the photograph clearly showed massive clouds of smoke billowing
into the sky over the Argentine base, while in another corner readers could see the overturned hull of
an Argentine warship as it slowly sank into the water.
The photograph also helped stoke already blazing fires of discontent among Argentina’s civilian
population. Far from being the glorious triumph they and their leaders had hoped for, the border war
with Chile was if anything shaping up to be a fiasco; worse yet from their perspective, the conflict was
giving Argentina’s old adversary Great Britain the perfect excuse to bulk up its military presence in the
South Atlantic. Whitehall had already dispatched British Army engineers to the Falklands’ capital city,
Port Stanley, to upgrade the main runway at Stanley’s airport and the islands’ Royal Marine garrison
would soon receive an infusion of extra manpower. Two of Britain’s key NATO allies, Portugal and the
United States, made pacts with the Thatcher government to let the British military use their respective
bases in the Azores and the Caribbean as staging and re-supply checkpoints if or when the situation
warranted it.
There was even a rumor one of the Royal Navy’s front-line submarines, the HMS Conqueror,
was set to be deployed to the South Atlantic. This turned out to be more paranoid fantasy on the
Argentine military’s part than actual fact, but the notion nonetheless reflected the collective anxieties
of the Argentine people after a year of war. Those anxieties would soon become even greater: Peru,
a de facto ally of Chile almost from the second the war began, made the partnership official in early
September of 1979 with the signing of a mutual defense pact; this meant Peru was now once and for
all in Chile’s corner in the border conflict with Argentina.
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