ABSTRACT
Many argentines joined outsiders to criticize the junta in Buenos Aires for using the repossession of the Falkland/Malvinas Islands to manipulate popular sentiment and unite support for an increasingly disliked leadership. Yet they, with most of Latin America, have stood behind the military government's claim to the islands. The junta's success in mobilizing Argentina depended, not on support for the government's members or for their military move, but on the unanimous Argentine feeling that claims to the ‘Malvinas’ are central to Argentina's claims to national identity. Many Argentines — perhaps most — have been committed not to their government, but to the cause which the government is exploiting. Nevertheless, in both diplomatic and military confrontations that government can count on Argentine popular sentiment and on widespread Latin American sympathy for it. The failure of the British and their American allies to assess the depth of the Argentines' unanimous dedication to recovering their sovereignty over the islands has resulted from an inability to assess the cultural context and historical experience which form Argentine and Latin American public opinion in this crisis.
