Which country colonized the Beagle Channel? Chile or Argentina?

The region of the Beagle Channel, explored by Robert FitzRoy in the 1830s, was one of the last to be colonized by Chile and Argentina. The cold weather, the long distances from other inhabited regions, and the shortage of transport and subsistence, kept it far from the governmental task.

Beagle Channel cartography since 1881

In the maps exhibited in this page it is possible to appreciate the lacking knowledge of the geography by navigators and explorers of the zone and also the statesmen who had to decide on the borders. Nevertheless, when the Boundary treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina was signed, in the Beagle Channel zone at least the main islands and waterways were known.

The Beagle Channel Arbitration Court reviewed in-depth the cartography of the zone and stated that:

There was no agreement about the sovereignty over Patagonia and archipelago of Tierra del Fuego before the Boundary treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina. While Chile and Argentina claimed territories on both side of the 1984 defined border as own territories, the US and the European powers considered the land and islands often as Res nullius, although the Chilean settlement, and later city, of Punta Arenas at the Strait of Magellan existed since 1843.

From 1881 to 1888 show almost all Argentine maps the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands as Chilean Territories.

All Chilean maps have shown always the islands as Chilean territories, like the map of engineer Alejandro Bertrand showed here. This border line is today valid for both countries.

There were some few dissentient (Argentine) maps in this period, but the Court declared it untrustworthy because of its ""excentric"" borderline. (see below).

Partial reproduction of the first Argentine map showing the boundaries laid down in the Boundary Treaty of 23 July 1881, appeared in "La Ilustracion Argentina" issue of 10 November 1881 in Buenos Aires. The copy reproduced here is one handed to the British Minister Plenipontentiary in Buenos Aires by Dr. Bernardo de Irigoyen, Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs who negotiated and signed the Boundary Treaty. The original is located in the official British Archives. The British Minister sent it to his Government with the comment that the dark shaded area ""comprising the Strait of Magellan, half of Tierra del Fuego and all the southern islands, represent was actually has been ceded to Chile by the recent Treaty."" (under Irigoyen map)

This map reproduced here is regarded by Chile as first official Argentine map after the Boundary Treaty of 1881, though its official character was subsequently denied by the Argentine Government. It was ordered to be drawn up by the then Argentine Minister of the Interior, Bernardo de Irigoyen (who had previously been Minister of Foreign Affairs in which capacity he signed the Boundary Treaty of 1881) for inclusion in an official publication issued by the Director of the National Statistics Office, Dr. Francisco Latzina, in 1883 under the title "The Argentine Republic as a field for European Immigration" (under Latzina map of 1882). This was published in Spanish, English, German, French and Italian in an edition of 120.000 copies. On the official map all the islands located south of the Beagle Channel are shown under Chilean Sovereignty.

This official map of Chile, partially reproduced here, "«was drawn up on the orders of the Chilean Government for use in primary schools in the Republic and with a view to the most recent data»" by Alejandro Bertrand in 1884. The author, an engineer, was member of the Boundary Commissions charged with marking out the Chilean-Argentine Frontier. At the time the map was approved by the Chilean Hydrographic Office. On the map all the islands south of the Beagle Channel as far as Cape Hoorn are shown as being under Chilean sovereignty. All Chilean maps have shown this border line since 1881.

In 1882 the Argentine Geographic Institute decided to issue a general map and an atlas of the Argentine Republic. The task was put in the hands of the well known Professor of the (Argentine) University of Córdoba, Arturo Seelstrang, who had already brought out a map of the Republic in 1875. The Atlas was "«constructed and published»" by the institute "«under the auspices of the National Government»". Plate XXVII of the Atlas, reproduced here, was headed "«Governoship of Tierra del Fuego and the Malvinas Islands»" and were drawn up in 1885 and published the following year. As may be observed, said map shows the boundary line running through the centre of the Beagle Channel, indicating Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands an all the other islands and islets extending southwards as far as Cape Horn as being under Chilean sovereignty.

General Map of the Argentine Republic and neighbouring countries, 1886. The map shown here states that it was "«made according to the latest official data»" and "«in the light of the latest plans and sketches»" by Francisco Moreno, Argentine expert on the Commission for marking out the frontier with Chile, and by Lieutenant-Colonel José Olascoaga, Head of the "Military Typographic Office".

At the bottom, right, the map bears the inscription in the Library of Congress.

As may be observed, the international boundary is traced along the centre of the Beagle Channel, showing Picton, Nueva and Lennox and all the other islands and islets extending southwards as far as Cape Horn as being under Chilean sovereignty.

This map, reproduced here, is included in the book "«Geography of the Argentine Republic»" ("Geografía de la República Argentina") published in Buenos Aires in 1888, editorial Lajouane, by Francisco Latzina, National Director of the "«Argentine Statistics Institute»" and member of numerous scientific societies. "«This work obtained the "Rivadavia Award" [Gran Premio Bernardino Rivadavia] of the "Argentine Geographic Institute" and a large number of copies of it were ordered by the Argentine authorities for distribution in Europe and elsewhere.»" The jury was conformed by Estanislao Zeballos, Bartolomé Mitre, Julio Argentino Roca, Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, Guillermo Rawson and Lucio V. Mansilla.

In the extreme southern region, the international boundary is traced along the centre of the Beagle Channel and stretches to the south of the Isla de los Estados. Here it shows Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands and all other islands and islets extending southward as far as Cape Horn as being under Chilean sovereignty.

The Peruvian geographer Mariano Felipe Paz Soldán, who sought refuge in Buenos Aires during the disastrous War of the Pacific between Peru and Chile, drew 1888, amongst others, two maps of Argentina:

The relevant sections of the maps are shown on the left side.

The "Mapa orohidrográfico" shows the Islands ""Picton"" and ""Nueva"" as under Argentine und the Island ""Lennox"" as under Chilean sovereignty. In contrast, the "Mapa general" shows all disputed islands as Chilean territories.

This and other turnarounds (see below) of Paz Soldáns Interpretation of the 1881 Boundary Treaty caused the Arbitral Court to discard his maps from the documentary evidence.

Other maps of Paz Soldán show the disputed islands as Chilean Territories:

The map partially reproduced here was drawn up in Buenos Aires in 1889 by J. Duclout and published by E. Nolte.

In the southern region the international boundary is shown traced through the centre of the Beagle channel, continuing beyond the eastern mouth of the Channel, indicating Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands and all other islands and islets extending southward as far as Cape Horn as being under Chilean sovereignty

In the course of time became noticeable in Argentina a position that worked continuously towards a new interpretation of the Boundary Treaty. For example, in 1885 appeared a map of Mariano Paz Soldán that continued the perpendicular in the Tierra del Fuego Island forth to the Antarctic, "«a fanciful line unrelated to the Treaty basis of division»" as stated by the Court of Arbitration. In 1891, the Argentine Government created an "International Boundaries Office" at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1893 issued other decree providing that works on national geography already published should not be considered as officially approved unless accompanied by a "special statement" from the Department of Foreign Affairs.

In 1889 appeared the ""Carte de la République Argentine"" as part of "L'Agriculture et l'Elevage dans la République Argentine", officially sponsored for the purposes of the Argentine participation in the Paris World Exhibition of 1889. In the work of which this map was a part, the
version there given of the article III of the 1881 Treaty (Argentine attribution in the Islands clause), was seriously incorrect:

instead of the original text:

By the review of the cartography, the tribunal refused the validity of 3 in Argentina and 1 in London (by the Argentine Embassy) published maps. The maps are not disponible for now, but the court gave to every refuse a briefly map description (see text on the maps) that allowed us to rebuild the border line as showed at the left side.

In order to decide the validity of a map the court used following criterion for exclusion:

The refused maps are:

1 Paz Soldán Map 1885, published by Carlos Beyer: This version prolonged the perpendicular to the Antarctic and was discarded: "«this map, equally, showed a fanciful line unrelated to the Treaty basis of division»".

2 Map published in 1887 by the Argentine Bureau of Information in London: The footnote 102 regards to this map. It was refused with the argument: "«a completely fanciful line division that could have no possible warrant under the 1881 Treaty»". The map was corrected by the same Bureau on its map of the next year and the corrected map is linked.

3 The "Lajouane" versions of the Paz Soldán maps This versions were published between 1887 and 1890: altogether we know 4 different interpretations of Paz Soldán of the 1881 Treaty, see section "Two maps of Argentina, Mariano Paz Soldán, 1888", (above), and two here (left). Such turnaround lead the tribunal to the conclusion: "«Two volte-faces of this kind within one five-year period – for which no explanation seems to have been offered – must throw doubt on the credibility of the whole series of Paz Soldán based maps. It also raises the question of the reason for it.»".

4 The Pelliza map was published 1888 and presented to the Court by Argentina as the first official Argentine map that represented the border line according to the 1881 Treaty. There were several slight different versions of this map, by some ones the border line runs over the north shore of the channel and by others on the south shore of the channel. The Court refused this maps with following words: "«This result [border line], even if not absolutely underivable from any possible interpretation of the Treaty, is so eccentric that it can hardly be taken seriously»".

This partially reproduced map corresponds to that titled "Preliminary Map of the Southern Region of the Argentine Republic" which was included as No. XIV in the Argentine Evidence submitted by the Argentine Government to British Arbitration in 1898–1902. It is the first official map of Argentina showing in the area of the Beagle Channel a different frontier from the one established in the Boundary Treaty with Chile of 1881. As may be seen from the map, the boundary line deviates from the Beagle Channel towards Picton and Richmond Passages to end up between Lennox and Nueva Islands. In that way Picton and Nueva Islands appear as Argentine and Lennox Island as Chilean. The islands and islets extending southward as far as Cape Horn continue to be shown as under Chilean sovereignty. It should be recalled that there was no question concerning the territories to the south of the Magellan Strait in the British Arbitration of 1898–1902. Thus neither Chile nor Argentina made any specific reference to the boundary shown on the Argentine map reproduced here.

After the discovery of gold in Tierra del Fuego the Romanian adventurer Julio Popper gave a speech at the ""Instituto Geográfico Argentino"" (predecessor of Instituto Geográfico Militar) about a change of course of the Beagle channel. He allegued that the channel didn't reach the Cape San Pío but at the ""Punta Navarro"" flows to the south through the Navarino and Picton islands. 1899 ordered the Argentine navy the ship ARA Almirante Brown (1880) under the command of Captain Juan P. Saenz Valiente on a hydrographic survey of the Beagle channel. The Argentine survey corroborated the Argentine thesis about the change of the Beagle and therefore the institut published 1901 new charts of the zone with a new Toponymy. They expanded the Moat-Bay ("Bahía Moat"), located at the shore of the Tierra del Fuego, opposite to the Picton island, to a (new) Moat channel. The new channel reached from Punta Navarro to Cabo San Pío. Consequently, the Picton, Nueva and Lennox islands became Terra Nullius, because the treaty of 1881 at this zone doesn't mention other islands than "south of the Beagle channel". The toponymy was disclosed to the United Kingdom and to the United States of America (the United States Hydrographic Office used the Argentine name, "Moat Channel" in "South America Pilot (1916)" in p. 246). Chile, the immediate neighbour was not informed and was advised of the new names only 1904 through new charts of the zone edited by the US. Segundo R. Storni, then Leutnant later (1943) Foreign Ministers of Argentina legitimated the modifications:

A soviet map of the Beagle Channel used the Argentine toponyme "Moat Channel" in 1967. See Sowjet map 1967.

The new name didn't prevail and disappeared into oblivion. The Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984 between Chile and Argentina mention (only) the Beagle channel.

This map, whose southern part is reproduced here, is included in Col. Sir Thomas Holdich's work "The Countries of the King's Award" written immediately after his work on the British Arbitration in 1898–1902. After the British Arbitral Award of 1902 and during the course of the work marking out the frontier line indicated therein, Holdich visited the Beagle Channel zone which was not included in the arbitration. In the Beagle Channel region the map marks the international boundary as passing through the latter up to beyond its eastern mouth. Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands and all the other islands extending southwards as far as Cape Horn are shown as under Chilean sovereignty.

Other Europeans maps showing the same zone:

This reproduction of the "Map of the division of the Argentine territory into Military regions 1905" was included in the Military Bulletin of the Argentine Ministry of War, Year IV, vol. I, 1 May 1905, No. 140. The Argentine military regions are distinguished by different colours, all territories located south of the Beagle Channel as far as Cape Horn have been omitted and thus understood to be under Chilean sovereignty.

Partial reproduction of the "Nuevo Mapa de la República Argentina", 1914, prepared by Pablo Ludwig. The complete map is under. In the map Picton and Nueva appear under Argentine, Lennox under Chilean sovereignty.

Rebuild of the sheet 'Ushuaia' from the, 1967 edition. Only the borderline and the oceanic Toponymy are copied from the copyrighted original. A similar map was issued in 1948.

The international boundary shown in the Beagle Channel zone corresponds to the Argentine claim in the area which the arbitral decision of 18 April 1977 put a definitive end. Nueva Island is not shown on the map, and Picton and Lennox Islands are partially shown, coloured as belonging to the Argentine Republic. Nevertheless, all the other islands and islets extending southward as far as Cape Horn figure as under Chilean sovereignty.

In the official Argentine map the geographic nomenclature "OCÉANO ATLÁNTICO SUR" (South Atlantic Ocean) appears inserted to the south of Hoste Island and in the western region of Wollaston and Hermite Islands, in other words more than one degree longitude west of Cape Horn, thus contradicting the (1978) Argentine thesis concerning the ocean toponymy in the region of the extreme south of America, that the Cape Horn was the border between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. The reason could be that in 1938 the Argentine delegation to the Hydrographic Conference in Oslo tried to define the meridian 68° 43'W (through the Chilean Diego Ramírez Islands) as limit between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
During the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (1976–1983) and based on concepts of territorial nationalism and geopolitics Argentine geographs sustained the possession of the islands as a "vital issue" and called on to a "march to the south" in order to follow some kind of Argentine "Manifest Destiny":

The Beagle conflict, the Falklands dispute and the question of the use of the Rio de la Plata Basin became through the works of the geographs topics of popular interests and opinion.

This image shows a facsimile of the map appeared in the cover of the book compiled by of Admiral (R) Isaac Rojas, former vice-president of Argentina and former Chief of the Argentine Navy, and Arturo Medrano ""Argentina en el Atlántico Chile en el Pacífico"". It is approved by the Argentine Ministry of Education for teaching in schools and high schools.

The book justifies, as they say, the Argentine claim over the islands. Not only Picton, Nueva, Lennox and all islands east from Cape Horn meridian are Argentine Territories but also the east side of Navarino Island with the Chilean village of Puerto Toro appears under Argentine sovereignty.
 After the Falklands War, on the postage stamp issued in 1983 Cape Horn island was labeled as Argentinian, and the islands of Picton, Lennox and Nueva at the eastern entrance to the Beagle Channel are shaded like Argentina.
 A map of South America appears on the back of Argentine passports, showing the country's location within the continent and within Mercosur, together with the Argentine Antarctic Claim and the Falkland Islands as part of Argentina. Most of the Chilean Magallanes Region disappeared, included the Strait of Magellan, the Chilean part of Tierra del Fuego and all islands south of the Beagle Channel.
The contrast could hardly be starker between the multiple Argentine views and the sole Chilean view of the 1881 Boundary Treaty. The interpretation of the 1881 Boundary Treaty seems to have challenged to the limit the fantasy and intelligence of the Argentine cartography as of 1888, for they found more than 8 different border lines from the same text. Anyway, in his "Report and Decision" on 18 April 1977 the Court of Arbitration judged:

Argentine scientists Carlos Escudé and Andrés Cisneros in "Historia general de las relaciones exteriores de la República Argentina" give a résumé of the Boundary Treaty of 1881:

The same opinion shares the authors Karl Hernekamp, Annegret I. Haffa and Andrea Wagner in their works mentioned in the reference.

Both countries disagreed about the sovereign rights over the zone and Snipe, an uninhabitable islet between Picton Island and Navarino Island, claimed by both. Chileans call the waterway around the islet "Beagle Channel", but in Argentina they called it "Moat channel" on the grounds that the Beagle Channel, allegedly, went south around Navarino Island. In accordance with the Beagle Channel Arbitration and the Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984 between Chile and Argentina, it should be called Beagle Channel.

Snipe incident

The Snipe incident was a military incident that took place between Chile and Argentina during 1958 as a result of a disputed border line in the Beagle Channel.

The incident began on 12 January 1958 as the crew of the Chilean Navy transporter "Micalvi" built a lighthouse on the islet Snipe to improve navigation in the channel. The beacon of the lighthouse was installed on 1 May.

In April, Isaac Francisco Rojas, Commander of Naval Operations of the Argentine Navy, ordered the destruction of the Chilean lighthouse and its replacement with an Argentine one.
On 11 May, the Argentine lighthouse was dismantled and transported to Puerto Williams by the crew of the Chilean patrol boat "Lientur". Later, on 15 May, the same crew recovered the remains of the first Chilean lighthouse that had been removed and thrown into the sea by the crew of the Argentine patrol boat ARA "Guaraní".

On 8 June, a new Chilean lighthouse was installed on the islet by the crew of the "Lientur".

The next day the lighthouse was shelled and destroyed by the main guns of the Argentine destroyer ARA "San Juan", and a company of Argentine naval infantry occupied the islet to impose the Argentine claim.

Despite the military buildup, a truce was agreed between the parties, that brought a return to previous status quo: no lighthouse and withdrawal of the Argentine military from the islet.

The conflict over the islet (and the zone) was postponed, but Argentina maintained that the zone was disputed, and without a satisfactory solution, there would be no advance or economic use of the zone.

To confront the crisis, the Chilean government, in the last days of the second Carlos Ibáñez del Campo administration, issued the Ley Reservada del Cobre (Spanish for "Copper secret law") that provided yearly for part of state owned Codelco's copper sales, without parliamentary control, for the purchase of weapons.

Twenty years later, in 1978, in order to avoid a repetition of the "fait accompli", Chile placed troops on Snipe and their other islands south of the Beagle Channel before the start of Operation Soberania, Argentina's planned invasion.

The fate of Snipe islet has since been settled by the "Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984", as an internationally recognized territory of the state of Chile. There is now a lighthouse on the islet.

The direct negotiations between Chile and Argentina about the islands and maritime rights in Beagle conflict began after the Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom announced on 2 May 1977 the judgement of the Beagle Channel Arbitration to the governments of both countries. The court ruled that the islands and all adjacent formations belonged to Chile. The direct negotiations finished with the Act of Montevideo on 9 January 1979, where both countries accept the papal mediation after Argentina's call off of the Operation Soberanía. This was the most dangerous phase of the Beagle Conflict and there was a real possibility of open warfare.

Direct negotiations between Chile and Argentina in 1977–78

Argentina and Chile were both ruled by military governments at the time of the negotiations. The Chilean and Argentine governments shared common interests: internal war against subversion, annihilating the opposition; external war against communism, remaining nonetheless part of the non-aligned movement; modernisation and liberalisation of the economy; a conservative approach towards social and class relations. By the end of 1977, the war against subversion and opposition was substantially over in both countries, as the Operation Condor had lost momentum and détente had improved East-West relations. The two countries maintained good economic relations.

But in 1977, the conflict over the Beagle Channel had become the primary foreign policy imperative of both governments.

There was considerable international condemnation of the Chilean Military Regime's human rights record. President Augusto Pinochet enjoyed absolute authority and was largely unaccountable to other elements within the military, the Beagle conflict was a less significant issue and there was a highly unusual dialogue on the subject with the opposition. Eduardo Frei Montalva, leader of the Opposition, backed the policy of the government in this matter:

The most important negotiation goal of the Chilean government was to negotiate the maritime boundary without land loss.

Despite the many violations of human rights in Argentina the junta enjoyed abroad good regards and the human rights commission of the United Nations didn't condemn the Argentine Junta, until 1981. In 1978 the World Cup Final was held in Argentina and their team won the FIFA World Cup. The Argentine President Jorge Rafael Videla was considered by journalists at the beginning of its government with sympathy:

In Argentina, the consequences of the dispute for internal politics were more significant. The conflict became a keyword for the extreme nationalist elements within the military junta that controlled the country until 1983. Among many junta members, a conciliatory approach to Chile came to be regarded as a sign of weakness, giving the dispute far-reaching ramifications at the highest levels of Argentine politics. This ultimately produced an environment in which relatively moderate decision makers assumed a more aggressive posture due to the fear of removal.

The Argentine Historian Luis Alberto Romero wrote about the Argentine Government:

Similar arguments appeared in "New York Times on 31 December 1978":

During the crisis the Argentine Government was divided in two groups, hardliners, which pressured for drastic military actions and softliners that struggled to maintain bilateral negotiations.

Argentina took steps to increment the pressure upon Chile:

Chile held the islands de facto at least since 1881 and de jure after the judgement. The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio annotated about the pre-war disposition

The Ambassador of the United States of America in Buenos Aires in 1978, Raúl Héctor Castro, described in similar words the situation in Chile:

About the issues of the negotiations see Interests of the Parties

One day after the announcement of the award on 2 May 1977, the Argentine Minister of Foreign Affairs foreshadowed a possible refusal: "«…no commitment obliges a country to comply with that which affects its vital interests or that which damages rights of sovereignty…»".

Frenzied diplomatic activity occurred alongside the military preparations.

On 5 May 1977 the Argentine Government sent to Chile the Chief of Staff (jefe del Estado Mayor Conjunto), Admiral Julio Torti with the proposal for direct discussions regarding the consequences of the arbitral award, particularly the maritime border.

This overture eventually led to two rounds of discussions, held from July 5 to 8 1977 in Buenos Aires and October 17 to 20 1977 in Santiago de Chile.

On 14 June 1977 the Chilean Government issued the decree n°416 over the baselines (See Chilean Baselines Map) complicating the situation still further.

On 5 December 1977 Admiral Torti returned to Santiago with a new proposal. The new proposal conceded the Picton, Nueva and Lennox Islands group to Chile, but it called for joint ownership of three other islands to the south that Chile considered unequivocally Chilean: Evout, Barnevelt, and Cape Horn Island. The Torti proposal also provided for a maritime boundary that would extend south for 200 miles along a meridian passing through Cape Horn.

The new proposal extended the problem beyond of the "Hammer" (ABCDEF) to all islands south from the Tierra del Fuego as far as Cape Hoorn.

In December 1977 met the Ministers of Foreign Affairs Patricio Carvajal of Chile and Oscar Antonio Montes of Argentina. Both meetings were unsuccessful.

On 10 January 1978 Chile invited Argentina to submit the dispute to the International Court of Justice. But Argentina, dissatisfied with the ruling, did not pursue further juridical proceedings.

The Argentine and Chilean presidents met in Mendoza on 19 January 1978 and they agreed to meet again in March in a definitive attempt to reach a settlement through direct negotiation.

On 25 January 1978 Argentina repudiated the binding Arbitral Award. On 26 January 1978 Chile declared the Award binding and unappealable.

On 20 February 1978 Argentine and Chilean presidents signed the Act of Puerto Montt establishing a formal structure for further direct negotiations. Negotiations held in accordance with the Act of Puerto Montt were, however, unsuccessful.

On 20 November 1978 Chile proposed again to submit to the International Court in The Hague as provided by a 1972 treaty and was unofficially informed that Argentina would consider that option as a Casus belli, but a mediation was accepted by the Junta.

The two foreign ministers met on December 12 in Buenos Aires to decide who would be asked to mediate. The candidates were the President of the United States of America Jimmy Carter, the King Juan Carlos of Spain, a European President and the Pope. Both minister asserted that the only acceptable candidate was the Pope, but in the evening the Chilean Minister received a phone call to inform him that the Argentine Junta hadn't authorized the signing of the mediation agreement.

The failure of the December 12, 1978 meeting convinced many decision makers in both Chile and Argentina that war was both inevitable and imminent.

On December 14, 1978, in a meeting the Comite Militar, formed by the president, the three members of the Junta, the secretaries of the three armed forces and two more members both from the army's staff, (President Videla and the Foreign Minister were not invited) decided on military action: the Operation Soberanía should begin on 22 December 1978.

The Chilean Armed Forces were not able to impose by presence the Arbitral Award of 1977. Pinochet's regime could not prevent through international pressure the Argentine Declaration of nullity. It was one of the largest defeats of the Chilean dictatorship on international terrain.

The Argentine Regime encumbered a problem for years that they could not resolve. Neither through the threat of war nor through negotiations could Chile be moved to change the (land) border that was defined by the Arbitral Award.

The military tension at the border persisted until the Falklands War, and is often supposed to be the reason for Chilean Support to the United Kingdom during the war.

After the return to democracy in Argentina, Chile accepted shifting the maritime Border to the west.

About the course of the Beagle Channel there were discrepancies. The eastern end of the Channel can be seen as a delta with an east-west arm and a north-south arm (around Navarino Island). The channel specified in the border treaty of 1881 was seen by Chile as the east-west arm, but by Argentina as the north-south arm. Following this controversy, two clauses were in dispute: Chile argued the Channel clause ("... to Chile shall belong all the islands to the south of Beagle Channel up to Cape Horn..."), while Argentina the Atlantic clause ("... the other islands there may be on the Atlantic to the east of Tierra del Fuego..."). Some Chileans argued that the text ""until it touches the Beagle Channel"" in article III meant that Argentina had no navigable waters in the Beagle Channel, although this interpretation was not supported by the Chilean claim.

Beagle Channel Arbitration

On 22 July 1971 Salvador Allende and Alejandro Lanusse, the Presidents of Chile and Argentina, signed an arbitration agreement (the Arbitration Agreement of 1971). This agreement related to their dispute over the territorial and maritime boundaries between them, and in particular the title to the Picton, Nueva and Lennox islands near the extreme end of the American continent, which was submitted to binding arbitration under the auspices of the United Kingdom government.

On 2 May 1977 the court ruled that the islands belonged to Chile (see the Report and decision of the Court of Arbitration).
On 25 January 1978 Argentina repudiated the arbitration decision and on 22 December 1978 started (and a few hours later aborted) military action to invade both those islands and continental Chile.

The British Crown had previously in 1902 and 1966 acted as arbitrator between Chile and Argentina (see Arbitration 1902 here), but, given the growing Falkland Islands sovereignty dispute between Argentina and the United Kingdom, the parties agreed to change the statutory framework of the Arbitration.

The Arbitration Agreement of 1971 stipulated:

In this way the United Kingdom did not have any influence on the judgement: the procedure, the legal framework, the judges and the matter in dispute had all been defined by both countries.

The procedure had four phases:Chile handed over to the Court 14 volumes and 213 maps, and Argentina 12 volumes and 195 maps.

During the first fortnight of March 1976, the Court, accompanied by the Registrar and Liaison Officers from both sides, visited the Beagle Channel region, and inspected the islands and waterways concerned, first on the Chilean Naval Transport Vessel ""Aquiles"", and then on the Argentine Naval Transport Vessel ""ARA Bahia Aguirre"".

In the border treaty of 1855 Chile and Argentina had agreed to retain the borders of the Spanish colonial administration. This principle, known in jurisprudence as "Uti possidetis", served two purposes: the first was to divide the territory between the two countries, and the second to preclude the creation of "Res nullius" areas that could have been taken in possession by other powers (such as the United States of America, the UK or France – although the Beagle Channel had been unknown until 1830 and there had been no Spanish settlements south of Chiloé).

The boundary treaty of 1881 described, without any map, the course of the 5600 km border as follows:

The controversial articles II and III of the 1881 treaty were:

Under the so-called oceanic principle Argentina believed that the "uti possidetis" doctrine operated such that, under the arrangements operated by the colonial administrations, Chile (then the Captaincy General of Chile) had no territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean and the Argentine (then the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata) could not have territorial waters in the Pacific Ocean. The Argentine saw a reaffirmation of this principle in the Protocols of 1902, according to Rizzo Romano the first arms control pact in the world, under which both countries agreed that the Chilean navy should have enough ships to defend the interests of Chile in the Pacific, and the Argentine navy should have enough ships to defend the interests of Argentina in the Atlantic. Chile doesn't consider the 1902 protocol as a border treaty and the word "Pacific" doesn't appear in the Boundary treaty, and hence claimed that the boundary between the Pacific and the Atlantic had never been defined.
To resolve the conflicting interests of both countries, they decided in 1881 on an agreement; but nearly a century later there was still no mutual understanding of what that agreement had consisted of. Chile maintained it had only renounced rights to eastern Patagonia (today continental south Argentina) to obtain full possession of the Strait of Magellan, but Argentina believed Chile received the Strait of Magellan in return for renouncing all coasts bordering the Atlantic Ocean.

A unanimous judgement was handed over to Queen Elizabeth II on 18 April 1977. The French judge André Gros gave a dissenting vote, not concerning the result but the reason. On 2 May 1977 the judgement was announced to the governments of both countries.

It involved the border running approximately along the center of the Channel, and awarded both Chile and Argentina sovereignty over navigable waters in the Channel:

Whaits island, the islets called Snipe, Eugenia, Solitario, Hermanos, Gardiner and Reparo, and the bank known as Herradura were awarded to Chile. All of these lie near the southern bank of the Beagle Channel.

Argentina was awarded all islands, islets and rocks near the north coast of the channel: Bridges, Eclaireurs, Gable, Becasses, Martillo and Yunque.

At the eastern end of the Channel, the judgement recognized the sovereignty of Chile over the Picton, Nueva and Lennox islands and all their adjacent islets and rocks.

The territorial waters established by these coasts, according to international maritime law, established Chilean rights in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Court sentenced also:

The court rejected both the uti possidetis principle and the oceanic principle because:

The tribunal considered that the exchange of Patagonia for the Strait of Magellan was the transaction behind the 1881 treaty:

After careful consideration of all possible word meanings and interpretations of the text, the court refused the Atlantic clause:

Chile accepted the judgement immediately and enacted it into its domestic law on 14 June 1977 (decree n°416 over the base lines).

On 25 January 1978 Argentina repudiated the arbitration award. According to Argentina:

It has been argued that the Argentine claims over the Beagle Channel could not be sustained from a legal point of view and that in practice many of their assertions were subjective.

The court awarded navigable waters on the north bank of the eastern part of the Channel to Argentina, but otherwise it met all Chilean claims. Although the arbitration concerned only small islands, the direction of the new demarcation of the frontier would under international maritime law give Chile significant rights running into the Atlantic Ocean, and would also significantly reduce the claims of Argentina on the Antarctic continent and its waters.

The Argentine rejection led both countries to the verge of war. On 22 December 1978 Argentina started military action to invade the islands. Only last minute papal mediation prevented the outbreak of armed conflict. The award was a defeat for Argentine foreign policy, and initiated an uncoupling from the international community, which lead Argentina three years later into the Falklands war.

The arbitration was completely separate from the Falkland Islands issue, a fact that is often obfuscated or publicly denied in Argentina, where the arbitration is often presented as a plot by the UK.

Pablo Lacoste in his work ""La disputa por el Beagle y el papel de los actores no estatales argentinos"" (Argentine Civil Society Agencies in the Beagle Dispute) says:

Chile kept in mind the Argentine breach of the arbitration agreement.

The award brought the military dictatorships on both sides to the border to a unique and paradoxical situation: in Chile they celebrated the "wise" decision of the (overthrown) enemy Allende, and in Argentina they criticized the "imprudent" decision of his former colleague in power, general Lanusse.

The award was later fully recognized by Argentina in the Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1984.

Most of the members of the Junta are currently in prison for crimes against humanity and genocide.
The Beagle conflict began to brew in the 1960s, when Argentina began to claim that the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands in the Beagle Channel were rightfully hers. In 1971, Chile and Argentina signed an agreement formally submitting the Beagle Channel issue to binding Beagle Channel Arbitration. On May 2, 1977 the court ruled that the islands and all adjacent formations belonged to Chile. See the Report and decision of the Court of Arbitration.

History of Argentina

The history of Argentina can be divided into four main parts: the pre-Columbian time or early history (up to the sixteenth century), the colonial period (1530–1810), the period of nation-building (1810-1880), and the history of modern Argentina (from around 1880).

Prehistory in the present territory of Argentina began with the first human settlements on the southern tip of Patagonia around 13,000 years ago. Written history began with the arrival of Spanish chroniclers in the expedition of Juan Díaz de Solís in 1516 to the Río de la Plata, which marks the beginning of Spanish occupation of this region.

In 1776 the Spanish Crown established the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, an umbrella of territories from which, with the Revolution of May 1810, began a process of gradual formation of several independent states, including one called the United Provinces of Río de la Plata. With the declaration of independence on July 9, 1816 and the military defeat of the Spanish Empire in 1824, a federal state was formed in 1853-1861, known today as the Republic of Argentina.

The area now known as Argentina was relatively sparsely populated until the period of European colonization. The earliest traces of human life are dated from the Paleolithic period, and there are further signs in the Mesolithic and Neolithic. However, large areas of the interior and Piedmont were apparently depopulated during an extensive dry period between 4000 and 2000 B.C.

The Uruguayan archaeologist Raúl Campá Soler divided the indigenous peoples in Argentina into three main groups: basic hunters and food gatherers, without the development of pottery; advanced gatherers and hunters; and basic farmers with pottery. The second group could be found in the pampas and south of Patagonia, and the third one included the Charrúa and Minuane and the Guaraní.

The major ethnic groups included the Onas at Tierra del Fuego, Yámana at the archipelago between the Beagle Channel and Cape Horn, Tehuelche in the Patagonia, many peoples at the literal, guaycurúes and which is at Chaco. The Guaraní had expanded across large areas of South America, but settled in the northeastern provinces of Argentina. The Toba (Komlek) nation and the Diaguita which included the Calchaqui and the Quilmes lived in the North and the Comechingones in what is today the province of Cordoba. The Charrúa (which included the Minuane), yaros, Bohán and Chaná (and Chaná-Timbú) were people located in the actual territory of Entre Ríos and the Querandí in Buenos Aires.

In the late 15th century, the Native tribes of the Quebrada de Humahuaca were conquered by the Inca Empire, under Topa Inca Yupanqui, to secure the supply of metals such as silver, zinc, and copper. The Incan domination of the area lasted for about half a century and ended with the arrival of the Spanish in 1536.

Europeans first arrived in the region with the 1502 Portuguese voyage of Gonçalo Coelho and Amerigo Vespucci. Around 1512, João de Lisboa and Estevão de Fróis discovered the Rio de La Plata in present-day Argentina, exploring its estuary, contacting the Charrúa people, and bringing the first news of the "people of the mountains", the Inca empire, obtained from the local natives. They also traveled as far south as the Gulf of San Matias at 42ºS, on the northern shores of Patagonia. The Spanish, led by Juan Díaz de Solís, visited the territory which is now Argentina in 1516. In 1536 Pedro de Mendoza established a small settlement at the modern location of Buenos Aires, which was abandoned in 1541.

A second one was established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, and Córdoba in 1573 by Jerónimo Luis de Cabrera. Those regions were part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, whose capital was Lima, and settlers arrived from that city. Unlike the other regions of South America, the colonization of the Río de la Plata estuary was not influenced by any gold rush, since it lacked any precious metals to mine.

The natural ports on the Río de la Plata estuary could not be used because all shipments were meant to be made through the port of Callao near Lima, a condition that led to contraband becoming the normal means of commerce in cities such as Asunción, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo.

The Spanish raised the status of this region by establishing the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata in 1776. This viceroyalty consisted of today's Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay, as well as much of present-day Bolivia. Buenos Aires, now holding the customs of the new political subdivision, became a flourishing port, as the revenues from the Potosí, the increasing maritime activity in terms of goods rather than precious metals, the production of cattle for the export of leather and other products, and other political reasons, made it gradually become one of the most important commercial centers of the region.

The viceroyalty was, however, short-lived due to lack of internal cohesion among its many regions and lack of Spanish support. Ships from Spain became scarce again after the Spanish defeat at the battle of Trafalgar, that gave the British maritime supremacy. The British tried to invade Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806 and 1807, but were defeated both times by Santiago de Liniers. Those victories, achieved without help from mainland Spain, boosted the confidence of the city.

The beginning of the Peninsular War in Spain and the capture of the Spanish king Ferdinand VII created great concern all around the viceroyalty. It was thought that, without a King, people in America should rule themselves. This idea led to multiple attempts to remove the local authorities at Chuquisaca, La Paz, Montevideo and Buenos Aires, all of which were short-lived. A new successful attempt, the May Revolution of 1810, took place when it was reported that all of Spain, with the exception of Cádiz and León, had been conquered.

The May Revolution ousted the viceroy. Other forms of government, such as a constitutional monarchy or a Regency were briefly considered.
The viceroyalty was also renamed, and it nominally became the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata. However, the status of the different territories that had belonged to the viceroyalty changed many times during the course of the war, as some regions would remain loyal to their previous governors and others were captured or recaptured; later these would split into several countries.

The first military campaigns against the royalists were waged by Manuel Belgrano and Juan José Castelli. The Primera Junta, after expanding to become the Junta Grande, was replaced by the First Triumvirate. A Second Triumvirate would replace it years later, calling for the Assembly of year XIII that was meant to declare independence and write a constitution. However, it did not do either, and replaced the triumvirates with a single head of state office, the Supreme Director.

By this time José de San Martín arrived in Buenos Aires with other generals of the Peninsular War. They gave new strength to the Revolutionary war, which was marked by the defeat of Belgrano and Castelli and the royalist resistance at the Banda Oriental. Alvear took Montevideo, and San Martín started a military campaign that would span an important part of the Spanish territories in America. He created the Army of the Andes in Mendoza and, with the help of Bernardo O'Higgins and other Chileans, he made the Crossing of the Andes and liberated Chile. With the Chilean navy at his disposal, he moved to Peru, liberating that country as well. San Martín met Simón Bolívar at Guayaquil, and retired from action.

A new assembly, the Congress of Tucumán, was called while San Martín was preparing the crossing of the Andes. It finally declared independence from Spain or any other foreign power. Bolivia declared itself independent in 1825, and Uruguay was created in 1828 as a result of the Cisplatine War.

The United Kingdom officially recognized Argentine independence in 1825, with the signing of a "Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation" on February 2; the British chargé d'affaires in Buenos Aires, Woodbine Parish, signed on behalf of his country. Spanish recognition of Argentine independence was not to come for several decades.

The map below is based on a wide range of antique maps for the periods shown and is intended to give a broad idea of the changes in the State of Argentina in the nineteenth century. The periods are broad and plus or minus about a decade around each date. The hatched areas are disputed or subject to change during the period, the text in this article will explain these changes. There are minor changes of territory that are not shown on the map.

The defeat of the Spanish was followed by a long civil war between unitarians and federalists, about the organization of the country and the role of Buenos Aires in it. Unitarians thought that Buenos Aires should lead the less-developed provinces, as the head of a strong centralized government. Federalists thought instead that the country should be a federation of autonomous provinces, like the United States. During this period, the government would kidnap protestors, and torture them for information.

During this period, the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata lacked a head of state, since the unitarian defeat at the Battle of Cepeda had ended the authority of the Supreme Directors and the 1819 Constitution. There was a new attempt in 1826 to write a constitution, leading to the designation of Bernardino Rivadavia as President of Argentina, but it was rejected by the provinces. Rivadavia resigned due to the poor management at the Cisplatine War, and the 1826 constitution was repealed.

During this time, the Governors of Buenos Aires Province received the power to manage the international relations of the confederation, including war and debt payment. The dominant figure of this period was the federalist Juan Manuel de Rosas, who is portrayed from different angles by the diverse historiographic flows in Argentina: liberal history usually considers him a dictator, while revisionists support him on the grounds of his defense of national sovereignty.

He ruled the province of Buenos Aires from 1829 to 1852, facing military threats from secession attempts, neighboring countries, and even European nations. Although Rosas was a Federalist, he kept the customs receipts of Buenos Aires under the exclusive control of the city, whereas the other provinces expected to have a part of the revenue. Rosas considered this a fair measure because only Buenos Aires was paying the external debt generated by the Baring Brothers loan to Rivadavia, the war of independence and the war against Brazil. He developed a paramilitary force of his own, the Popular Restorer Society, commonly known as ""Mazorca"" ("Corncob").

Rosas' reluctance to call for a new assembly to write a constitution led General Justo José de Urquiza from Entre Ríos to turn against him. Urquiza defeated Rosas during the battle of Caseros and called for such an assembly. The Argentine Constitution of 1853 is, with amendments, still in force to this day. The Constitution was not immediately accepted by Buenos Aires, which seceded from the Confederation; it rejoined a few years later. In 1862 Bartolomé Mitre became the first president of the unified country.

The presidency of Bartolomé Mitre saw an economic improvement in Argentina, with agricultural modernization, foreign investment, new railroads and ports and a wave of immigration from Europe. Mitre also stabilized the political system by commanding federal interventions that defeated the personal armies of caudillos Chacho Peñaloza and Juan Sáa. Argentina joined Uruguay and Brazil against Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance, which ended during Sarmiento's rule with the defeat of Paraguay and the annexation of part of its territory by Argentina.

Despite victory in the war, Mitre's popularity declined severely because a broad section of the Argentine population was opposed to the war due to the alliance with Brazil (Argentina's historic rival) that took place during the war, and the betrayal of Paraguay (which had been until then one of the country's most important economic allies). One of the major hallmarks of Mitre's presidency was the "Law of Compromise", in which Buenos Aires joined the Argentine Republic and allowed the government to use the City of Buenos Aires as the center of government, but without federalizing the city and by reserving the right of the province of Buenos Aires to secede from the nation if conflict arose.

In 1868 Mitre was succeeded by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, who promoted public education, culture, telegraphs ; as well as the modernization of the Army and the Navy. Sarmiento managed to defeat the last known caudillos and also dealt with the fallout of the Triple Alliance War, which included a decrease in national production due to the death of thousands of soldiers and an outbreak of diseases, such as cholera and yellow fever, brought by returning soldiers.

In 1874 Nicolás Avellaneda became president and ran into trouble when he had to deal with the economic depression left by the Panic of 1873. Most of these economic issues were solved when new land was opened for development after the expansion of national territory through the Conquest of the Desert, led by his war minister Julio Argentino Roca. This military campaign took most of the territories under the control of natives, and reduced their population.

In 1880 a trade conflict caused turmoil in Buenos Aires, which led governor Carlos Tejedor to declare secession from the republic. Avellaneda denied them this right, breaking the Law of Compromise, and proceeded to send army troops led by Roca to take over the province. Tejedor's secession efforts were defeated and Buenos Aires joined the republic definitively, federalizing the city of Buenos Aires and handing it over to the government as the nation's capital city.

After his surge in popularity due to his successful desert campaign, Julio Roca was elected president in 1880 as the candidate for the National Autonomist Party (Partido Autonomista Nacional - PAN), a party that would remain in power until 1916. During his presidency, Roca created a net of political alliances and installed several measures that helped him retain almost absolute control of the Argentine political scene throughout the 1880s. This keen ability with political strategy earned him his nickname of ""The Fox"".

The country's economy benefited from a change from extensive farming to industrial agriculture and a huge European immigration, but there wasn't yet a strong move towards industrialization. At that time, Argentina received some of the highest levels of foreign investment in Latin America. In the midst of this economic expansion, the Law 1420 of Common Education of 1884 guaranteed universal, free, non-religious education to all children. This and other government policies were strongly opposed by the Roman Catholic Church in Argentina, causing the Holy See to break off diplomatic relations with the country for several years and setting the stage for decades of continued Church–state strain.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, Argentina temporarily resolved its border disputes with Chile with the Puna de Atacama dispute of 1899, the Boundary Treaty of 1881 between Chile and Argentina and the 1902 General Treaty of Arbitration. Roca's government and those that followed were aligned with the Argentine oligarchy, especially the great land owners.

In 1888, Miguel Juárez Celman became president after Roca was constitutionally disqualified from re-election; Celman attempted to reduce Roca's control over the political scene, which earned him his predecessor's opposition. Roca led a great opposition movement against Celman, which coupled with the devastating effects that the Long Depression had on the Argentine economy, allowed the Civic opposition party to start a coup d'état which would be later known as the Revolution of the Park. The Revolution was led by the three main leaders of the Civic Union, Leandro Alem, former president Bartolomé Mitre and moderate socialist Juan B. Justo. Though it failed in its main goals, the revolution forced Juárez Celman's resignation and marked the decline of the Generation of '80.

In 1891, Roca proposed that the Civic Union elect someone to be vice-president to his own presidency the next time elections came around. One group led by Mitre decided to take the deal, while another more intransigent group led by Alem was opposed. This eventually led to the split of the Civic Union into the National Civic Union (Argentina), led by Mitre, and the Radical Civic Union, led by Alem. After this division occurred, Roca withdrew his offer, having completed his plan to divide the Civic Union and decrease their power. Alem would eventually commit suicide in 1896; control of the Radical Civic Union went to his nephew and protégé, Hipólito Yrigoyen.

After Celman's downfall, his vice-president Carlos Pellegrini took over and proceeded to resolve the economic crisis which afflicted the country, earning him the moniker of ""The Storm Sailor"". Fearing another wave of opposition from Roca like the one imposed on Celman, Pellegrini remained moderate in his presidency ending his predecessor's efforts to distance ""The Fox"" from political control. The following governments up until 1898 took similar measures and sided with Roca to avoid being politically chastised.

In 1898, Roca became president again in a politically unstable situation, with a large number of social conflicts that included massive strikes and anarchist subversion attempts. Roca handled most of these conflicts by having the police or the army crack down on protestors, rebels and suspected rebels. After the end of his second presidency, Roca fell ill and his role in political affairs began to decrease gradually until his death in late 1914.

In 1904, Alfredo Palacios, a member of Juan B. Justo's Socialist Party (founded in 1896), became the first Socialist deputy in Argentina, as a representative for the working-class neighborhood of La Boca in Buenos Aires. He helped create many laws, including the Ley Palacios against sexual exploitation, and others regulating child and woman labor, working hours and Sunday rest.

The hegemony of the PAN ended in 1910 with the election of Roque Sáenz Peña to the presidency. Peña was a progressive member of the PAN who disliked the fraudulent elective system the PAN employed and thus passed the Sáenz Peña Law, which made the political vote mandatory, secret and universal among males aged eighteen or more. Under this law the first non-PAN president since 1880 was elected in 1916, Hipólito Yrigoyen of the Radical Civic Union.

Conservative forces dominated Argentine politics until 1916, when the Radicals, led by Hipólito Yrigoyen, won control of the government through the first national elections under universal male suffrage. 745,000 citizens were allowed to vote, of a total population of 7.5 million (immigrants, who represented much of the population, were not allowed to vote); of these, 400,000 abstained.

Yrigoyen, however, only obtained 45% of the votes, which did not allow him a majority in Parliament, where the conservatives remained the leading force. Thus, of 80 draft laws proposed by the executive, only 26 were voted through by the conservative majority. A moderate agricultural reform proposal was rejected by Parliament, as was an income tax on interest, and the creation of a Bank of the Republic (which was to have the missions of the current Central Bank).

Despite this conservative opposition, the Radical Civic Union (UCR), with their emphasis on fair elections and democratic institutions, opened their doors to Argentina's expanding middle class as well as to social groups previously excluded from power. Yrigoyen's policy was to "fix" the system, by enacting necessary reforms which would enable the agroindustrial export model to preserve itself. It alternated moderate social reforms with repression of the social movements. In 1918, a student movement started at the University of Córdoba, which eventually led to the University Reform, which quickly spread to the rest of Latin America. In May '68, French students recalled the Córdoba movement.

The Tragic Week of January 1919, during which the Argentine Regional Workers' Federation (FORA, founded in 1901) had called for a general strike after a police shooting, ended with 700 killed and 4,000 injured. General Luis Dellepiane marched on Buenos Aires to re-establish civil order. Despite being called on by some to initiate a coup against Yrigoyen, he remained loyal to the President, on the sole condition that the latter would allow him a free hand in the repression of the demonstrations. Social movements thereafter continued in the "Forestal" British company, and in Patagonia, where Hector Varela headed the military repression, assisted by the Argentine Patriotic League, killing 1,500.

On the other hand, Yrigoyen's administration enacted the Labor Code establishing the right to strike in 1921, implemented minimum wage laws and collective contracts. It also initiated the creation of the "Dirección General de Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales" (YPF), the state oil company, in June 1922. Radicalism rejected class struggle and advocated social conciliation.

Meanwhile, the Radicals continued Argentina's neutrality policy during World War I, despite the United States urging them to declare war against the Central Powers. Neutrality enabled Argentina to export goods to Europe, in particular to Great Britain, as well as to issue credit to the belligerent powers. Germany sank two Argentine civilian ships, "Monte Protegido" on April 4, 1917 and the "Toro", but the diplomatic incident ended only with the expulsion of the German ambassador, Karl von Luxburg. Yrigoyen organized a Conference of Neutral Powers in Buenos Aires, to oppose the United States' attempt to bring American states in the European war, and also supported Sandino's resistance in Nicaragua.

In September 1922, Yrigoyen's administration refused to follow the "cordon sanitaire" policy enacted against the Soviet Union, and, basing its policy on the assistance given to Austria after the war, decided to send to the USSR 5 million pesos in assistance.

The same year, Yrigoyen was replaced by his rival inside the UCR, Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, an aristocrat, who defeated Norberto Piñero's "Concentración Nacional" (conservatives) with 458,457 votes to 200,080. Alvear brought to his cabinet personalities belonging to the traditional ruling classes, such as José Nicolás Matienzo at the Interior Ministry, Ángel Gallardo in Foreign Relations, Agustín P. Justo at the War Ministry, Manuel Domecq García at the Marine and Rafael Herrera Vegas at the Haciendas. Alvear's supporters founded the "Unión Cívica Radical Antipersonalista", opposed to Yrigoyen's party.

During the early 1920s, the rise of the anarchist movement, fueled by the arrival of recent émigrés and deportees from Europe, spawned a new generation of left-wing activism in Argentina. The new left, mostly anarchists and anarcho-communists, rejected the incremental progressivism of the old Radical and Socialist elements in Argentina in favor of immediate action. The extremists, such as Severino Di Giovanni, openly espoused violence and 'propaganda by the deed'. A wave of bombings and shootouts with police culminated in an attempt to assassinate U.S. President Herbert Hoover on his visit to Argentina in 1928 and a nearly successful attempt to assassinate Yrigoyen in 1929 after he was re-elected to the presidency.

In 1921, the counter-revolutionary "Logia General San Martín" was founded, and diffused nationalist ideas in the military until its dissolution in 1926. Three years later, the "Liga Republicana" (Republican League) was founded by Roberto de Laferrère, on the model of Benito Mussolini's Blackshirts in Italy. The Argentine Right found its major influences in the 19th-century Spanish writer Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and in the French royalist Charles Maurras. Also in 1922, the poet Leopoldo Lugones, who had turned towards fascism, made a famous speech in Lima, known as "the time of the sword", in the presence of the War Minister and future dictator Agustín P. Justo, which called for a military coup and the establishment of a military dictatorship.

In 1928, Yrigoyen was re-elected as president and began a series of reforms to increase workers' rights. This intensified the conservative opposition against Yrigoyen, which grew even stronger after Argentina was devastated by the beginning of the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash. On September 6, 1930, a military coup led by the pro-fascist general José Félix Uriburu overthrew Yrigoyen's government and began a period in Argentine history known as the Infamous Decade.

During the Great Depression, exports of frozen beef, especially to Great Britain, provided much needed foreign currency, but trade fell off sharply.

In 1929, Argentina was wealthy by world standards, but the prosperity ended after 1929 with the worldwide Great Depression. In 1930, a military coup, supported by the Argentine Patriotic League, forced Hipólito Yrigoyen from power, and replaced him with José Félix Uriburu. Support for the coup was bolstered by the sagging Argentine economy, as well as a string of bomb attacks and shootings involving radical anarchists, which alienated moderate elements of Argentine society and angered the conservative right, which had long been agitating for decisive action by the military forces.

The military coup initiated during the period known as the "Infamous Decade", characterized by electoral fraud, persecution of the political opposition (mainly against the UCR) and pervasive government corruption, against the background of the global depression.

During his brief tenure as president, Uriburu cracked down heavily on anarchists and other far-left groups, resulting in 2,000 illegal executions of members of anarchist and communist groups. The most famous (and perhaps most symbolic of anarchism's decay in Argentina at the time) was the execution of Severino Di Giovanni, who was captured in late January 1931 and executed on the first of February of the same year.

After becoming president through the coup, Uriburu attempted to create a constitutional reform that would include corporatism in the Argentine Constitution. This move toward fascism was viewed negatively by the conservative backers of the coup and they turned their support to the more moderate conservative general Agustín P. Justo, who won the presidency in a 1932 election that was heavily fraudulent.

Justo began a policy of liberal economic moves that primarily benefitted the nation's upper classes and permitted great political and industrial corruption at the expense of national growth. One of the most infamous decisions of Justo's government was the creation of the Roca–Runciman Treaty between Argentina and the United Kingdom, which benefitted the British economy and the rich beef producers of Argentina.

In 1935, progressive democrat Senator Lisandro de la Torre began an investigation into several corruption allegations within the Argentine beef production industry, during which he attempted to charge Justo's Minister of Agriculture, Luis Duhau, and the Minister of Finance, Federico Pinedo, with political corruption and fraud charges. During the exposition of the investigation in the National Congress, Duhau started a fight among the senators, during which his bodyguard, Ramón Valdez-Cora, tried to kill De La Torre but accidentally ended up shooting De La Torre's friend and political partner Enzo Bordabehere. The meat investigation was dropped soon afterward, but not before De La Torre managed to achieve the incarceration of the head of the "Anglo" meat company for corruption charges. De la Torre would later commit suicide in 1939.

The collapse of international trade led to industrial growth focused on import substitution, leading to a stronger economic independence. Political conflict increased, marked by confrontation between right-wing fascists and leftist radicals, while military-oriented conservatives controlled the government. Though many claimed the polls to be fraudulent, Roberto Ortiz was elected president in 1937 and took office the next year, but due to his fragile health he was succeeded by his vice-president, Ramón Castillo. Castillo effectively took power in 1940; he formally assumed leadership in 1942.

The civilian government appeared to be close to joining the Allies, but many officers of the Argentine armed forces (and ordinary Argentine citizens) objected due to fear of the spread of communism. There was a wide support to stay neutral in the conflict, as during World War I. The government was also questioned for domestic policy reasons, namely, electoral fraud, poor labour rights, and the selection of Patrón Costas to run for the presidency.

On June 4, 1943, the United Officers' Group (GOU), which was a secret alliance between military leaders led by Pedro Pablo Ramírez, Arturo Rawson, Edelmiro Farrell, and Farrell's protégé Juan Perón, marched to the Casa Rosada and demanded the resignation of president Castillo. After hours of threats, their goal was achieved and the president resigned. This event is considered by historians to be the official end of the Infamous Decade.

After the coup, Ramírez took power. Although he did not declare war, he broke off relations with the Axis powers. Argentina's largest neighbor, Brazil, had already entered the war on the Allied side in 1942.

In 1944 Ramirez was replaced by Farrell, an army officer of Irish-Argentine origin who had spent two years attached to Mussolini's army in the twenties. Initially, his government continued to maintain a neutral policy. Towards the end of the war, Farrell decided it was in the interests of Argentina to be attached to the winning side. Like several Latin American states, Argentina made a late declaration of war against Germany with no intention of providing any military forces.

Juan Perón managed relations with labourers and unions, and became highly popular. He was deposed and detained on Martín García Island, but a massive demonstration on October 17, 1945, forced the government to free Perón and restore him to office. Perón would win the elections shortly afterward by a landslide. The US ambassador, Spruille Braden, took direct action in Argentine politics supporting the antiperonist parties.

In 1946 General Juan Perón became president; his populist ideology became known as peronism. His popular wife Eva Perón played a leading political role until her death in 1952. Perón established censorship by closing down 110 publications between 1943 and 1946. During Juan Perón's rule, the number of unionized workers and government programs increased.

His government followed an isolationist foreign policy and attempted to reduce the political and economic influence of other nations. Perón expanded government spending. His policies led to ruinous inflation. The peso lost about 70% of its value from early 1948 to early 1950; inflation reached 50% in 1951.

Opposition members were imprisoned and some of them tortured. He dismissed many important and capable advisers, while promoting officials largely on the basis of personal loyalty. A coup ("Revolución Libertadora") led by Eduardo Lonardi, and supported by the Catholic Church, deposed him in 1955. He went into exile, eventually settling in Francoist Spain.

In Argentina, the 1950s and 1960s were marked by frequent coups d'état, low economic growth in the 1950s and high growth rates in the 1960s. Argentina faced problems of continued social and labor demands. Argentine painter Antonio Berni's works reflected the social tragedies of these times, painting in particular life in the "villas miseria" (shanty towns).

Following the "Revolución Libertadora" military coup, Eduardo Lonardi held power only briefly and was succeeded by Pedro Aramburu, president from November 13, 1955, to May 1, 1958. In June 1956, two Peronist generals, Juan José Valle and Raul Tanco, attempted a coup against Aramburu, criticizing an important purge in the army, the abrogation of social reforms and persecution of trade-union leaders. They also demanded liberation of all political and labor activists and a return to constitutional order. The uprising was quickly crushed. General Valle and other members of the military were executed, and twenty civilians were arrested at their homes and their bodies were thrown in the León Suarez dumping ground.

Along with the June 1955 Casa Rosada bombing on the Plaza de Mayo, the León Suarez massacre is one of the important events that started a cycle of violence. Pedro Aramburu was later kidnapped and executed for this massacre, in 1970, by Fernando Abal Medina, Emilio Angel Maza, Mario Firmenich and others, who would later form the "Montoneros" movement.

In 1956, special elections were held to reform the constitution. The Radical Party under Ricardo Balbín won a majority, although 25% of all ballots were turned in the blank as a protest by the banned Peronist party. Also in support of Peronism, the left wing of the Radical Party, led by Arturo Frondizi, left the Constitutional Assembly. The Assembly was severely damaged by this defection and was only able to restore the Constitution of 1853 with the sole addition of the Article 14 "bis", which enumerated some social rights.

A ban on Peronist expression and representation continued during the fragile civilian governments of the period 1958–1966. Frondizi, UCRI's candidate, won the presidential elections of 1958, obtaining approximately 4,000,000 votes against 2,500,000 for Ricardo Balbín (with 800,000 neutral votes). From Caracas, Perón supported Frondizi and called upon his supporters to vote for him, as a means toward the end of prohibition of the Peronist movement and the re-establishment of the workers' social legislation voted during Perón's leadership.

On one hand, Frondizi appointed Álvaro Alsogaray as Minister of Economy to placate powerful agrarian interests and other conservatives. A member of the powerful military dynasty Alsogaray, Álvaro, who had already been Minister of Industry under Aramburu's military rule, devalued the peso and imposed credit control.

On the other hand, Frondizi followed a laicist program, which raised concerns among the Catholic nationalist forces, leading to the organization, between 1960 and 1962, of the far-right Tacuara Nationalist Movement.

The Tacuara, the "first urban guerrilla group in Argentina", engaged in several anti-Semitic bombings, in particular following Adolf Eichmann's kidnapping by the Mossad in 1960. During the visit of Dwight Eisenhower to Argentina, in February 1962 (Eisenhower had been until 1961 President of the United States), the Tacuara headed nationalist demonstrations against him, leading to the imprisonment of several of their leaders, among them Joe Baxter.

However, Frondizi's government ended in 1962 with intervention yet again by the military, after a series of local elections were won by the Peronist candidates. José María Guido, chairman of the senate, claimed the presidency on constitutional grounds before the deeply divided armed forces were able to agree on a name. Right-wing elements in the Argentine armed forces in favor of direct military rule and the suppression of former Peronist politicians, subsequently attempted to wrest control of the government in the 1963 Argentine Navy Revolt on April 2. The failure of the revolt's plotters to win the loyalty of army units near the capital permitted Guido's government to swiftly put down the revolt at the cost of 21 lives.

In new elections in 1963, neither Peronists nor Communists were allowed to participate. Arturo Illia of the Radical People's Party won these elections; regional elections and by-elections over the next few years favored Peronists.

On the other hand, the Tacuara were outlawed by Illia in 1965, some of its members ultimately turning to the Peronist Left (such as Joe Baxter) while others remained in their far-right positions (such as Alberto Ezcurra Uriburu, who would work with the Triple A).

Despite the fact that the country grew and developed economically during Illia's tenure as president, he was eventually ousted in a military coup in 1966.

Amidst growing worker and student unrest, another coup took place in June 1966, self-designated "Revolución Argentina" (Argentine Revolution), which established General Juan Carlos Onganía as "de facto" president, supported by several leaders of the General Confederation of Labour (CGT), among these the general secretary, Augusto Vandor. This led to a series of military-appointed presidents.

While preceding military coups were aimed at establishing temporary, transitional "junta"s, the "Revolución Argentina" headed by Onganía aimed at establishing a new political and social order, opposed both to liberal democracy and communism, which gave to the Armed Forces of Argentina a leading, political role in the economic rationalization of the country. The political scientist Guillermo O'Donnell named this type of regime an "authoritarian-bureaucratic state", in reference both to the "Revolución Argentina", the Brazilian military regime (1964–85), Augusto Pinochet's regime (starting in 1973) and Juan María Bordaberry's regime in Uruguay.

Onganía's Minister of Economy, Adalbert Krieger Vasena, decreed a wage freeze and a 40% devaluation of the currency, which strongly affected the state of the Argentine economy, in particular the agricultural sector, favoring foreign capital. Vasena suspended collective labour conventions, reformed the hydrocarbon law which had established a partial monopoly of the "Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales" (YPF) state enterprise, as well as passing a law facilitating expulsions in case of failure to pay rent. Finally, the right to strike was suspended (Law 16,936) and several other laws reversed progress made concerning labor laws throughout the preceding years.

The workers' movement divided itself between Vandoristas, who supported a "Peronism without Peron" line (Vandor declared that "to save Perón, one has to be against Perón") and advocated negotiation with the junta, and Peronists, themselves divided.

In July 1966 Onganía ordered the forcible clearing of five facilities of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) on July 29, 1966 by the Federal Police, an event known as "La Noche de los Bastones Largos" ("The Night of the Long Batons"). These facilities had been occupied by students, professors and graduates (members of the autonomous government of the university) who opposed the military government's intervention in the universities and revocation of the 1918 university reform. The university repression led to the exile of 301 university professors, including Manuel Sadosky, Tulio Halperín Donghi, Sergio Bagú and Risieri Frondizi.

In late May 1968 General Julio Alsogaray dissented from Onganía, and rumors spread about a possible coup d'état, with Algosaray leading the conservative opposition to Onganía. Finally, at the end of the month, Onganía dismissed the leaders of the Armed Forces: Alejandro Lanusse replaced Julio Alsogaray, Pedro Gnavi replaced Benigno Varela, and Jorge Martínez Zuviría replaced Adolfo Alvarez.

On 19 September 1968, two important events affected Revolutionary Peronism. On one hand, John William Cooke, former personal delegate of Perón and ideologist of the Peronist Left, as well as a friend of Fidel Castro, died from natural causes. On the other hand, a small group (13 men and one woman) who aimed at establishing a "foco" in Tucumán Province, in order to head the resistance against the junta, was captured. Among them was Envar El Kadre, then a leader of the Peronist Youth.

In 1969 the "General Confederation of Labour of the Argentines" (CGTA, headed by the graphist Raimundo Ongaro) headed social movements, in particular the Cordobazo, as well as other movements in Tucumán and Santa Fe. While Perón managed a reconciliation with Augusto Vandor, head of the CGT Azopardo, he followed, in particular through the voice of his delegate Jorge Paladino, a cautious line of opposition to the military junta, criticizing with moderation the neoliberal policies of the junta but waiting for discontent inside the government (""hay que desencillar hasta que aclare"", said Perón, advocating patience). Thus, Onganía had an interview with 46 CGT delegates, among them Vandor, who agreed to cooperate with the military junta, thus uniting themselves with the "Nueva Corriente de Opinión" headed by José Alonso and Rogelio Coria.

In December 1969, more than 20 priests, members of the "Movement of Priests for the Third World" (MSTM), marched on the "Casa Rosada" to present to Onganía a petition pleading with him to abandon the planned eradication of "villas miserias" (shanty towns).

Meanwhile, Onganía implemented corporatism policies, experimenting in particular in Córdoba, underneath Carlos Caballero's governance. The same year, the Movement of Priests for the Third World issued a declaration supporting socialist revolutionary movements, which led to the Catholic hierarchy, by the voice of Juan Carlos Aramburu, coadjutor archbishop of Buenos Aires, to proscribe priests from making political or social declarations.

During the de facto government of the "Revolución Argentina", the left began to regain power through underground movements. This was mainly through violent guerrilla groups. Later, the return of Peronism was expected to calm down the heated waters but did exactly the opposite, creating a violent breach between right-wing and left-wing Peronism, leading to years of violence and political instability that culminated with the coup d'état of 1976.

Various armed actions, headed by the "Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación" (FAL), composed of former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, occurred in April 1969, leading to several arrests among FAL members. These were the first left-wing urban guerrilla actions in Argentina. Beside these isolated actions, the Cordobazo uprising that year, called forth by the CGT de los Argentinos, and its Cordobese leader, Agustín Tosco, prompted demonstrations in the entire country. The same year, the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) was formed as the military branch of the Trotskyist Workers' Revolutionary Party, kidnapping high-profile rich Argentines and demanding ransom.

The last of the "de facto" military presidents, Alejandro Lanusse, was appointed in 1971 and attempted to re-establish democracy amidst an atmosphere of continuing Peronist workers' protests.

On March 11, 1973, Argentina held general elections for the first time in ten years. Perón was prevented from running, but voters elected his stand-in, Dr. Hector Cámpora, as President. Cámpora defeated his Radical Civic Union opponent. Cámpora won 49.5 percent of the votes in the presidential election following a campaign based on a platform of national reconstruction.

Riding a wave of mass support, Cámpora inaugurated his period on May 25. He acceded to his functions on May 25, which was saluted by a massive popular gathering of the Peronist Youth movement, Montoneros, FAR and FAP ("Fuerzas Armadas Peronistas") in the Plaza de Mayo. Cámpora assumed a strong stance against right-wing Peronists, declaring during his first speech: "La sangre derramada no será negociada" ("Spilled blood will not be negotiated").

Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós and Chilean president Salvador Allende were present at his inauguration, while William P. Rogers, U.S. Secretary of State, and Uruguayan president Juan Bordaberry, could not attend, blocked in their respective cars by demonstrators. Political prisoners were liberated on the same day, under the pressure of the demonstrators. Cámpora's government included progressive figures such as Interior Minister Esteban Righi and Education Minister Jorge Taiana, but also included members of the labor and political right-wing Peronist factions, such as José López Rega, Perón's personal secretary and Minister of Social Welfare, and a member of the P2 Masonic lodge. Perón's followers also commanded strong majorities in both houses of Congress.

Hector Cámpora's government followed a traditional Peronist economic policy, supporting the national market and redistributing wealth. One of José Ber Gelbard's first measures as minister of economics was to augment workers' wages. However, the 1973 oil crisis seriously affected Argentina's oil-dependent economy. Almost 600 social conflicts, strikes or occupations occurred in Cámpora's first month. The military conceded Campora's victory, but strikes, as well as government-backed violence, continued unabated. The slogan "Campora in government, Perón in power" expressed the real source of popular joy, however.

Amidst escalating terror from the right and left alike, Perón decided to return and assume the presidency. On June 20, 1973, two million people waited for him at Ezeiza airport. From Perón's speaking platform, camouflaged far-right gunmen fired on the masses, shooting at the Peronist Youth movement and the Montoneros, killing at least thirteen and injuring more than three hundred (this became known as the Ezeiza massacre).

Cámpora and vice-president Solano Lima resigned on July 13. Deputy Raúl Alberto Lastiri, José López Rega's son-in-law and also a P2 member, was then promoted to the presidency to organize elections. Cámpora's followers such as Chancellor Juan Carlos Puig and Interior Minister Esteban Righi were immediately replaced by Alberto J. Vignes and Benito Llambi, and the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (ERP - People's Revolutionary Army) was declared a "dissolved terrorist organization". On September 23, Perón won the elections with 61.85% of the votes, with his third wife, Isabel Martínez de Perón, as vice-president. Their administration was inaugurated on October 12.

Peronist right-wing factions won a decisive victory and Perón assumed the Presidency in October 1973, a month after Pinochet's coup in Chile. Violent acts, including by the Triple A, continued to threaten public order. On September 25, 1973, José Ignacio Rucci, CGT trade-union's Secretary General and Perón's friend, was assassinated by the Montoneros. The government resorted to a number of emergency decrees, including the implementation of special executive authority to deal with violence. This allowed the government to imprison individuals indefinitely without charge.

In his second period in office, Perón was committed to achieving political peace through a new alliance of business and labor to promote national reconstruction. Peron's charisma and his past record with respect to labor helped him maintain his working-class support.

Perón died on July 1, 1974. His wife succeeded him in office, but her administration was undermined by the economic collapse (inflation was skyrocketing and GDP contracted), Peronist intra-party struggles, and growing acts of terrorism by insurgents such as the ERP and paramilitary movements.

Isabel de Perón was inexperienced in politics and only carried Perón's name; Lopez Rega was described as a man with numerous occult interests, including astrology, and a supporter of dissident Catholic groups. Economic policies were directed at restructuring wages and currency devaluations in order to attract foreign investment capital to Argentina. López Rega was ousted as Isabel de Perón's adviser in June 1975; General Numa Laplane, the commander in chief of the army who had supported the administration through the Lopez Rega period, was replaced by General Jorge Rafael Videla in August 1975.

Montoneros, led by Mario Firmenich, cautiously decided to go underground after Peron's death. Isabel Perón was removed from office by the military coup on March 24, 1976. This gave way to the last and arguably most violent de facto government in Argentina, the National Reorganization Process.

Following the coup against Isabel Perón, the armed forces formally exercised power through a junta led consecutively by Videla, Viola, Galtieri and Bignone until December 10, 1983. These "de facto" dictators termed their government program the "National Reorganization Process"; and "Dirty War" () is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina () for this period of state terrorism in Argentina as part of Operation Condor. from 1974, during which military and security forces and right-wing death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A) hunted down any kind of (or suspected to be) political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism or contrary to the plan of neoliberal economic policies dictated by Operation Condor. About 30,000 people disappeared, many of which were impossible to be formally reported due to the nature of state terrorism.

The targets were students, militants, trade unionists, writers, journalists, artists and anyone suspected to be a left-wing activist, included Peronist guerrillas. The "disappeared" (victims kidnapped, tortured and murdered whose bodies were disappeared by the military government) included those thought to be politically or ideologically a threat to the military junta, even vaguely; and they were killed in an attempt by the junta to silence the social and political opposition.

Serious economic problems, mounting charges of corruption, public discontent and, finally, the country's 1982 defeat by the United Kingdom in the Falklands War following Argentina's unsuccessful attempt to seize the Falkland Islands all combined to discredit the Argentine military regime. Under strong public pressure, the junta lifted bans on political parties and gradually restored basic political liberties.

Most of the members of the Junta are currently in prison for crimes against humanity and genocide.
The Beagle conflict began to brew in the 1960s, when Argentina began to claim that the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands in the Beagle Channel were rightfully hers. In 1971, Chile and Argentina signed an agreement formally submitting the Beagle Channel issue to binding Beagle Channel Arbitration. On May 2, 1977 the court ruled that the islands and all adjacent formations belonged to Chile. See the Report and decision of the Court of Arbitration.

On 25 January 1978, the Argentina military junta led by General Jorge Videla declared the award fundamentally null and intensified their claim over the islands. On 22 December 1978, Argentina started Operation Soberanía over the disputed islands, but the invasion was halted due to:
and in cite 46:

In December that year, moments before Videla signed a declaration of war against Chile, Pope John Paul II agreed to mediate between the two nations. The Pope's envoy, Cardinal Antonio Samorè, successfully averted war and proposed a new definitive boundary in which the three disputed islands would remain Chilean. Argentina and Chile both agreed to Samoré's proposal and signed the Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984 between Chile and Argentina, ending that dispute.

On October 30, 1983, Argentines went to the polls to choose a president; vice-president; and national, provincial, and local officials in elections found by international observers to be fair and honest. The country returned to constitutional rule after Raúl Alfonsín, candidate of the Radical Civic Union ("Unión Cívica Radical", UCR), received 52% of the popular vote for president. He began a 6-year term of office on December 10, 1983.

Five days later, he created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), led by Argentine writer Ernesto Sábato. However, it was also under Alfonsín's presidency that the December 24, 1986 "Full stop law" was voted, granting amnesty to all acts committed before December 10, 1983, amid pressure from the military. It would not be until June 2005's Supreme Court decision to overturn all amnesty laws that investigations could be started again.

During the Alfonsín administration, a Treaty of Peace and Friendship of 1984 between Chile and Argentina with Chile was signed and the roots of the Mercosur trade bloc were established.

In 1985 and 1987, large turnouts for mid-term elections demonstrated continued public support for a strong and vigorous democratic system. The UCR-led government took steps to resolve some of the nation's most pressing problems, including accounting for those who disappeared during military rule, establishing civilian control of the armed forces, and consolidating democratic institutions. One of the biggest achievements of the Alfonsín administration was the reduction of corruption in public offices, which was reduced by half during his administration.

However, constant friction with the military, failure to resolve several economic problems inherited from the military dictatorship and great opposition from the labor unions undermined the effectiveness of the Alfonsín government, which left office six months early after Peronist candidate Carlos Menem won the 1989 presidential elections.

As President, Carlos Menem launched a major overhaul of Argentine domestic policy. Large-scale structural reforms dramatically reversed the role of the state in Argentine economic life. Ironically, the Peronist Menem oversaw the privatization of many of the industries Perón had nationalized.

A decisive leader pressing a controversial agenda, Menem was not reluctant to use the presidency's powers to issue "emergency" decrees (formally "Necessity and Urgency Decrees") when the Congress was unable to reach consensus on his proposed reforms. Those powers were curtailed somewhat when the constitution was reformed in 1994 as a result of the so-called Pact of Olivos with the opposition Radical Party. That arrangement opened the way for Menem to seek and win reelection with 50% of the vote in the three-way 1995 presidential race. Piquetero movement rose.

The 1995 election saw the emergence of the moderate-left FrePaSo political alliance. This alternative to the two traditional political parties in Argentina was particularly strong in Buenos Aires but lacked the national infrastructure of the Peronists and Radicals. In an important development in Argentina's political life, all three major parties in the 1999 race espoused free market economic policies.

In October 1999, the UCR–FrePaSo "Alianza"'s presidential candidate, Fernando de la Rúa, defeated Peronist candidate Eduardo Duhalde. Having taken office in December 1999, De la Rúa followed an IMF-sponsored program of government spending cuts, revenue increases, and provincial revenue-sharing reforms to get the federal fiscal deficit under control, and pursued labor market flexibilization and business-promotion measures aimed at stimulating foreign investment, so as to avoid defaulting the public debt.

Towards the end of 2001, Argentina faced grave economic problems. The IMF pressed Argentina to service its external debt, effectively forcing Argentina to devalue the Argentine peso, which had been pegged to the U.S. dollar, or alternatively fully dollarize its economy. Deep budget cuts, including a 13% reduction in pay for the nation's 2 million public sector employees, failed to curb the rapidly increasing country risk on almost U$100 billion in Argentine bonds, increasing debt service costs and further limiting access to international credit, despite a moderately successful debt swap arranged by Cavallo with most bondholders. Voters reacted to the rapidly worsening economy in the October 2001 midterm elections by both depriving the Alliance of its majority in the Lower House, and by casting a record 25% of spoiled ballots.

On November 1, 2001, as people's fears that the peso would be devalued caused massive withdrawal of bank deposits and capital flight, de la Rúa's Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo passed regulations severely limiting withdrawals, effectively freezing the peso-denominated assets of the Argentine middle class, while dollar-denominated foreign accounts were, by its very nature, shielded from devaluation. (The freezing of the bank accounts was informally named "corralito".)

The overall economy declined drastically during December 2001. The resulting riots led to dozens of deaths. The Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo resigned, but that did not prevent the collapse of De la Rúa's administration. On December 20 de la Rúa also resigned, but the political crisis was extremely serious, as a result of the previous resignation of the vice-president Carlos "Chacho" Álvarez in 2000. The president of the Senate became interim president until the National Congress elected, two days later, Adolfo Rodríguez Saá to finish De la Rúa's term. But Rodríguez Saá resigned a week later on December 31, leaving the power to the president of the Chamber of Deputies (as the Senate was undergoing their annual renovation of its president) as interim.

Finally, on January 2, 2002, the National Congress elected the Peronist Eduardo Duhalde, a losing candidate in the most recent presidential election, as. president. The peso was first devalued by 29%, and then the dollar peg was abandoned; by July 2002, the national currency had depreciated to one-quarter of its former value.

President Duhalde faced a country in turmoil. His administration had to deal with a wave of protests (middle-class cacerolazos and unemployed piqueteros), and did so with a relatively tolerant policy, intending to minimize violence. As inflation became a serious issue and the effects of the crisis became apparent in the form of increased unemployment and poverty, Duhalde chose a moderate, low-profile economist, Roberto Lavagna, as his Minister of Economy. The economic measures implemented brought inflation under control.

After a year, Duhalde deemed his tasks fulfilled and, pressured by certain political factors, called for elections, which in April 2003 brought Néstor Kirchner, the left-of-centre Peronist governor of Santa Cruz, to power.

President Kirchner took office on May 25, 2003. He reshuffled the leadership of the Armed Forces, overturned controversial amnesty laws that protected members of the 1976-1983 dictatorship from prosecution, and kept Lavagna on as economy minister for most of his presidency. Kirchner's administration saw a strong economic rebound, and foreign debt restructuring.

The Guardian compares Nestor Kirchner's economic policy with that of Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression. For the British daily, the Argentine president managed to take over a failed economy (21% unemployment, half the population below the poverty line and a 20% decline in GDP) by rejecting IMF injunctions. An economic policy that has allowed Argentina to advance on average growth of 8% per year and to lift 11 million people out of poverty.

The 2007 general election took place in ten provinces in September and Kirchner's Front for Victory won in six provinces. Hermes Binner was elected governor of Santa Fe, becoming the first Socialist governor in Argentina's history and the first non-Justicialist to rule the rather wealthy Santa Fe province, and Center-left Fabiana Ríos (ARI) became the first woman to be elected governor of Tierra del Fuego, while the right-wing Mauricio Macri was elected Chief of Government of Buenos Aires City in June 2007.

On December 10, 2007, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner took over the presidency from her husband, after winning elections with 44% of the vote. Néstor Kirchner remained a highly influential politician during the term of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The press developed the term ""presidential marriage"" to make reference to both of them at once. Some political analysts compared this type of government with a diarchy.

After proposing a new taxation system for agricultural exports, Cristina Fernández's Government had to face a severe lock out of the sector. The protest, which spread over 129 days, was quickly politicized and marked an inflection point in her administration. The system was finally rejected in the Senate by an opposing vote by the Vice President Julio Cobos.

The political style of the government changed with the Death and state funeral of Néstor Kirchner. Cristina slowly distanced herself from the traditional structure of the Justicialist Party and favored instead "La Cámpora", a group of young supporters led by her son Máximo Kirchner.

On 22 November 2015, Mauricio Macri won the presidency. As leader of the "Republican Proposal (PRO)" party, he won the presidency with an alliance known as "Cambiemos," also integrated by the Civic Coalition ARI and the Radical Civic Union. Overcoming the former motorist Daniel Scioli, from the Front for Victory. Macri took over as president on the 10th of December of that same year. His government changed direction from the previous era, moving back to neoliberal policies.

President Macri was one of the political leaders identified in the scandalous Panama Papers where he was identified as having several offshore companies for which other leaders have used to evade taxes, though to the day he has not suffered any convictions.General:

Both countries submitted the controversy to binding arbitration by the international tribunal. The decision (see Beagle Channel Arbitration between the Republic of Argentina and the Republic of Chile, "Report and Decision of the Court of Arbitration") recognized all the islands to be Chilean territory. Argentina unilaterally repudiated the decision of the tribunal and planned a war of aggression against Chile.

Argentina–Chile relations

Argentina–Chile relations refers to international relations between the Republic of Chile and the Argentine Republic. Argentina and Chile share the world's third-longest international border, which is long and runs from north to the south along the Andes mountains. Although gaining their independence during the South American wars of liberation, during much of the 19th and the 20th century relations between the countries were chilled as a result of disputes over the border in Patagonia, although Chile and Argentina have never engaged in a war. In recent years relations have improved dramatically. Despite increased trade between the two countries, Argentina and Chile have followed quite different economic policies. Chile has signed free trade agreements with countries such as China, the USA, Canada, South Korea and the EU and is an active member of the APEC, while Argentina belongs to the Mercosur regional free trade area. In April 2018, both countries suspended membership of the Union of South American Nations.

The relationship between the two countries can be traced back to an alliance during Spanish colonial times. Both colonies were offshoots of the Viceroyalty of Peru, with the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (which Argentina was a part of) being broken off in 1776, and Chile not being broken off until independence. Argentina and Chile were colonized by different processes. Chile was conquered as a southward extension of the original conquest of Peru, while Argentina was colonized from Peru, Chile and from the Atlantic.

Argentina and Chile were close allies during the wars of independence from the Spanish Empire. Chile, like most of the revolting colonies, was defeated at a point by Spanish armies, while Argentina remained independent throughout its war of independence. After the Chilean defeat in the Disaster of Rancagua, the remnants of the Chilean Army led by Bernardo O'Higgins took refuge in Mendoza. Argentine General José de San Martín, by that time governor of the region, included the Chilean exiles in the Army of the Andes, and in 1817 led the crossing of the Andes, defeated the Spaniards, and confirmed the Chilean Independence. While he was in Santiago, Chile a cabildo abierto (open town hall meeting) offered San Martín the governorship of Chile, which he declined, in order to continue the liberating campaign in Peru.

In 1817 Chile began the buildup of its Navy in order to carry the war to the Viceroyalty of Perú. Chile and Argentina signed a treaty in order to finance the enterprise. But Argentina, fallen in a Civil war, was unable to contribute. The naval fleet, after being built, launched a sea campaign to fight the Spanish fleet in the Pacific to liberate Peru. After a successful land and sea campaign, San Martín proclaimed the Independence of Peru in 1821.

From 1836 to 1839, Chile and Argentina united in a war against the confederation of Peru and Bolivia. The underlying cause was the apprehension of Chile and Argentina against potential power of Peru-Bolivia block. This resulted from concern over the large territory of Peru-Bolivia as well as the perceived threat that such a rich state would represent to their southern neighbors. Chile declared the war on 11 November 1836 and Argentina on 19 May 1837.

In 1837 Felipe Braun, one of Santa Cruz's most capable generals and highly decorated veteran of the war of independence, defeated an Argentine army sent to topple Santa Cruz. On 12 November 1838 Argentine representatives signed an agreement with the Bolivian troops. However, on 20 January 1839 the Chilean force obtained a decisive victory against Peru-Bolivia at the Battle of Yungay and the short-lived Peru-Bolivian Confederation came to an end.

A series of coastal and high-seas naval battles between Spain and its former colonies of Peru and Chile occurred between 1864 and 1866. These actions began with Spain's seizure of the guano-rich Chincha Islands, part of a strategy by Isabel II of Spain to reassert her country's lost influence in Spain's former South American empire. These actions prompted an alliance between Ecuador, Bolivia, Peru and Chile against Spain. As a result, all Pacific coast ports of South America situated south of Colombia were closed to the Spanish fleet. Argentina, however, refused to join the alliance and maintained amicable relations with Spain and delivered coal to the Spanish fleet.

On 6 February 1873, Peru and Bolivia signed a secret Treaty of alliance against Chile. On 24 September, Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento asked the Argentine Chamber of Deputies to join Argentina with the alliance. The Argentine chamber assented by a vote of 48-18. The treaty made available a credit of six million pesos for military expenditures. However, in 1874, after the delivery of the Chilean ironclad Almirante Cochrane and the ironclad Blanco Encalada, the Argentine Senate postponed the matter until late 1874, and Sarmiento was prevented signing the treaty. Consequently, Argentina remained neutral during the war; and the Argentinians signed a Border Treaty with Chile in 1881.

Border disputes continued between Chile and Argentina, as Patagonia was then a largely unexplored area. The Border Treaty of 1881 established the line of highest mountains dividing the Atlantic and Pacific watersheds as the border between Argentina and Chile. This principle was easily applied in northern Andean border region; but in Patagonia drainage basins crossed the Andes. This led to further disputes over whether the Andean peaks would constitute the frontier (favoring Argentina) or the drainage basins (favoring Chile). Argentina argued that previous documents referring to the boundary always mentioned the "Snowy Cordillera" as the frontier and not the continental divide. The Argentine explorer Francisco Perito Moreno suggested that many Patagonian lakes draining to the Pacific were in fact part of the Atlantic basin but had been moraine-dammed during the quaternary glaciations changing their outlets to the west. In 1902, war was again avoided when British King Edward VII agreed to mediate between the two nations. He cleverly established the current Argentina-Chile border in Patagonia by dividing many disputed lakes into two equal parts. It is interesting that most of these lakes still have different names on each side of the frontier. A dispute that arose in the northern Puna de Atacama was resolved with the Puna de Atacama Lawsuit of 1899.

At the start of the 1900s a naval arms race began amongst the most powerful and wealthy countries in South America: Argentina, Brazil and Chile. It began when the Brazilian government ordered three formidable battleships whose capabilities far outstripped older vessels after the Brazilian Navy found itself well behind the Argentine and Chilean navies in quality and total tonnage.

During the Baltimore Crisis which brought Chile and the United States to the brink of war in 1891 (at the end of the 1891 Chilean Civil War), the Argentine foreign minister Estanislao Zeballos offered the US-minister in Buenos Aires the Argentine province of Salta as base of operations from which to attack Chile overland. In return, Argentina asked the U.S. for the cession of southern Chile to Argentina. Later, Chile and the United States averted the war.

The Pactos de Mayo are four protocols signed in Santiago de Chile by Chile and Argentina on 28 May 1902 in order to extend their relations and resolve its territorial disputes. The disputes had led both countries to increase their military budgets and run an arms race in the 1890s. More significantly the two countries divided their influence in South America into two spheres: Argentina would not threaten Chile's Pacific Coast hegemony, and Santiago promised not to intrude east of the Andes.

In 1958 the Argentine Navy shelled a Chilean lighthouse and disembarked infantry in the uninhabitable islet Snipe, at the east entrance of the Beagle Channel.

The Laguna del Desierto incident, in Argentina called also Battle of Laguna del Desierto occurred between 4 members of Carabineros de Chile and 90 members of the Argentine Gendarmerie and took place in zone south of O'Higgins/San Martín Lake on 6 November 1965, resulting in one Lieutenant killed and a Sergeant injured, both members of Carabineros, creating a tense atmosphere between Chile and Argentina.

Trouble once again began to brew in the 1960s, when Argentina began to claim that the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands in the Beagle Channel were rightfully theirs, although this was in direct contradiction of the 1881 treaty, as the Beagle Channel Arbitration, and the initial Beagle Channel cartography since 1881 stated.

In 1978 Direct negotiations between Chile and Argentina in 1977-78 failed and relations became extremely tense. Argentina sent troops to the border in Patagonia and in Chile large areas were mined. On 22 December, Argentina started Operation Soberanía in order to invade the islands and continental Chile, but after a few hours stopped the operation when the Pope John Paul II sent a personal message to both presidents urging a peaceful solution. Both countries agreed that the Pope would mediate the dispute through the offices of Cardinal Antonio Samoré his special envoy (See Papal mediation in the Beagle conflict).

On 9 January 1979 the Act of Montevideo was signed in Uruguay pledging both sides to a peaceful solution and a return to the military situation of early 1977. The conflict was still latent during the Falklands war and was resolved only after the fall of the Argentine military "junta".

A number of prominent public officials in Chile still point to past Argentine treaty repudiations when referring to relations between the two neighbors.

During the Falklands War in 1982, with the Beagle conflict still pending, Chile and Colombia were the only South American countries to abstain from voting in the TIAR (as did also the USA and Trinidad and Tobago).

The Argentine government planned to seize the disputed Beagle Channel islands after the occupation of the Falkland Islands. Basilio Lami Dozo former Chief of the Argentine Air Force during the Falklands war disclosed that Leopoldo Galtieri told him that:
Óscar Camilión, the last Argentine Foreign Minister before the war (29 March 1981 to 11 December 1981) has stated that:
These preparations were public. On 2 June 1982 the newspaper "La Prensa" published an article by Manfred Schönfeld explaining what would follow Argentina's expected victory in the Falkland Islands:
Argentine General Osiris Villegas demanded (in April 1982) after the successful Argentine landing in the Falklands that his government stop negotiations with Chile and seize the islands south of the Beagle. In his book "La propuesta pontificia y el espacio nacional comprometido", (p. 2), he asked:
This intention was probably known to the Chilean government, as the Chileans provided the United Kingdom with 'limited, but significant information' during the conflict. The "Chilean Connection" is described in detail by Sir Lawrence Freedman in his book "The Official History of the Falklands Campaign".

Post-Pinochet democratic governments in Chile have given greater support to the Argentine claim on the Falkland Islands.

On June 2010 (as in 2009 and years before ) Chile has supported the Argentine position at the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization calling for direct negotiations between Argentina and the United Kingdom concerning the Falkland Islands dispute.

This important treaty "()" was an agreement signed in 1984 between Argentina and Chile establishing friendly relations between the two countries. Particularly, the treaty defines the border delineation and freedom of navigation in the Strait of Magellan and gives possession of the Picton, Lennox and Nueva islands and sea located south of Tierra del Fuego to Chile, but the most part of the Exclusive Economic Zone eastwards of the Cape Horn-Meridian to Argentina. After that, other border disputes were resolved by peaceful means.

The 1984 treaty was succeeded by the "Maipu Treaty of Integration and Cooperation" ("Tratado de Maipú de Integración y Cooperación") signed on 30 October 2009

Despite the Pactos de Mayo agreement, in 2004 Argentina proposed to establish a "corridor" through Chilean territory under partial Argentine administration as a Bolivian outlet to sea. After talks with Chilean ambassador to Argentina, the Kirchner government pulled out of the proposal and declared the issue as "concerning Chile and Bolivia" only.

In the 1990s, relations improved dramatically. The dictator and last president of the Argentine Military Junta, General Reynaldo Bignone, called for democratic elections in 1983, and Augusto Pinochet of Chile did the same in 1989. As a consequence, militaristic tendencies faded in Argentina. The Argentine presidents Carlos Menem and Fernando de la Rúa had particularly good relations with Chile. In a bilateral manner, both countries settled all the remaining disputes except "Laguna del Desierto", which was decided by International Arbitration in 1994. That decision favoured Argentine claims.

According to a 1998 negotiation held in Buenos Aires, a section of the boundary in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field is still pending mapping and demarcation according to the limits already settled by the 1881 treaty. In 2006, president Néstor Kirchner invited Chile to define the border, but Michelle Bachelet's government left the invitation unanswered. The same year, the Chilean government sent a note to Argentina complaining that Argentine tourism maps showed a normal boundary in the Southern Patagonian Icefield placing most of the area in Argentina.

Officially Chile supports the Argentine claim on the Falkland Islands.

Geopolitics over Antarctica and the control of the passages between the south Atlantic and the south Pacific have led to the founding of cities and towns such as Ushuaia and Puerto Williams, both of which claim to be the southernmost cities in world.
Currently, both countries have research stations in Antarctica, as does the United Kingdom. All three nations claim the totality of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Trade between the two countries is made mostly over the mountain passes that have enough infrastructure for large scale trade.
The trade balance shows a great deal of asymmetry. As of 2005 Chile is the 3rd export trading partner for Argentina, behind Brazil and the United States. Significant import products from Argentina to Chile include cereal grains and meat. Recently significant Chilean capital has been invested in Argentina, especially in the retail market sector.

In 1996 Chile became an associate member of Mercosur, a regional trade agreement that Argentina and Brazil created in the 1990s. This associate membership does not convey full membership to Chile, however.

In 2009 approvals were granted for a $3-billion Pascua Lama project to mine an ore body on the border of the two countries.

In 2016, Argentina's exports to Chile amounted to US$2.3 billion while Chile's exports to Argentina amounted to US$689.5 million.

Argentine president Carlos Menem signed a natural gas exportation treaty with Chilean president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle in 1996. In 2005, President Néstor Kirchner broke the treaty due to a supply shortage experienced by Argentina. The situation in Argentina was partly resolved when Argentina increased its own imports from Bolivia, a country with no diplomatic relations with Chile since 1978. In the import contract signed with Bolivia it was specified that not even a drop of Bolivian gas could be sold to Chile from Argentina.

In 2003, Argentine AFA's president suggested that both countries launch a joint bid for the 2014 FIFA World Cup but was abandoned in favor of a CONMEBOL unified posture to allow the tournament be hosted in Brazil.

Beginning in 2009, the Dakar Rally began to be held in South America, and both Argentina and Chile have collaborated in organizing the annual cross-border event multiple times.

Host country Chile and Argentina will contest the 2015 Copa America final and Chile was declared Champion after penalty shots. Copa America 2016 trophy was also for Chile against Argentina once again in the penalty shots.

Argentina announced on 28 August 2009 the election of the Japanese/Brazilian ISDB-T digital television standard with Chile following the same direction on 14 September.

Since the 1990s, both militaries began a close defense cooperation and friendship policy. On September 1991 they signed together with Brazil, the Mendoza Declaration, which commits signatories not to use, develop, produce, acquire, stock, or transfer —directly or indirectly— chemical or biological weapons.

Joint exercises were established on an annual basis in the three armed forces alternately in Argentina and Chile territory. An example of such maneuvers is the "Patrulla Antártica Naval Combinada" () performed by both Navies to guarantee safety to all touristic and scientific ships that are in transit within the Antarctic Peninsula.

Both nations are highly involved in UN peacekeeping missions. UNFICYP in Cyprus was a precedent where Chilean troops are embedded in the Argentine contingent. They played a key role together at MINUSTAH in Haiti and in 2005 they began the formation of a joint force for future United Nations mandates. Named Cruz del Sur (), the new force began assembly in 2008 with headquarters alternately on each country every year.

In 2005, while the Argentine Navy school ship ARA "Libertad" was under overhaul, Argentine cadets were invited to complete their graduation on the Chilean Navy school ship "Esmeralda" and in another gesture of confidence, on 24 June 2007, a Gendarmeria Nacional Argentina (Border Guard) patrol was given permission to enter Chile to rescue tourists after their bus became trapped in snow.

On 13 March 2010, following the Chilean earthquake the benefit concert "Argentina Abraza Chile" () was hosted in Buenos Aires, and an Argentine Air Force Mobile Field Hospital was deployed to Curicó.

On 8 April 2010 the newly elected Chilean president Sebastián Piñera made his first trip abroad a visit to Buenos Aires where he thanked president Cristina Fernández for the help received. He also stated his commitment to an increased cooperation between the two countries

In September 2010, CONARE (the Argentine National Refugee Commission, a department of the Argentine Interior Ministry) granted asylum to Chilean citizen Galvarino Apablaza. Apablaza now lives in Argentina where he is married to journalist Paula Chain, and is father to three Argentine-born children. Chain has worked for the Argentine Government press office since 2009. Apablaza is accused by Chile of being involved in the murder of Chilean Senator Jaime Guzmán in 1991, during the government of Patricio Aylwin, as well as the kidnapping of the son of one of the owners of the "El Mercurio" newspaper. The asylum status has been universally rejected by the Chilean government, as well as by the Argentine political opposition. Some Argentine media and journalists have pointed out that the Argentine government ignored a ruling of the Argentine Supreme Court of Justice allowing the extradition of Apablaza. Chilean state attorney Gustavo Gené has pointed out that there was no question of the Chilean legal system's authority or grounds by the Argentine Commission, and that the reasons for granting political asylum were based exclusively on "humanitarian grounds".

On 17 February 2010 the Argentine executive issued the decree 256/2010 pertaining to authorisation requirements placed on shipping to and from Argentina but also to ships going through Argentine jurisdictional water heading for ports situated in the Falkland Islands, South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands. This decree was implemented by disposition 14/2010 of the Prefectura Naval Argentina. On 19 May 2010 the United Kingdom presented a note verbale rejecting the Argentine government’s decrees and stipulating that the UK considered the decrees “are not compliant with International Law including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea ”, and with respect to the Straits of Magellan the note recalls that “the rights of international shipping to navigate these waters expeditiously and without obstacle are affirmed in the 1984 Treaty of Peace and Friendship between Chile and Argentina with respect to the Straits of Magellan”.

Article 10 of the 1984 Treaty states “The Argentine Republic undertakes to maintain, at any time and in whatever circumstances, the right of ships of all flags to navigate expeditiously and without obstacles through its jurisdictional waters to and from the Strait of Magellan”.