General Mario Menéndez
Military governor of the Falklands during Argentina’s brief occupation of the islands in 1982
GENERAL MARIO MENÉNDEZ, who has died aged 85, was the military governor of the Falkland Islands during Argentina’s brief occupation of the archipelago in 1982; 30 years later he was arrested and detained for his alleged role in human rights abuses.
Argentine troops arrived on the islands on April 2 1982 and swiftly overwhelmed a 78-strong detachment of Royal Marines who put up a courageous defence of the islands’ capital, Port Stanley. As commander of the occupying troops, Menéndez, a military hard-liner, arrived in Stanley on April 7 to take over as governor.
With little option but to bow to superior force, the British governor Sir Rex Hunt donned his formal uniform – including the plumed hat – and made the short ride in his official car (a converted London taxi) to the town hall to meet Menéndez. “There was this rather miserable little general, sallow faced, coming towards me with a fixed smile on his face,” Hunt recalled later. “I really felt the anger surge then and I thought, ‘This is the rape of the Falkland Islands.’”
Hunt refused to shake hands and told him: “You have landed unlawfully on British territory and I order you to remove yourself and your troops forthwith.”
The now unsmiling Menéndez replied: “We have taken back what is rightfully ours and we shall stay for ever.” Sir Rex and his family were then ordered to leave the islands that day and were flown to Uruguay.
It was said that Menéndez so liked the governor’s office that he did not rearrange the furniture or even take the Queen’s portrait off the wall, and he appeared confident that Britain would not exert itself to recover the islands. “Let the little prince come,” he was quoted as saying when told that Prince Andrew was on his way.
But just 74 days after declaring Argentina’s intention of staying on the islands for good, he surrendered to Major General Jeremy Moore following a brief war that left 649 Argentines and 255 British dead.
Before Moore’s arrival, Menéndez had been treated to a tongue-lashing by General Leopoldo Galtieri, leader of the Argentine junta, who demanded a last-ditch defence of “Puerto Argentino”, as he called Port Stanley, to salvage a modicum of national pride. “I had to repeat to him what our situation was,” Menéndez recalled later. “But he didn’t want to understand. I ended the call. I thought, ‘This is the end.’ I knew my troops couldn’t give any more.”
In an article in The Daily Telegraph in 2002 he recalled that although Argentine troops had tried to slow down the British advance, “we didn’t have the ammunition. I kept ordering more, but it did not arrive. It was as if, in Buenos Aires, they were living a war that was different to the one I was living.” It had been difficult to sign the surrender document: “I asked myself, ‘Why did it have to be me?’”
Within a month of the surrender, Menéndez had been removed from his positions of power.
Mario Benjamin Menéndez was born in Buenos Aires on April 3 1930 into a military family. A great uncle would attempt a coup against the government of Juan Peron in 1951, while an uncle would lead an unsuccessful effort to unseat the ruling junta in 1978.
Mario Menéndez trained at the National Military College, graduating as a second lieutenant in the infantry in 1949. He was promoted with regularity, reaching the rank of general in 1979.
In his surrender negotiations with the British, Menéndez insisted that his officers be allowed to retain their pistols as insurance against their own men, many of whom had suffered the brutality of their superiors during the occupation. (It was agreed they could keep their weapons, but without any ammunition). In 2007 Argentine veterans staged a protest at his home to denounce a decree granting special pensions to high-level officers of the military regime, including Menéndez, and to demand an investigation of alleged violations of the human rights of Argentine soldiers by their own officers during the conflict.
Yet it was not for his role in the Falklands that he was arrested in 2012, but in connection with “La Escuelita,’’ a torture centre in Argentina’s Tucuman province that he was alleged to have run in 1975, the year before the military coup that ushered in the dictatorship of General Galtieri, during “Operativo Independencia”, a counter-insurgency campaign against Trotskyist guerrillas. He had been expected to stand trial later this year.
In 1955 Menéndez married Susana Arguello, with whom he had a son and two daughters.