Argentina’s football team has caused outrage as they played Slovenia in the Fifa World Cup’s warm-up match. As the team took to the football pitch for photographs before the game began, they held up a banner that said ‘Las Malvinas son Argentinas’, which translates to ‘The Malvinas Are Argentinian’ (Malvinas is the Spanish name for the Falklands).
The Falklands has had British sovereignty since 1833, and the fierce dispute came to a head with the Falklands War in 1982, which saw the deaths of 255 British military personnel and 649 Argentinians. Argentina has long laid claim to the territory and ever since Prime Minister Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner took power in 2007, there have been repeated diplomatic clashes with Britain over the situation. Earlier this year, she claimed that Argentina had been stripped of the Falklands in a ‘blatant exercise of 19th century colonialism’.
Despite her claims, however, the people living on the Falkland Islands voted in a referendum last year as to which nation they wanted to remain in the possession of, with the result being 1,513 to 3 in favour of the British, sending a clear message to Argentina.