No Hail Mary Can Save Argentina
June 22, 1986. World Cup quarter-final in Mexico: Argentina versus England.
Six minutes into the second half, Diego Maradona put the ball in the net to give Argentina a 1–0 lead. Right after the goal, though, his teammates did not rush over to celebrate. Many on the pitch had seen what had really happened — Maradona had punched the ball into the goal with his hand.
When they reached him, the first thing his teammates asked was, “Did you handle that?”
Maradona panicked, terrified the referee would spot the cheat. This was the infamous “Hand of God.”
Neither the referee nor the linesman had a clear view of the handball, so the goal stood.
While players argued on the pitch, celebrations erupted thousands of kilometres away across Argentina. Maradona became a national hero overnight. For Argentina, winning this quarter-final against England mattered even more than lifting the World Cup itself. Four years before this match, the Falklands War had unfolded in the South Atlantic.
Argentina sits in the southeast of South America, bordering the Atlantic Ocean. It has roughly 40 million people and covers 2.78 million square kilometres.
A common online myth claims two nations have slid from developed to developing status: South Africa and Argentina. This is not true. Neither country was ever developed. Development is a holistic benchmark covering industry, technology and social infrastructure, and both fell well short of that standard.
Argentina’s story is unique. Simon Kuznets, the Nobel-winning economist, once said the world only has four kinds of countries: developed nations, developing nations, Japan, and Argentina. Japan is an economic oddity, yet Argentina’s quirks rival its. Put plainly, Argentina sits on a goldmine and still struggles to feed itself.
Few countries on Earth are better suited for primary industry. It has fertile soil, mild climates, world-class farmland and rich mineral reserves. It is resource-rich and sparsely populated — and still it never grew wealthy.
Argentina’s brief golden age arrived before the First World War, when it grew rich exporting farm goods to Europe. After the two world wars, its economy settled into a jagged boom-bust cycle. Growth spiked and crashed repeatedly, and sustained progress proved impossible. The pattern became familiar: two decent years, three years of losses.
The root of this volatility lies in its unstable politics. Leftists, right-wing populists and military governments traded power. Economic policy swung 180 degrees with every new administration. No long-term, consistent economic plan ever stuck. Many Latin American states shared this trouble, but Argentina took it to another level in the 1980s, under its young and inexperienced leader Leopoldo Galtieri.
A military junta seized power in 1976, and Galtieri was a loyal stalwart. An engineer by training, he climbed all the way to army chief with the regime’s backing. Once in office, he rolled out shock-therapy neoliberal reforms to fight the country’s deep recession. The policy collapsed almost immediately.
Historians do not dwell heavily on his domestic economic record; few expected a military ruler to manage an economy well. What Galtieri is remembered for is his foreign policy.
Latin America was widely seen as the United States’ backyard, and Washington courted Argentina. In 1981, Galtieri visited the US, and Ronald Reagan gave him an unusually warm reception. Senior American officials praised him effusively. Even as Galtieri crushed domestic opposition, Reagan spoke glowingly of his rule. Galtieri left Washington emboldened, convinced of his own diplomatic skill.
Strangely for a fiercely anti-communist right-wing leader, he also sought closer ties with the Soviet Union. Argentina was a major grain exporter, and Galtieri approved large grain shipments to Moscow. His calculation was simple: keep the US onside, keep the Soviets happy. He also maintained solid relations with France, West Germany and other European powers. Galtieri imagined himself as Latin America’s version of India, courted by the two superpowers.
That grand illusion yielded almost nothing. By the early 1980s, US monetary policy triggered a brutal debt crisis across Latin America, and Argentina was not spared just because its leader was friendly to Washington.
By 1981, the economy was unraveling. Inflation hit 600%, GDP shrank 11%, and manufacturing output fell 22%. Galtieri’s government teetered. Opposition parties were uniting to force him out.
Most leaders facing such collapse would have had few answers. Galtieri believed he held one drastic fix: play the Falklands card.
The Falkland Islands cut deep into Argentina’s national psyche. Many summaries frame the Falklands War merely as a cynical distraction from domestic crisis. That is part of the truth, but incomplete. Galtieri wanted to rally public support, yet Argentine claims to the islands were decades old, not invented out of nowhere.
The Falklands lie roughly 500 kilometres off Argentina’s coast, spanning about 12,000 square kilometres. Its territorial history is tangled. Both Britain and Argentina laid claim, though Britain held de facto control.
Long before Galtieri, successive Argentine governments and grassroots groups chipped away with small, incremental provocations — landing parties, minor gestures, a “salami tactic” to slowly erode British control. Britain mostly watched on.
The Falklands meant vastly different things to the two sides. Most Britons barely knew the remote islands existed. They were bleak, lightly settled, home to only a few thousand residents back then. British commentators joked the Falklands mattered less to the nation than a single goal in the English top flight.
That dismissive attitude stung. What Argentina viewed as sacred, unfinished national business was, to many British people, an afterthought. Britain had no intention of handing the islands over, but it was open to negotiation and tolerated Argentina’s low-level pressure.
In May 1982, a group of Argentines landed on South Georgia, east of the Falklands, posing as scrap merchants. Britain’s only local military vessel, an icebreaker, sailed to investigate and then withdrew.
That retreat fuelled Galtieri’s confidence. He believed Britain was hollow, that one sharp push would hand him the islands. Britain was also winding down its overseas military presence; it planned to retire that last icebreaker stationed near the islands.
Galtieri might have hesitated in another year, but 1982 was explosive. His domestic position was crumbling fast, and he badly needed a unifying national cause. Chile, the only neighbouring state with overlapping territorial disputes with Argentina, was a close US ally under Augusto Pinochet, and a war with Chile would be messy and risky.
So Galtieri settled on provoking a permanent member of the UN Security Council.
His miscalculation grew from Britain’s faded global standing after the Second World War. By the 1980s, nearly all its colonies were gone, and its navy had shrunk dramatically. To Argentine planners, Britain looked weak enough to fight.
Britain operated two small light aircraft carriers at the time. HMS Hermes was nearly forty years old and already earmarked for sale to India. HMS Invincible was newer, yet Britain planned to offload her to Australia too. Once those sales went through, the Royal Navy would be carrier-less.
Argentina, by contrast, owned the ARA Veinticinco de Mayo, a carrier originally built in Britain that had passed into Argentine hands. Its air force had American training and flew large numbers of French jets and missiles. Galtieri judged Argentina’s military inferior, but still capable of fighting a competitive war.
Most crucially, Argentine officials collectively believed Britain would never send troops. Two assumptions underpinned this: first, the Falklands were not a core British interest, and Britain had swallowed earlier provocations; second, Reagan had repeatedly invoked the Monroe Doctrine, suggesting Washington would leave American hemisphere disputes to regional powers.
Watching Britain’s decline and America’s friendly signals, Argentina bet the whole pot.
The military plan originally targeted September. By then, Britain’s carriers would have been sold, and Argentina’s new weapons deliveries would be complete. Britain would be left with no realistic military option.
Galtieri’s fateful choice was to move the invasion forward to April 1982. He wanted a victory to mark Argentina’s May national holiday, and feared his government would not survive until September.
Still aware of the stakes, Galtieri sent quiet diplomatic signals: Argentina would reclaim the islands by force if talks stalled.
Britain misread the warning. Despite the territorial dispute, bilateral ties remained broadly cordial. London did not believe Argentina would launch a full invasion. Silence, Galtieri decided, amounted to acceptance.
On April 2, 1982, around three thousand Argentine marines landed on the Falklands. The British garrison numbered just two hundred.
There was almost no serious fighting. Outnumbered, the British surrendered quickly. One Argentine soldier died; one British serviceman was wounded. Argentina later repatriated the captured British troops by air.
News of the recapture sent Argentina into ecstasy. Hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Buenos Aires to celebrate. Galtieri, reviled weeks earlier, became the embodiment of national pride. Thirteen opposition parties suspended protests and backed him. He waved to cheering crowds from the plaza, and for a moment every crisis of his regime seemed erased. Victory felt shockingly easy.
Britain’s reaction was the opposite. Headlines screamed of national humiliation. Margaret Thatcher cut diplomatic ties with Argentina immediately.
Thatcher called Reagan and asked him to pressure Galtieri to withdraw. When Reagan relayed the message, Galtieri refused.
Galtieri thought the Falklands crisis was a gift from fate. What he missed was that Thatcher also desperately needed a rallying cause.
Thatcher’s privatisation and liberal economic reforms had alienated huge swathes of voters, and her approval ratings had collapsed. Newspapers demanded her resignation the day the Falklands fell. The public was stunned that Argentina dared challenge Britain.
In Parliament, opposition leader Michael Ford shouted, “We need action, not words!”
Thatcher had only one viable path: war. She addressed Parliament: voting for her resolution meant standing with Britain. Within forty-eight hours, an expeditionary fleet sailed south to retake the islands.
Galtieri was caught off guard. He had never truly believed Britain would fight. Even after the fleet departed, he assumed it was a bluff, and pinned his hopes on diplomacy.
He turned first to Reagan. Surely the warm relationship between him and the US president would bring help.
He soon learned Washington’s “neutrality” was performative. The United States publicly claimed it would not arm either side, but the neutrality tilted heavily toward Britain. Argentina lacked domestic advanced weapons manufacturing, so the embargo hit it far harder.
Next he looked to Europe. Argentina’s air force relied heavily on French hardware, yet France halted all arms shipments at once. France had no desire to alienate Britain for Argentina’s sake.
The Soviet Union seemed the last hope. But economic trade in grain and minerals was the full extent of the relationship. Galtieri had never visited Moscow.
Timing also worked against him. Leonid Brezhnev was gravely ill and would die in November 1982. Even if the USSR had wanted to intervene, the distance — nearly twenty thousand nautical miles — made rapid support impossible. The war would be long over before Soviet aid arrived.
Direct diplomatic channels between Britain and Argentina closed after the break in relations. Negotiations continued indirectly via Peru and Switzerland, but they stalled.
Galtieri was reckless, and Britain was no longer the empire it once was. US media dubbed the British deployment “The Empire Strikes Back,” after the blockbuster film showing in cinemas that year. Yet Britain’s military had clear limits. Its fleet suffered gaps in reconnaissance and intelligence, relying on American satellite data and Chilean radar stations to track Argentine air raids. When one Chilean radar site went down for scheduled maintenance for twenty-four hours, Argentine aircraft sank two British frigates.
France shared full technical data on the missiles it had sold Argentina and ran training exercises with British pilots to replicate Argentine attack tactics. Even with that support, the Royal Navy took heavy losses.
Argentina’s air force fought with extraordinary skill and courage. Pilots flying Dassault Super Étendards skimmed just above the waves, popped up to launch Exocet missiles, and sank HMS Sheffield, Britain’s most modern destroyer at the time.
Early in the conflict, Argentine air attacks inflicted serious damage: two destroyers and two frigates sunk, more vessels damaged. By June, however, the air campaign faltered. Aircraft losses mounted, and stockpiles of sophisticated missiles ran dry. With no guided ordnance left, pilots carried simple iron bombs and dove low to strike British ships — tactics straight out of the Second World War. The bravery left British commanders impressed.
For all its 1980s setting, the war felt dated. ARA General Belgrano, the first major warship sunk, was a cruiser that had survived Pearl Harbor and was almost fifty years old. The British submarine HMS Conqueror sank it with torpedoes designed in 1925.
The sinking of the Belgrano shattered Argentine naval morale. The fleet retreated to port and took no further part in combat.
If the navy hid, the army performed even worse. Argentina’s ground troops had not fought a major conflict in a century, and their training and readiness were poor. British landing preparations began on May 20; Argentine forces only detected the landing on May 21, by which point two thousand British troops were ashore.
The air force fought on alone, the navy stayed in harbour, the army was outmatched. Argentina’s defeat became inevitable. Britain’s imperial glow had faded, but its institutional military edge still outclassed Argentina.
On June 14, 1982, the Argentine island commander surrendered more than nine thousand troops. The next day, Galtieri announced the surrender to the nation.
From the April landing to the June capitulation, public mood flipped completely on both sides. Thatcher’s popularity surged after victory, and she won re-election comfortably the following year. When the fleet came home, she gave her famous speech promising to “make Britain great again.”
Galtieri was arrested in 1983 over wartime command failures and sentenced to twelve years in prison. He lived out his final years in poverty and poor health and died in 2003.
The fall of the junta did not lift ordinary Argentines out of hardship. Political chaos worsened after the military rule ended. In 2001, Argentina cycled through five presidents in two weeks, a record it broke in 2015 when three presidents took office within twenty-four hours.
The core problem remained populist politics. Politicians made irresponsible welfare promises and printed money to fund them, triggering catastrophic inflation. Argentina defaulted on its sovereign debt in 2001. Holdout creditors later pressured a US court to seize an Argentine navy vessel in 2012 to auction it for repayment; Argentina settled part of the debt to avoid the humiliation.
Today, Argentines no longer expect rapid economic growth. An annual inflation rate under 50% counts as a good year. Without Venezuela, Argentina would be Latin America’s most famous cautionary tale.
Argentina still sees the Falklands as an open national wound. The defeat did not erase its territorial claim, yet the goal grows ever more remote. Its armed forces declined sharply after 1982; the air force now has very few operational jet fighters.
Amid endless economic hardship, Galtieri’s brief, hollow Falklands triumph once gave the public a fleeting escape from daily misery. After defeat, only football remained to lift the nation.
The 1986 World Cup brought the rematch: Argentina against England. The Hand of God gave Argentina its controversial opening goal. Minutes later, Maradona scored one of football’s greatest goals, weaving past five England players to finish cleanly. Argentina won 2–1, a kind of revenge for the battlefield loss.
Argentina kept winning and claimed the World Cup trophy. Maradona became a global icon.
Countries across Latin America, from Honduras to Argentina, carry an intense passion for football. For nations on the margins of global power, few events can unify the whole population quite like sport.
Football, though, has grown industrialised and structured. The economic gap between Europe and Latin America shows up on the pitch. Even generational talents like Maradona cannot reverse the broader decline of Latin American football.
On November 25, 2020, news spread worldwide: Diego Maradona had died of a heart attack, aged sixty. Argentina mourned. Television anchors broke down live on air. The president declared three days of national mourning.
It is hard for people outside Argentina to grasp the depth of that grief. For a country on the periphery of global affairs, a world-famous native son becomes the nation’s face. He was Argentina’s Bolt, its García Márquez.
In an interview, the Argentine president put it simply: “To the world, Maradona is Argentina. The joy he gave us is something we can never repay.”
His lying-in-state was held at the presidential palace. On the day of the funeral, more than a million people lined the streets of Buenos Aires. Crowds wept, laid flowers and sang for him. Street signs and electronic screens across the city bore the same message: Gracias, Diego.
Maradona was endlessly divisive, but no one can deny he embodied Argentina, the man with Che Guevara tattooed on his shoulder. Outside Argentina, news outlets reached for a familiar lyric to mark his passing: Don’t Cry for Me Argentina.
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