Santiago Caputo, Chief Adviser to President Javier Milei of Argentina, has shared a post on the social media platform X in which he claims that the United Kingdom is being ‘colonized by Islam’ and therefore ‘recovering the Malvinas is not solely a national cause. It is a cause of the West.’
Caputo published the message in response to Sagal Abdi-Wali of the Labour Party, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab, being elected to the British Parliament to represent Holborn and St Pancras in a by-election earlier this month.
The British newspaper The Guardian claims that President Milei himself has shared Caputo’s post on X. However, the post in question is no longer available on President Milei’s X feed, either on his main feed or among his many reposts.
It is understandable why a territorial claim over the Falkland Islands (or Malvinas, as Caputo and other Argentine nationalists like to refer to the islands by their Spanish name) coming from an official in the Argentine government would cause an uproar in the British press.
In 1982 Argentine armed forces invaded the islands in an effort to claim them, which provoked a two-month war that ultimately ended in a British victory. The conflict also claimed around 900 lives: 650 on the Argentine side and 250 on the British side.
The Falklands never legally belonged to Argentina, although the South American nation did maintain a small garrison and settlement on the islands in the 1820s after gaining independence from Spain. Today, the vast majority of the local population of around 3,500 people have allegiance to the UK over Argentina.
The issue reentered the public discussion in July of this year.
After Argentina beat England in the FIFA World Cup semi-finals 2–1, Argentine players Lisandro Martínez and Giovani Lo Celso held up a banner with the words ‘the Malvinas are Argentine’ in Spanish. Apparently, the banner was given to them by fans, but they evidently were aware of its content when they decided to show it to the cameras.
Milei Adviser’s Post about Islam in the UK and the Falklands
In his post published on Wednesday, 14 October, Caputo starts by praising Britain’s long history, calling it ‘in many respects, the cradle of modern Western civilization’ and celebrating the great British minds of the past, such as Adam Smith, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Alan Turing.
However, he goes on to argue that the recent spread of Islamic influence in the United Kingdom is ‘a risk to the cause of the entire West’ and ‘a tragedy in historical terms’. Caputo believes that protecting Argentina and the Southern Atlantic from the threats of Islam is just ‘another reason’ why his nation should make efforts to ‘recover’ the Malvinas.
In this post per se, he does not elaborate on what other reasons he sees for an Argentine takeover of the Falklands.