Flights to resume from Argentina to Falklands as tense relations with UK ease

Deal reached by Lammy with counterpart at UN includes agreeing to humanitarian visits for relatives to pay respects at soldiers’ graves

Argentina will resume passenger flights to the Falkland Islands after David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, held talks with Diana Mondino, his counterpart.
The deal, reached on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York this week, will re-establish a weekly flight from São Paulo in Brazil, which once a month will also stop over in the Argentinian city of Cordoba.
Argentina’s previous Leftist government, led by Alberto Fernández – who is now facing prosecution for domestic abuse allegations – suspended the flights in 2020.
He blamed the decision on the UK’s alleged refusal to negotiate over the sovereignty of the islands, which Buenos Aires has long claimed as its own.
Mr Lammy and Ms Mondino also agreed to co-ordinate humanitarian visits to the islands, known in Spanish as the Malvinas, by the Red Cross to identify the remains of Argentine soldiers buried there following the 1982 Falklands war, as well as by relatives of the fallen.
Separately, they agreed to reopen talks on the contentious issue of fisheries in the islands’ rich waters, which Argentina wants to access.
The deal marks a minor victory for Javier Milei, Argentina’s populist-Right president who had vowed to resume diplomatic pressure on the UK.
An Anglophile, Mr Milei nevertheless prefers to take a low-key approach to the islands, unlike that of his Leftist predecessors, most notably Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who was often accused of “Malvinerismo”, opportunistically using them for domestic political gain.
Mr Lammy has previously insisted that the Government would not discuss sovereignty with Buenos Aires, continuing a bipartisan position held by all British governments since the war.
In a statement, the Foreign Office described the new agreement as the start of a “new era of constructive co-operation within the bilateral relationship, characterised by improved dialogue and confidence-building measures”.
But the agreement has been criticised in Argentina, where Falklands conflict veterans have accused Mr Milei and Ms Mondino of using the country’s war dead as a bargaining chip.
“You can’t make humanitarian work contingent on fisheries exploitation,” Jerónimo Guerrero Iraola, a lawyer with the La Plata Malvinas Islands Veterans’ Centre, told the Buenos Aires Herald.