...Fascinating - I understood enough of the post (thanks to obscure loan-words between English and Spanish) to get the gist of the text.
...Would Argentina accept 300 million English pounds (my assessment of the debt, in terms of inflation) in settlement of the Falklands Question?
Or would they hold out for half a billion?
Has to be a better deal all round, than bailing out the damned banks!
When? Nowadays? Never, at least not in any forseeable scenario. And anyway, the debt we had back then with the UK has already been paid, a long long time ago. But it's more than that: no politican would accept such a deal, and the Congress would never ratify it, no matter the amount of money offered.
In the 1
830ies or early 1
840ies? Maybe, and for much less money. Back then, Rosas was, for all matters, a dictator (even if he had been legally elected in 1835, and probably had vast support among the masses). He could have done as he pleased. Yes, some would have protested, and his opponents (most of them living in exile in Montevideo or in Chile) would have written furibund critics and panflets if he had done it. But that would have been all, as they couldn't have done much, and they already hated him anyway.
Rosas might have found reasonable to accept such a deal, as the British already had control of the islands anyway. But those kinds of deals can only be done under a dictatorships, never under a modern democracy: no politician can be expected to accept such a deal without giving up any hope of EVER being relected,
