Malvinas: The First Argentine on Patriotic Ground

The First Argentine To Land in the Malvinas

In 1982, Chief Corporal Carlos Cequeira, aged 27, was at the Marine Infantry School. After the Malvinas, he later completed the promotion course to join the Officers’ Corps.

Most of the Amphibious Commandos, special troops of the Marine Infantry, were called up around 21 March 1982 to the unit based in Mar del Plata and were then assigned to Operation Rosario for the recovery of the Malvinas. The Amphibious Commando Group of the Argentine Navy was stationed in Mar del Plata, and from there they were transferred to Puerto Belgrano before embarking on the Santísima Trinidad, which carried approximately 90 Navy Commandos and Tactical Divers. They would make up the advance force of the amphibious operation to recover the Islands.

“We had a general preparatory order and knew what equipment we had to prepare for the operation. We had been told that we were going to land from a surface ship and that we were going to take a barracks and a Government House, but we did not know where,” recalls Carlos Cequeira.

During the crossing, the weapons were tested, and only once they were already sailing towards the location did they learn that the destination was the Islas Malvinas.

On the night of 1 April, at 8.00 p.m., they arrived near the Malvinas, and at 9.00 p.m. they began boarding the small craft — rubber boats and kayaks — to approach the beach.

Cequeira, together with the head of the section named “Cachiyuyo” for the operation, Marine Infantry Sub-Lieutenant Bernardo Schweizer, were the first to reach the shores of the Malvinas by kayak, at Puerto Enriqueta.



The mission of “Cachiyuyo” was to land ahead of the task units and secure the beach, allowing the rest of the rubber boats carrying the Commandos and Tactical Divers to land safely.

Cequeira recalls: “We moved in a boat and then, at the first tangle with the cachiyuyos — seaweed that grows in the southern sea and was abundant in that sector of the beach — we lost a little patience, got into the kayak and began paddling in order to reach a small inlet at the mouth of the right bank. Lieutenant Schweizer had a night-vision device, and I was behind him with the compass, keeping the direction of advance. He told me that he could see a light on the coast. He lent me the device, and I saw that there was someone on the shore. We assumed they were the British.”

For that reason, they decided to go to an alternative beach that was part of the plan. “The other beach was 500 metres from the main beach. We carried out a reconnaissance, mainly by listening for noises caused by the presence of people on the new beach, and then we gathered at the site. With no developments to report, the Lieutenant signalled the advance to the five security boats, which approached and established the beachhead.”

Cequeira says that on that 1 April “the sea was calm, there was only one line of breakers, and there was a moon that dazzled us; by the time we reached the beach, the moon had already set. When we made the approach march it was dark, and there were many natural and artificial obstacles, because there was peat, wire fencing, and the terrain was very uneven. The coast was similar to that of Río Grande, in our Tierra del Fuego.” He said he had carried out many exercises on the Patagonian coast, in even more inhospitable weather conditions.

At around 11.00 p.m., the main body of the Navy’s special forces reached the beach, and their approach march towards the objectives began at around 1.00 a.m. on 2 April. “At 6.00 in the morning, on 2 April, we had to take the Royal Marines’ barracks at Moody Brook and the Government House located in the town.” For that reason, they split into two groups.

One headed towards the barracks under the command of Captain Sánchez Sabarots, while the other was under Captain Pedro Edgardo Giachino.

Cequeira recalls that they began marching and reached the objectives at the appointed time. “We had a very particular restriction. If one looks at the history of commando-type operations, they are bloody, with many dead among both one’s own forces and the enemy’s. In this case, we were ordered not to cause enemy casualties, with the aim of being well positioned for negotiations. We were not to kill or wound the British, and that constrained us enormously. We did it that way, at the cost of our own wounded and dead.

Captain Giacchino, Lieutenant García Quiroga and Corporal Urbina were our first casualties,” on 2 April 1982.



Upon reaching the objectives, “we adopted the arrangement we had planned; each of us had a responsibility. Within the patrol, echelons are formed with specific tasks for each one. The mission of the security echelon is to prevent reinforcements from reaching the objective. So, in the area where there was a bridge, those of us in security positioned ourselves to prevent British soldiers from arriving to reinforce the barracks.”

Cequeira remembers that there was “very weak resistance” from the Royal Marines. “There were ten men defending the barracks. They fired, fired and fired for ten minutes, and at a certain point the firing stopped.”

“We entered what was the barracks and found no one. At that moment, we lowered the British flag that was on the mast, and the Argentine flag was raised at 7.15 a.m. at the Royal Marines’ barracks.” The raising of the blue and white flag was carried out by the commander of the Amphibious Commando Group, Captain Sánchez Sabarots, and the Group’s senior non-commissioned officer, Guillermo Rodríguez.

“It was an enormous joy to see our national flag flying in the Malvinas.”

Immediately afterwards, the Argentines heard gunfire coming from the house of the then Governor of the Islands, six kilometres away, where Captain Giachino was. A group of Commandos quickly headed towards the town to reinforce Captain Giachino’s group. But before reaching the Governor’s house, someone in civilian clothing appeared. He was an Argentine from civil aviation who had not been captured on the night of 1 April — all the Argentines in Puerto Argentino, who were carrying out various tasks, had been detained by the British authorities — and he told them that behind the Governor’s house, 400 metres away, there were around twenty British troops.

“So we advanced, ready to enter combat, but they offered no resistance. We moved with great caution and applied a technique used in such cases. Since we had the order not to cause enemy casualties, we advanced to shorten the distance and the twelve of us stood up simultaneously, weapons ready to fire and aimed. When we began to move forward, we saw that they were surrendering, without combat, with a white flag on a radio aerial.”

From there, they moved towards the Governor’s House, where they heard automatic-weapons fire. “We went to reinforce Captain Giachino, and we saw that at that moment the Argentine amphibious vehicles were arriving with Marine Infantry Battalion No. 2, which formed the main force of the amphibious operation. At that moment, the British surrendered.”

Malvinas: The Bad Guys Had An Impressive Logistics

The Impressive Logistics of the Invader

On 2 June 1982, the invading British troops completed the temporary Harrier landing strip at San Carlos Water.

Built in just a few days by the Royal Engineers and support units, the strip was designed to bring British air cover closer to the front line.

Constructed from prefabricated aluminium panels originally developed for use in Europe in the event that NATO airfields were destroyed during a Soviet invasion, it provided a simple but effective forward operating base in the Malvinas / Falklands.

The strip was not intended to be a fully equipped air base. There were no facilities for rearming aircraft, only for refuelling them. Fuel was stored in large floating fuel bladders anchored in San Carlos Water and pumped ashore to support operations.



The aim was simple: to allow the Harriers to land, refuel quickly and return to the skies, extending their patrol times over Gran Malvina / East Falkland and reducing the need to fly back to the aircraft carriers to refuel.

The first Harriers from HMS Hermes would arrive on 5 June, and the forward operating base quickly became an important part of the British air defence network. At times, up to four aircraft operated there, ready to launch at short notice against Argentine air attacks or to provide support to British troops advancing towards Puerto Argentino.

The landing strip remained operational until the end of the war, though not without incident.

On one occasion, a loose connector pin from the surface of the strip was sucked into the engine of a Harrier during take-off. The resulting damage caused the aircraft to crash, although the pilot escaped unharmed.



After the accident, flight operations from the strip were temporarily suspended, and some Harriers operated instead from HMS Fearless and HMS Intrepid using vertical landings.

The San Carlos Forward Operating Base was a remarkable achievement. Built in a remote war zone under the threat of air attack, it helped keep the Harriers over the battlefield for longer. This deployment demonstrated the enormous logistical capacity of the British invader, who did not hesitate to use every means available for the sustained support and supply of his troops, in contrast to the Argentine command, which had never anticipated the possibility of a British blockade. This left the ground forces in a state close to abandonment, forced to face combat with undernourished, freezing, poorly armed soldiers, and without adequate support and communications systems.

Malvinas: Algeciras, the Patriotic Union

Algeciras, the Patriotic Union

Operation Algeciras was a secret plan by the Argentine Navy during the Malvinas/Falklands War to attack British ships at the Gibraltar base using underwater mines placed by divers. The operation was conceived by Admiral Jorge Isaac Anaya and was even kept hidden from much of the military government itself.
What is striking about this episode is that the operational side was entrusted to  members of Montoneros. The main figure was Máximo Alfredo Nicoletti, accompanied by other militants: Antonio Nelson Latorre ("el Pelado Diego") and Abel Adolfo Ojeda ("el Marciano"). All of them had experience in sabotage and clandestine operations. 
The involvement of these guerrillas can be explained by their specialised knowledge of explosives and tactical diving.
This situation represents one of the most striking paradoxes of the period: men who only a few years earlier had fought against the Navy ended up collaborating with it in an operation against the United Kingdom during the war.
The operation was never carried out. In late May 1982, the Spanish police detected suspicious movements by members of the group in Málaga and Algeciras. They were arrested before they could place the mines and were subsequently discreetly expelled from Spain in order to avoid a diplomatic conflict.
An interesting detail is that several researchers maintain that British services had intercepted Argentine communications and had partial knowledge of the plan, although the exact role of British intelligence in the failure of the operation remains disputed. Still, as masters of intelligence, they were most likely aware of it.
The story of Máximo Alfredo Nicoletti is one of the most astonishing of the 1970s. He took part in sabotage operations against the Navy. The best known was the 1975 attack on the destroyer ARA Santísima Trinidad, when he placed explosives below the waterline while the ship was moored. The vessel suffered significant damage and had to remain under repair for a long time.
After the 1976 coup, Nicoletti’s situation changed radically. He was arrested and, according to various investigations, ended up collaborating with sectors of Naval Intelligence. The exact details of how that collaboration came about remain a subject of debate among historians and journalists, because there are contradictory versions and incomplete documentation.
The paradox is extraordinary: the same man who years earlier had planted bombs against Navy ships was now planning to attack a British target on behalf of that very same Navy.
Nicoletti and his group travelled to Spain posing as tourists. From hotels on the Costa del Sol, they monitored the movements of British ships entering and leaving Gibraltar. The plan was to attach limpet mines to the hull of a British warship or logistics support vessel and detonate the charges once the ship was under way. However, the Spanish police began to suspect them. The arrests took place before they could carry out the attack. Spain, which was going through a delicate democratic transition and sought to maintain good relations with both Argentina and the United Kingdom, chose to resolve the matter discreetly: the Argentines were expelled from the country and the episode remained largely secret for years.



Nicoletti also appears in several books on the Malvinas/Falklands War and special operations, including works by the journalist Juan Bautista Yofre and the British historian Nigel West. What makes his story so distinctive is that it reflects the complex and sometimes contradictory relationships that emerged during the dictatorship: former enemies ended up collaborating in a wartime operation against an external adversary. 
The main driving force —and, strictly speaking, the true political mastermind of the operation— was Admiral Jorge Isaac Anaya, then Commander-in-Chief of the Navy and a member of the Military Junta. Contrary to some malicious voices claiming that the admiral was indulgent towards British policy on the Malvinas so that the United Kingdom of Great Britain could recover the naval power that Margaret Thatcher was beginning to dismantle, he wanted to strike the British Navy outside the Malvinas theatre of operations, taking the war to Europe. Anaya entrusted the operational design to Admiral Eduardo Morris Girling, head of Naval Intelligence, who selected the personnel and organised the details of the mission.
As for the name, "Operation Algeciras" was so called because the Spanish city of Algeciras, located opposite Gibraltar, was the base from which the Argentine commandos would operate. There they rented vehicles, stayed in hotels and carried out surveillance of British naval traffic. The real target was Gibraltar, but the code name adopted that of the Spanish city from which the mission would be carried out.
There is an interesting historical detail: the operation drew some inspiration from the actions of the Italian divers of the Decima Flottiglia MAS during the Second World War. Those commandos had attacked British ships precisely in Gibraltar and other Mediterranean ports using limpet mines placed by divers. Nicoletti, moreover, was the son of an Italian veteran of that type of unit, so there was a technical and even family connection with that tradition of underwater warfare. 
What is extraordinary is that, had the operation succeeded, it would probably have been the only Argentine attack carried out on European soil during the South Atlantic war but, above all, it showed that when Argentines unite beyond our ideological differences in favour of "the Fatherland first", we can land a solid punch on our enemies.

Expo Ejército 2026

Expo Ejército 2026/ 2026 Army Expo

Thousands of families have already participated in the 2026 Army Expo and shared a weekend full of history, tradition, and experiences for all ages. Vehicles, equipment, exhibits, interactive activities, and the opportunity to tour the Plaza de Armas at the Libertador Building offered a close-up look at the present and capabilities of our Argentine Army.




The best part was seeing so many children amazed, asking questions, climbing into the vehicles, and discovering a little more about those who dedicate their lives to serving their country. The Argentine Army is celebrating its 216th anniversary in the best way possible, alongside all Argentinians. 🇦🇷

Malvinas: Grumman S-2E Tracker Searching for the Royals

Grumman S-2E Tracker Searching for the Royals

Two rarely seen photos of an Argentine Navy Grumman S-2E Tracker en route to anti-surface search operations, possibly in late May/early June 1982. Note the nacelles, loaded with sonobuoys. The APS-88 radar is not yet deployed in the Malvinas.

 

Tracker in the POMA

Grumman S-2E Tracker 0702/2-AS-23 anti-submarine aircraft inside the hangar of the Argentine Navy's (V-2) aircraft carrier ARA 25 de Mayo

How Argentine People Express Themselves

A very good account of what is to be an Argentine chap.




"Che Boludo! A Gringo’s Guide to Understanding the Argentines" por James Bracken.