Facts on the ground

Brain was waving good and proper when I woke up this morning. Why don't the Argies take a leaf out of the Zionist book and create some facts on the ground? Simply buy up whatever chunks of land that they can get their hands on. The value of land must be fairly low out in the Malvinas, being only good for penguin farming and such like, and, as the Zionists found in the thirties of the last century, you can always find people willing to sell out, even if they didn't like to tell their neighbours about it.

Then, once you have a toehold, being a catholic people, breeding will do the rest. In not very many generations they will be in the majority and in a position to vote for union with the mother country. Job done without fuss.

But then, waking up a bit more, I started to wonder about the land tenure arrangements in the Malvinas. Maybe all the land is held on leases from the Crown? Are there rules about alien leases?

A quick google suggests that while until fairly recently, say until the 1970's, most of the land was held by absentee landlords with a firm grip on the poor peasants who actually lived in the place and worked the penguin farms, with far and away the biggest landlord being the Falkland Islands Company, there are now rather more middle sized farms, although currently poor prices for penguin pelts (too much competition from fakes from China) mean that most of them are struggling. Probably subsidy junkies like so many of the farmers in the motherland. There was also a suggestion that land tenure in the Malvinas was a bit odd: maybe there were no proper surveys or land registries or that sort of thing.

Digging a bit deeper we get to http://www.the-falkland-islands-co.com where it says that 'The Falkland Islands Company still retains its Royal Charter, and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Falkland Islands Holdings PLC, a public company quoted on the London Stock Exchange'. So maybe the Argies don't need to bother with actually going to the Malvinas - after all, why on earth would one want to? - they can just get their agent in London to buy up all the shares and they will be almost home and dry.

But that may not suit their real agenda. What they really want is a great old fuss, not a solution; very latin of them.