On the 32nd Anniversary of Argentina’s invasion of the UK Falkland Islands, Buenos Aires has issued a new 50-Peso note (A$6.78) with a map of what officials there refer to as “Las Malvinas”.  And Argentina’s President accused Britain of turning the rocky outcrop into a NATO nuclear installation.

“We live in a changing world.  I have endless confidence that we will recover these islands,” President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner said before leading an event commemorating the Falkslands war, “The colonial enclaves always end up being recovered, sooner or later.”

Argentina has long maintained that Britain is illegally occupying the islands, and the 2013 referendum in which residents confirmed their British status was an empty gesture voted on by a transplanted population.  Argentina’s military government fought a 74-day conflict in which 649 of its soldiers and 255 British troops as well as three civilians were killed. 

The humiliating defeat led to the downfall of the junta and led to the democratic reforms under which President Fernandez, known colloquially by her initials CFK, was elected.  But she’s more concerned about Britain’s current activities on the island than history.

“The truth about Las Malvinas is that it represents a NATO military base in the South Atlantic that is the truth that can no longer remain hidden,” CFK alleged.  And she detailed the military the hardware Britain has stashed there:

Electronic systems for controlling “all the air traffic in the region”; 1500-2000 troops; a frigate; an icebreaker; a nuclear attack submarine and aircraft armed with long-range ballistic missiles “that could reach several areas in the Southern Cone”.

Fernandez insists the presence of those the nuclear submarine and missile-equipped jet fighters are a violation of Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (Tlatelolco Treaty) that “all American countries expect for those in the North have signed.”