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Faced with mounting international pressure over the Falkland Islands territorial dispute, the British government enlisted its spy service, including a highly secretive unit known for using “dirty tricks,” to covertly launch offensive cyberoperations to prevent Argentina from taking the islands. A shadowy unit of the British spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had been preparing a bold, covert plan called “Operation QUITO” since at least 2009. Documents provided to The Intercept by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published in partnership with Argentine news site Todo Notícias, refer to the mission as a “long-running, large scale, pioneering effects operation.” At the heart of this operation was the Joint Threat Research and Intelligence Group, known by the acronym JTRIG, a secretive unit that has been involved in spreading misinformation.

The British government, which has continuously administered the Falkland Islands — also known as the Malvinas — since 1833, has rejected Argentine and international calls to open negotiations on territorial sovereignty. Worried that Argentina, emboldened by international opinion, may attempt to retake the islands diplomatically or militarily, JTRIG and other GCHQ divisions were tasked “to support FCO’s [Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s] goals relating to Argentina and the Falkland Islands.” A subsequent document suggests the main FCO goal was to “[prevent] Argentina from taking over the Falkland Islands” and that new offensive cyberoperations were underway in 2011 to further that end. Tensions between the two nations, which fought a war over the small archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean in 1982, reached a boil in 2010 with the British discovery of large, offshore oil and gas reserves potentially worth billions of dollars.

While the full extent of JTRIG’s tactics used in the Falklands mission is unclear, the scope of JTRIG’s approved capabilities offers an idea of what may have been done. The group, first revealed last year by NBC News and The Intercept, has developed various techniques — including “false flag” operations, sexual “honey traps,” and implanting computer viruses — to collect intelligence, plant propaganda and diminish or discredit opponents. As reported in The Intercept last year, JTRIG “has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls, artificially inflate pageview counts on web sites, ‘amplif[y]’ sanctioned messages on YouTube,” and plant false Facebook wall posts for “entire countries.” According to a study of the group by the U.K.’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL), “the language of JTRIG’s operations is characterized by terms such as ‘discredit,’ promote ‘distrust,’ ‘dissuade,’ ‘deceive,’ ‘disrupt,’ ‘delay,’ ‘deny,’ ‘denigrate/degrade,’ and ‘deter.’” The unit’s activities generally break down into two symbiotic categories: online Human Intelligence, or HUMINT, and “effects operations.” Online HUMINT is the collection of information on human targets through passive tracking or overt interaction with a target through an alias. These operations may sometimes be in support of, or in conjunction with, covert MI-6 agents on the ground.

The Argentinian authorities are wondering about the massive purchase of land in Patagonia by a British billionaire, and the « holidays » that tens of thousands of Israëli soldiers are enjoying on his property.

In the 21st century, benefitting from the advantages offered them by the Falklands War Treaty, the United Kingdom and Israël are now setting up a new project Patagonia. British billionaire Joe Lewis has acquired immense territories in the South of Argentina and even neighbouring Chile. His properties cover areas several times larger than the State of Israël. They are situated in Tierra del Fuego, at the extreme Southern point of the continent. In particular, they surround the Lago Escondido, which effectively denies access to the entire region, despite a legal injunction. The billionaire has built a private airport with a two kilometre landing strip, in order to be able to receive civil and military aircraft. Since the Falklands War, the Israëli army has been organising « holiday camps » (sic) in Patagonia for its soldiers. Between 8,000 and 10,000 of them now come every year to spend two weeks on Joe Lewis’ land. While in the 1970’s, the Argentinian army noted the construction of 25,000 empty houses, which gave rise to the myth of the Andinia Plan, hundreds of thousands have been built today.

It is impossible for the moment to determine if Israël is engaged in a programme for the exploitation of Antarctica, or if it is building a rear base in case of defeat in Palestine.

Ecuador''s National Assembly has begun the procedure to make official the resignation of the Andean country from the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty), signed with the United States in 1947. The approval of the resignation request is being handled by the Commission on Sovereignty and International Relations, which yesterday listened to arguments from several officials belonging to the foreign ministry, the legislative body reported in a press note. According to the text, the diplomat Mauricio Montalvo explained to some members of the commission that the Ecuadorian government supports the country's resignation from that agreement due to the current lack of political, material, and historical conditions that were once present after the end of the Cold War and which motivated the signature of the agreement. Montalvo referred to the Rio Treaty as an instrument promoted by the United States to deal with alleged attacks against the peace, security, and sovereignty of Latin American nations, as a result of the intervention of powers outside the region, specifically the communist bloc in Eastern Europe and Asia.

However, the diplomat stated that in recent years the document has been used to justify interventionism and the use of force against Latin American countries and governments with nationalist, socialist, or populist tendencies. In addition, he mentioned as an example the case of the British invasion of the Malvinas (Falkland) Islands, when the United States sided with the United Kingdom, against Argentina´s interests, despite this Southern country being one of the signatories of the agreement. Ecuador announced its resignation from Rio Treaty at the summit of the Organization of American States celebrated in June, 2012 in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, through its foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño. On that occasion, the head of Ecuadorian diplomacy expressed that his country, like Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela had made the choice to withdraw from the agreement, considering that it had lost its legitimacy after the Malvinas war. "We have decided to bury what deserves to be buried, and to dispose what is of no longer useful," Patiño declared at the time.