The Malvina Islands Newsletter No. 72 of May 1998, a publication of the Malvina Islands Association , revealed yesterday by Agenda Malvinas, states that the first drilling in the Malvina Islands took place on April 27, 1997. It also claimed that the Borgny Dolphin platform had been towed 13,500 km from Norway for this task. However, after verifying the information with sources at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we were able to confirm that the newsletter 's authors lied. They deliberately concealed the fact that the unit was already operating in the Southern Marine Basin under Argentine jurisdiction, operated by the French company Total and the privatized YPF . This represented a multi-million dollar logistical saving, handed to them on a silver platter by the government of Carlos Menem and his Foreign Minister, Guido Di Tella .

On that day, the Borgny Dolphin semi-submersible platform began drilling the first illegal well for the US oil company Amerada Hess in block A of the North Basin (the area that today is part of License PL001 ).

For nearly three decades, the official narrative constructed by the British colonial administration attempted to portray the operation as an epic of transoceanic logistics. In that edition of the Malvina Islands Newsletter (May 1998) , the Malvina Islands Association celebrated the event, stating that the imposing floating structure "had been towed over 8,000 miles (13,500 km) from Norway across the Atlantic Ocean on a journey of several weeks."

However, the comparison of historical data with diplomatic and technical sources from the Argentine Foreign Ministry of the time revealed a substantially different reality: the British publication either falsified the origin of the displacement or deliberately concealed the platform's actual position to cover up a scandalous logistical collaboration.

The platform that "appeared" in the north of the Malvina Islands

Testimony from veterans themselves and various sources linked to foreign policy and the energy sector in the late 1990s, consulted by Agenda Malvinas , confirmed that the semi-submersible platform did not undertake an epic journey directly from the North Sea to the archipelago. The unit was already operating in the waters of the Argentine continental shelf, carrying out exploration and technical evaluation tasks in the Austral Marine Basin, off the northern coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego (north of Río Grande and opposite San Sebastián Bay).

During that period (1996-1997), the operating consortium in the area —headed by Total Austral and YPF SA (in the midst of a partial privatization process with its shareholding dispersed in Wall Street investment funds and managed first by José Estensoro and then by Roberto Monti)— was carrying out an active evaluative drilling campaign on fields such as Carina , Aries and Vega Pléyade .

Moving a deep- and mid-water drilling platform in the late 1990s—from the Northern Hemisphere to the South Atlantic—would have cost the occupying colony and its partners tens of millions of dollars in operating expenses alone, just for freight, towing, and insurance. Having a unit already positioned a few nautical miles off the Argentine continental shelf allowed the British-American consortium (comprising Amerada Hess, Shell, LASMO, and IPC ) to amortize and drastically reduce its mobilization costs.

The exploration approved and tolerated on the Argentine continental shelf by the Menem-Di Tella administration ended up implicitly and directly financing the British landing on the islands. 

The map of platforms in the Austral Marine Basin (1996-1998)

In the period leading up to and coinciding with April 27, 1997 —the “day zero” of oil exploration in the Malvina Islands—the seabed off the northern coast of Tierra del Fuego was the site of intense hydrocarbon activity . Semi-submersible units such as the Atwood Southern Cross , the Noble Kol Ancient , and the Borgny Dolphin (along with jack-up platforms for development in shallow areas) operated off the coasts of Río Grande and San Sebastián for the Total and YPF consortium . The geographical and operational proximity of this offshore park facilitated the logistical transfer to the illegal North Malvina Basin under the cover of the policy of neutrality and the 1995 New York Agreements .

The "Umbrella of Sovereignty" and the 1995 New York Agreements

This logistical maneuver did not occur in a political vacuum. It was fertile ground for the diplomatic architecture designed by Foreign Minister Guido Di Tella and Deputy Foreign Minister Andrés Cisneros , under the leadership of President Carlos Saúl Menem .

On September 27, 1995 , Argentina and the United Kingdom signed the "Joint Declaration on Cooperation in Offshore Activities in the Southwest Atlantic" in New York. Under the fallacy of the "sovereignty umbrella," the Argentine government agreed to create a hydrocarbon cooperation zone and fostered a climate of commercial understanding that was unilaterally exploited by London.

While the Foreign Office celebrated the progress of the licenses and the arrival of support ships from Aberdeen such as the Kapitan Vaga or the Maersk Puncher , the Argentine Foreign Ministry limited itself to sending weak protest notes to the British Embassy in Buenos Aires that never translated into punitive actions or the effective blockade of supplies circulating through the South Atlantic.

The British colony's own bulletin of May 1998 cynically reflected Argentina's diplomatic ineptitude: "Despite the 1995 Oil Agreement, the Argentines accuse Great Britain of unilaterally advancing 'without their permission'... Great Britain firmly rejects this, insisting that any oil in its waters belongs to the Malvinas . "

From the passivity of the '90s to the Pino Solanas Law

The deliberate inaction of diplomacy in the 1990s left an indelible stain on the protection of national heritage. It took almost a decade for the Argentine state to attempt to equip itself with effective defense tools. It was only in 2007 (and subsequently intensified in 2011 and 2013) that, at the urging of the late filmmaker and senator Fernando "Pino" Solanas , the National Congress passed amendments to Hydrocarbons Law 26,659 .

The so-called "Pino Solanas Law" established for the first time criminal penalties, administrative disqualifications , delisting ) stock market seizures and asset freezes for all hydrocarbon or offshore logistics companies that participated without Argentine authorization in the exploration of the islands, or that provided technical support from the mainland to the colonial occupation.

However, the historical precedent of April 1997 demonstrates that the oil corporations did not act alone. The British advance in the North Basin of the archipelago was fueled not only by speculative capital from the City of London, but also by the complacency of an Argentine Foreign Ministry that preferred to look the other way while a platform operating in Tierra del Fuego set sail for the Malvinas to consolidate the dispossession.