The Land That Lost Its Heroes

'A required book for anyone who wishes to understand the Argentine situation before and after the Falklands War' Graham Greene 'Full of insights about the extraordinary story of Argentina under Galtieri and Alfonsin' Max Hastings __________________ Jimmy Burns was the only full-time British foreign correspondent to remain in Argentina covering the Falklands War. In The Land that Lost Its Heroes, he gives a detailed account of the military planning of the invasion, exposing not only the hidden motives and nature of Argentina's military regime, but also the pitifully inadequate reactions of both British diplomacy and intelligence. Burns exposes the duplicity of other Western nations and the international banking community and gives a vivid first-hand account of the end of the regime, the debt crisis and the return to democracy under Raul Alfonsin.

An account of the military planning of the invasion of the Falklands, exposing the motives and nature of Argentina's military regime and the reactions of British diplomacy and intelligence. The author was foreign correspondent in Argentina for the Financial Times from 1981-86.

OSis title, by the only British foreign correspondent to remain in Argentina covering the Falklands War, gives a detailed account of the military planning of the invasion. He also gives an account of the end of the regime, the debt crisis and the return to democracy under Raul Alfonsin.

During the five years Jimmy Burns was based in Buenos Aires, which resulted in his award-winning study of the Falklands War and its aftermath, The Land That Lost Its Heroes, he also embarked on further-flung journeys in Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Chile. 'Each South American country is idiosyncratic - it brings out our individual fantasies and forces us to interpret anew,' writes Burns. Certainly to travel with him is to trace the footprints of history - conquest and subjugation, defiance and hope - yet to encounter at each turn a fresh observation, the unexpected. He conducts us by steam train up the Andes and down to the treacherous depths of a Bolivian tin mine. We find a hotbed of Argentine loyalties in Tierra del Fuego, beaches of bodies beautiful in Brazil and Peruvian streets where fanatical Sendero Luminoso guerrillas wage a permanent power struggle with the military. Burns introduces us to Sixto Vazquez, Indian intellectual with an unshakeable faith in legend and animism; to Tina, White Russian Duchess of Platinov, who now presides over an eerie domain of enormous moths in the Ecuadorian rain forest; to Father Renato Hevia, the editor of a Jesuit magazine in Chile who is harassed and detained if he fails to mention Pinochet in even one edition. To this journey of discovery Jimmy Burns brings all the clarity of vision and eloquence of expression for which he was awarded the 1988 Somerset Maugham Award for Non-fiction.

President Ronald Reagan needed his ally Thatcher in power to maintain Britain's commitment to his reinvigoration of Soviet containment. Dr. Richard C. Thornton contends that Reagan's solution to the two problems was found in the Falklands War.