Beagle Channel Arbitration - Aftermath

Aftermath

The court awarded navigable waters on the north bank of the eastern part of the Channel to Argentina, but otherwise it met all Chilean claims. Although the arbitration concerned only small islands, the direction of the new demarcation of the frontier would under international maritime law give Chile significant rights running into the Atlantic ocean, and would also significantly reduce the claims of Argentina on the Antarctic continent and its waters.

The Argentine rejection led both countries to the verge of war. On 22 December 1978 Argentina started military action to invade the islands. Only last minute papal mediation prevented the outbreak of armed conflict. The award was a defeat for Argentine foreign policy, and initiated an uncoupling from the international community, which lead Argentina three years later into the Falklands war.

The arbitration was completely separate from the Falkland Islands issue, a fact that is often obfuscated or publicly denied in Argentina, where the arbitration is often presented as a plot by the UK.

Pablo Lacoste in his work "La disputa por el Beagle y el papel de los actores no estatales argentinos" (Argentine Civil Society Agencies in the Beagle Dispute) says:

The Argentine newspaper Clarin wished to show that the UK government had taken a substantive role in the arbitration, so that it could be criticized as biased in this by its own dispute with Argentina over the Falklands. To buttress this suggestion, on 3 May 1977, just as the arbitration award was announced, the newspaper put on its front page a cartoon of Queen Elizabeth II eating a Cap of Liberty, an Argentine emblem. Note that the same monarch had resolved the Palena and California controversies ten years previously, and that the Argentine government had accepted those decisions – but that in 1977 the Argentine press did not mention these precedents.

Chile kept in mind the Argentine breach of the arbitration agreement.

The award brought the military dictatorships on both sides to the border to a unique and paradoxical situation: in Chile they celebrated the "wise" decision of the (overthrown) enemy Allende, and in Argentina they criticized the "imprudent" decision of his former colleague in power, general Lanusse.

The award was later fully recognized by Argentina in the Friendship and Peace Treaty of 1984.