How I narrowly escaped joining Argentina’s ‘disappeared’

A bully-boy leader. A corrupt, out-of-touch regime. A twisted reading of history. An unprovoked, military-led landgrab. A domestic disinformation blitz. And an enemy that, contrary to all the aggressor’s expectations, fought back. We’ve been here before. Not on the scale of Russia’s attack on Ukraine perhaps, nor with the tragic cost to civilian lives. But wind back 40 years and something akin to Putin’s demented assault played out in the South Atlantic.

In the last throes of a desperate government, Argentina’s military dictatorship ordered an assault on the Falkland Islands. When the news broke in early April 1982, the world gaped. Sabre-rattling from Buenos Aires was nothing new. But an actual invasion? Few believed it could ever happen.

As Argentine troops were raising their flag over the disputed territories (under British rule since 1833), the television reporter Julian Manyon was covering another war, this time in El Salvador. With a journalist’s relish for action, he and his ITV production team duly dropped everything and jumped on the first plane to Argentina. It proved a fateful decision. Soon afterwards, Manyon found himself being grabbed off the street, bundled into the back of a Ford Falcon and driven to the scrubby outskirts of the capital.

What followed was surreal. The henchmen of a murderous regime eventually credited with butchering up to 25,000 ‘subversives’ during its seven-year rule let Manyon and his production-team colleagues go. ‘Instead of lying in pools of blood after the sort of execution that had taken place so often in Argentina,’ the veteran British newsman recalls, ‘we were standing near-naked in a field, in the middle of a country at war with Britain.’

It gets weirder. After they found their way to a police station, a ministerial car was sent to pick them up.