General Leopoldo Galtieri

Leopoldo Galtieri was an accomplished practitioner of torture and terrorism but an incompetent and cowardly soldier. Best known internationally for his ill-judged order for the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982, he was the archetype of the Argentine officer who was less adept at fighting than at climbing up the greasy pole of military politics, enriching himself and using force on his fellow citizens.

Born in 1926 of a family of Italian immigrants, he was not seen as very intelligent, and distinguished himself little in his first years in uniform. Nevertheless, he caught the eye of US military talent spotters and was sent for a course at the School of the Americas, a US institution at the time based in Panama, whose long-term mission was to persuade Latin American officers that the circumstances of the Cold War meant that their primary loyalty was to the United States' national interests and not to the governments who paid them. The establishment trained many, such as his compatriot Admiral Emilio Massera, who were to exercise dictatorial power by use of terrorist techniques up and down the Western Hemisphere.

From his time in Panama, Galtieri nursed the notion that Washington would be sympathetic to his ideas, an idea which was later to be strengthened by the praise and support which he received from hard-right elements in the government of President Ronald Reagan.

He came to national prominence after the 1976 military coup led by General Jorge Videla against the civilian government of the hysterical María Estela "Isabelita" Martínez de Perón. Videla gave Galtieri command of the Second Army Corps stationed in Rosario, a short drive north of the capital at a time when Argentina was being torn apart by extremists of the left and of the right.

In a property known as the Quinta de Funes, Galtieri mounted an interrogation and torture centre established to break physically and mentally the Montoneros, the radical nationalist guerrillas. Some years previously, they had broken with the increasingly conservative General Juan Domingo Perón, then in his last term in the presidency. The Quinta mirrored practices tried out by Massera in the more notorious ESMA, the School of Naval Mechanics, in the city of Buenos Aires. Galtieri personally oversaw torture sessions but not without an occasional note of whimsy, letting off one suspect mother because she bore the name Malvina (Islas Malvinas is the Argentine term for the Falkland Islands).

His good work in the Quinta de Funes allowed him to progress to the command of the First Army Corps in 1979: before the year was out he had taken over as commander-in-chief of the Argentine army. There his over-riding duty was to protect the privileges and perks of senior officers and NCOs against any show of hostility from their bitterest enemies, viz, their counterparts in the Argentine navy and the air force. He was zealous in that task and thus strengthened the existing animosities which were to make the country's forces such an international laughing-stock when they attempted war with the UK in 1982.

From a standing start in December 1979, it took Galtieri less than two years to encompass the downfall of Videla's successor, General Roberto Viola, as president and his own accession to the office of head of state. Viola was seen as weak for having tentative contacts with civilian politicians.

By then, increasingly addicted to whisky, Galtieri had become fixated with the capture of the Falkland Islands, the British colony in the South Atlantic the sovereignty over which had since the 1830s been demanded – not without some reason – by successive governments in Buenos Aires.

As he put in train plans for the invasion Galtieri was encouraged by the hopeful interpretations offered by his advisers of the always ambivalent attitudes of London and Reagan's Washington. In the US capital, powerful right-wing figures such as Jeane Kirkpatrick, permanent representative at the UN, had put forward the idea that while left-wing dictatorships were bad, right-wing dictatorships – such as his – were acceptable. In London, Margaret Thatcher, with her policy of selling arms to Buenos Aires, of allowing Argentine naval vessels to exercise in Cardigan Bay and other stretches of British waters, her withdrawal from service of HMS Endurance in Antarctic waters and her threat to close British bases in South Georgia was taken as signalling her indifference to the maintenance of a British presence in the region.

Galtieri, increasingly haughty, ordered an invasion on 2 April 1982, exulting on radio and television,

Let the nation understand the profound and ineluctable national feeling of this decision so that the collective sense of responsiblity and effort can accompany this task and allow, with the help of God, the legitimate rights of the Argentine people, postponed prudently and patiently for 150 years, to become a reality.

The enterprise was a military and political disaster. After the sinking of the Argentine warship the General Belgrano by a British submarine on 2 May 1982, he was however capable of blustering, "I have 400 dead Argentines and if it is necessary to satisfy honour, Argentina is ready for 4,000 or 40,000 more dead."

But by 14 June it was all over and his forces surrendered. The Buenos Aires mob who had cheered Galtieri in April were jeering him two months later. His fellow generals took power from him three days later.

The official Argentine inquest into the Falklands débâcle said that Galtieri should be cashiered and shot. He got away with six years of relatively comfortable imprisonment. He devoted himself to his grandchildren and to oil painting and visits to the seaside. Always vain, he rejoiced in being photographed on the beach wearing a cross round his neck as though his career had fitted him to claim to be a follower of Christ. He also put in a claim – unsuccessfully – for a pension as a former president.

In June 2002 he was put under house arrest charged with the killing of 18 prisoners. His crimes also brought demands for his extradition from Italy and Spain.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy