Disclaimer: I was employed by the BBC at the time of the 1982 war, and continue to be so. However, this is an entirely personal blog post, reflecting only my views.
Acknowledgements: I must thank Alejo Miguel Díaz, whose 2016 academic thesis Las Operaciones Psicológicas en el Conflicto del Atlántico Sur ("Psychological Operations in the South Atlantic Conflict") presented at the army university in Buenos Aires is a rich resource for anyone researching Radio Atlantico del Sur. The thesis has a section dedicated to the Pausas Sentimentales, which I am happy to acknowledge as a key source for this post.
I continue to be grateful for the encouragement from my Argentine friend Adrian Korol; and to professional researcher Lee Richards and his excellent website PsyWar.Org, without which I would probably not have started this blog last year.
(Update: This article was written in 2018. The section below on "Who was Mariana Flores?" was updated in May 2022.)
Mariana Flores and her "Pausas Sentimentales"
A regular feature of Radio Atlantico del Sur's output was its Sentimental Breaks (or Interludes) ("Pausas Sentimentales").
In each Sentimental Break, the station's sole female presenter – who used the on-air name Mariana Flores – would dedicate some lines of poetry and a record to named individuals said to be among the Argentine forces on the islands.
Flores put on her most empathetic manner to do this. For RAdS's producers, it was key that the segment be presented by a voice with which the target audience could form an emotional connection. [1]
A written summary in the MoD files of the opening of the first day's RAdS broadcast put it bluntly: Sentimental Break was hosted by an "attractive girl presenter".
In his thesis, Alejo Miguel Díaz says Mariana Flores cultivated an ambiguity in how her (exclusively male) target listeners would see her, depending on their age, family circumstance and inclination:
The sole aim (unspoken, of course) of the Sentimental Breaks was to demoralise the audience.
This was done across all of RAdS's output by reinforcing feelings of homesickness and unsettling the listener through an implicit but regular reminder of his predicament – he was a long way from home, isolated, facing a determined, well-equipped and well-trained enemy, and without hope of reinforcement or relief. (By the time RAdS was launched the islands were under a British air and sea blockade.)
Díaz notes the subtlety of Mariana Flores's approach. While speaking "in a gentle way", to gain the listener's attention, there was also "a hint of coldness in the intonation".
This reminded the listener of his hopeless situation and was in line with the first of the two aims that RAdS had formally set itself, to persuade Argentine troops to "consider positively the benefits of surrendering". (The other objective was to increase any inclination to "hesitate before firing on British troops".)
Having seduced the listener with her sympathetic tone, Mariana let him down with cold comfort.
With luck, RAdS's producers must have hoped, an Argentine soldier would feel miserable at the end of her little interludes – but not of course blame Mariana for that.
A regular feature of Radio Atlantico del Sur's output was its Sentimental Breaks (or Interludes) ("Pausas Sentimentales").
In each Sentimental Break, the station's sole female presenter – who used the on-air name Mariana Flores – would dedicate some lines of poetry and a record to named individuals said to be among the Argentine forces on the islands.
Flores put on her most empathetic manner to do this. For RAdS's producers, it was key that the segment be presented by a voice with which the target audience could form an emotional connection. [1]
A written summary in the MoD files of the opening of the first day's RAdS broadcast put it bluntly: Sentimental Break was hosted by an "attractive girl presenter".
In his thesis, Alejo Miguel Díaz says Mariana Flores cultivated an ambiguity in how her (exclusively male) target listeners would see her, depending on their age, family circumstance and inclination:
[She] set her voice in a gentle way, between mother and confidant, so as to awaken in the audience the feeling of being in front of a beloved and missed woman: a mother, a wife or a friend.Psychological intent and technique
The sole aim (unspoken, of course) of the Sentimental Breaks was to demoralise the audience.
This was done across all of RAdS's output by reinforcing feelings of homesickness and unsettling the listener through an implicit but regular reminder of his predicament – he was a long way from home, isolated, facing a determined, well-equipped and well-trained enemy, and without hope of reinforcement or relief. (By the time RAdS was launched the islands were under a British air and sea blockade.)
Díaz notes the subtlety of Mariana Flores's approach. While speaking "in a gentle way", to gain the listener's attention, there was also "a hint of coldness in the intonation".
This reminded the listener of his hopeless situation and was in line with the first of the two aims that RAdS had formally set itself, to persuade Argentine troops to "consider positively the benefits of surrendering". (The other objective was to increase any inclination to "hesitate before firing on British troops".)
Having seduced the listener with her sympathetic tone, Mariana let him down with cold comfort.
With luck, RAdS's producers must have hoped, an Argentine soldier would feel miserable at the end of her little interludes – but not of course blame Mariana for that.
Examples of three Sentimental Breaks
Each Sentimental Break lasted just a few minutes. They went out every half an hour or so during each broadcast.
Three Sentimental Breaks can be heard in a studio recording of the first 90 minutes of the RAdS broadcast of 20 May 1982, on Jonathan Marks's website.
On the recording's timeline, the three examples can be heard at 00:23:20, 00:49:50 and 01:21:05.
Flirting on the airwaves
In this particular broadcast (the day after the station was launched), the two main presenters introduce
themselves as Francisco Marín and José Miguel Antonov.
In the first Sentimental Break of the evening (at 00:23:20 on the recording), Francisco Marín engages in some on-air flirting with Mariana Flores as he introduces her segment:
She ends this particular Sentimental Break by playing Julio Iglesias singing De niña a mujer (From girl to woman). Díaz notes that this song would have been intended to resonate with an older listener, perhaps an officer or a senior NCO, who might have a teenage daughter.
A mistake in translation
For the evening's second outing of Sentimental Break (at 00:49:50), Mariana is introduced in a rather more restrained fashion by the other main presenter, José Miguel Antonov.
It is in this segment that she makes a brief but serious mistake.
After José Miguel's introduction, she reads some more poetry "for all of you in the Malvinas" and then introduces the song A Little Peace.
This had been the winner of that year's Eurovision Song Contest, which had taken place the previous month and where it had been the West German entry, sung in German as Ein bißchen Frieden.
An English version of the song is then played (chorus: "A little loving, a little giving, to build a dream for the world we live in, a little patience and understanding, for our tomorrow, a little peace"...).
A good choice of song to undermine any martial ardour in the listener and, understandably, Mariana introduces the English-language disc by giving its title in English. But she then makes a homophonic error when translating its name into Spanish:
It is perhaps unfair to highlight such a passing error, made on live radio (station manager Neil ffrench-Blake was insistent that all of RAdS's broadcasts be made live) in the early hours of the morning (almost 1 a.m. London time) by a young volunteer who possibly had no previous broadcast experience.
Dedication to a fictional lieutenant?
In the third outing of Sentimental Break that evening (on the recording at 01:21:05) you can hear Mariana send greetings to a second lieutenant, whose name she is careful to enunciate as Juan Esteban Olmedo Zigorraga, before her reading and musical dedication.
But did such an officer exist?
A listener's anecdote
Writing on a radio hobbyists' website in 2002, a shortwave listener in Brazil, Sérgio Dória Partamian, reminisced about Mariana Flores and her Sentimental Breaks.
Presumably recalling his own memories of listening twenty years earlier, he said Flores would suggest that "while the Argentinian soldiers suffered difficulties, their captured commanders would be amusing themselves with British women".
Assuming that Partamian's memory was correct, this was a classic demoralisation technique, used by both the British and Germans in the second world war: hinting that while the combat soldier endured his lonely hardships at the front, his more fortunate compatriots – civilians and senior officers back home, or those lucky enough to have been captured by a decent enemy – enjoyed an easier life.
Who was Mariana Flores?
We don't know. The identity of her Argentine counterpart, Silvia Fernández Barrio, who broadcast to British forces anonymously as "Liberty", became public knowledge soon after the war, and Silvia Fernández has been happy to talk about her secret work in 1982.
But Radio Atlantico del Sur's presenters – said to have numbered nine in total, with all except Mariana being male and serving members of the British armed forces – remain known only by their on-air pseudonyms. Along with Mariana they included Francisco Marín and José Miguel Antonov (both mentioned above), Mario Santana and the station's resident military commentator, Jaime Montero.
Perhaps this makes them the perfect psychological warriors. For eternity they will exist only as voices on the radio, that most ephemeral of media.
Three Sentimental Breaks can be heard in a studio recording of the first 90 minutes of the RAdS broadcast of 20 May 1982, on Jonathan Marks's website.
On the recording's timeline, the three examples can be heard at 00:23:20, 00:49:50 and 01:21:05.
Flirting on the airwaves
In the first Sentimental Break of the evening (at 00:23:20 on the recording), Francisco Marín engages in some on-air flirting with Mariana Flores as he introduces her segment:
Francisco: The programme is called La Pausa Sentimental with Miss Mariana Flores. And here is the señorita again. How are you, Mariana?
Mariana: Very well, Francisco, thank you. How are you?
Francisco: I'm very well. But you are pretty, as always. [Mariana wordlessly acknowledges the compliment.] Hey, I think our audience has been waiting for you since we finished yesterday at 2300, because your dedications and your verses were magnificent. [2]
Mariana: Thanks.
Francisco: Look, I hope you have more tonight.
Mariana: I hope so...Mariana then reads a poem by the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) which she says is from all the Argentine women "who regret being without husbands, sons or boyfriends" (in other words, because they are, most unfortunately, with the forces on the islands, and no doubt as unhappy about that as their womenfolk are).
She ends this particular Sentimental Break by playing Julio Iglesias singing De niña a mujer (From girl to woman). Díaz notes that this song would have been intended to resonate with an older listener, perhaps an officer or a senior NCO, who might have a teenage daughter.
A mistake in translation
For the evening's second outing of Sentimental Break (at 00:49:50), Mariana is introduced in a rather more restrained fashion by the other main presenter, José Miguel Antonov.
It is in this segment that she makes a brief but serious mistake.
After José Miguel's introduction, she reads some more poetry "for all of you in the Malvinas" and then introduces the song A Little Peace.
This had been the winner of that year's Eurovision Song Contest, which had taken place the previous month and where it had been the West German entry, sung in German as Ein bißchen Frieden.
An English version of the song is then played (chorus: "A little loving, a little giving, to build a dream for the world we live in, a little patience and understanding, for our tomorrow, a little peace"...).
A good choice of song to undermine any martial ardour in the listener and, understandably, Mariana introduces the English-language disc by giving its title in English. But she then makes a homophonic error when translating its name into Spanish:
Y ahora, dedico una canción que se llama A Little Peace, un pedazo chico.In short, rather than translating A Little Peace as "un poco de paz" she says "un pedazo chico" (a little piece).
It is perhaps unfair to highlight such a passing error, made on live radio (station manager Neil ffrench-Blake was insistent that all of RAdS's broadcasts be made live) in the early hours of the morning (almost 1 a.m. London time) by a young volunteer who possibly had no previous broadcast experience.
Dedication to a fictional lieutenant?
In the third outing of Sentimental Break that evening (on the recording at 01:21:05) you can hear Mariana send greetings to a second lieutenant, whose name she is careful to enunciate as Juan Esteban Olmedo Zigorraga, before her reading and musical dedication.
But did such an officer exist?
A listener's anecdote
Writing on a radio hobbyists' website in 2002, a shortwave listener in Brazil, Sérgio Dória Partamian, reminisced about Mariana Flores and her Sentimental Breaks.
Presumably recalling his own memories of listening twenty years earlier, he said Flores would suggest that "while the Argentinian soldiers suffered difficulties, their captured commanders would be amusing themselves with British women".
Assuming that Partamian's memory was correct, this was a classic demoralisation technique, used by both the British and Germans in the second world war: hinting that while the combat soldier endured his lonely hardships at the front, his more fortunate compatriots – civilians and senior officers back home, or those lucky enough to have been captured by a decent enemy – enjoyed an easier life.
Who was Mariana Flores?
We don't know. The identity of her Argentine counterpart, Silvia Fernández Barrio, who broadcast to British forces anonymously as "Liberty", became public knowledge soon after the war, and Silvia Fernández has been happy to talk about her secret work in 1982.
But Radio Atlantico del Sur's presenters – said to have numbered nine in total, with all except Mariana being male and serving members of the British armed forces – remain known only by their on-air pseudonyms. Along with Mariana they included Francisco Marín and José Miguel Antonov (both mentioned above), Mario Santana and the station's resident military commentator, Jaime Montero.
Perhaps this makes them the perfect psychological warriors. For eternity they will exist only as voices on the radio, that most ephemeral of media.
Update in May 2022: In a TV documentary aired in April 2022 to mark the 40th anniversary of the war, a retired British major, Terence Scott, confirmed that he had played the part of "Jaime Montero" and that "Mariana Flores" was a cousin of his.
Further listening
Thanks to Adrian Korol for pointing me towards a complete recording of Sentimental Break's theme music.
Notes
[1] Contrary to misunderstandings at the time – including within the British government – and since, the sole target audience for Radio Atlantico del Sur was Argentine forces in the islands and, to a lesser extent, in their mainland coastal bases. It did not target an Argentine civilian audience, still less one elsewhere in Latin America (though the nature of shortwave meant that it had listeners in those places).
[2] Radio Atlantico del Sur's evening broadcasts went out at 2000 to 2300 local time (2300-0200 GMT). When Argentine forces invaded the Falklands on 2 April 1982 the local time in the islands was 4 hours behind GMT. The occupying forces decreed that local time in the islands would be the same as that in Argentina, which was 3 hours behind GMT. As an act of civil disobedience, the islanders refused to recognise the imposed time zone. Throughout this blog, I use the Argentine-imposed time zone (GMT minus 3) as Radio Atlantico del Sur was only targeting Argentine troops, and announced that time on the air.
© 2018. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.
Further listening
Thanks to Adrian Korol for pointing me towards a complete recording of Sentimental Break's theme music.
Notes
[1] Contrary to misunderstandings at the time – including within the British government – and since, the sole target audience for Radio Atlantico del Sur was Argentine forces in the islands and, to a lesser extent, in their mainland coastal bases. It did not target an Argentine civilian audience, still less one elsewhere in Latin America (though the nature of shortwave meant that it had listeners in those places).
[2] Radio Atlantico del Sur's evening broadcasts went out at 2000 to 2300 local time (2300-0200 GMT). When Argentine forces invaded the Falklands on 2 April 1982 the local time in the islands was 4 hours behind GMT. The occupying forces decreed that local time in the islands would be the same as that in Argentina, which was 3 hours behind GMT. As an act of civil disobedience, the islanders refused to recognise the imposed time zone. Throughout this blog, I use the Argentine-imposed time zone (GMT minus 3) as Radio Atlantico del Sur was only targeting Argentine troops, and announced that time on the air.
© 2018. Material may be reproduced if attributed to Chris Greenway and any original source.
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