Alejandro Betts

Alejandro Jacobo Betts His younger brother Peter served in the British Task Force.

Early life

Betts, a fourth generation Falkland Islander, was born to Cyril Betts and Mally Goss, who ran the Victory Bar in Stanley. The Goss family first arrived in the Falklands in approximately 1841/2, when Jacob Napoleon Goss (great-great-grandfather) and his wife Ann Patrick arrived on board the Alarm. John Betts (great-great-grandfather) arrived on 9 August 1855, following the shipwreck of the Carlton.

Betts has two younger brothers who participated in the Falklands War: Peter, who was a merchant seaman who served with the British task force, and Terry, who was one of the islanders who volunteered to support British forces. Another brother died in infancy as the result of meningitis. He also had two half-brothers and two half-sisters from his father's first marriage.

At the age of fourteen Betts went to train as sheep shearer and later worked for LADE as an air-traffic controller at Port Stanley Airport. Betts' first wife, Candy, died in 1977 at the age of 26. The couple had a son, Paul, born in 1968 and a daughter, Dawn, born in 1969. Betts' second marriage was to Rosita, where he still lives and has adopted the name Pablo. Following the Falklands War, Betts divorced Rosita, marrying Santina Toranzo, with whom he had three children. Islanders were apparently unaware of Betts' claim to support Argentina and suggested he left the Falklands of his own accord, abandoning his wife and their children (and his 13 yr old daughter from his previous marriage John Fowler, the former deputy editor of Penguin News, pointed out in an editorial that other islanders who collaborated with the Argentine military during the war suffered no persecution and still live in the islands.

Life in Argentina

After leaving the Falklands, Betts moved to Córdoba Province and married his Argentine partner, Caroline.

Betts campaigned in support of Argentine sovereignty over the Falklands, giving evidence at annual meetings of the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization as part of Argentina's delegation. In 1987, his brother Terry Betts also gave evidence to the committee as a member of the Falkland Islands Government and although they sat together did not speak, he later said that his brother had ″lost touch″ with developments on the islands since the war. Betts was later to criticise his brother's attendance stating:

In response, John Fowler of the Penguin Times in an editorial replied:

Betts does not mention that during that time his brother Terry was a Councillor in the government of the Islands, democratically elected and defending the interests and rights of the inhabitants of the Islands and not those of the British. Councillors choose which of their own members go to the Committee as part of the British delegation.

In his evidence to the Special Committee's meeting in 2013, Betts caused controversy when he suggested that during the Falkland Islands sovereignty referendum campaign, Peter Willets, an Emeritus Professor of Global Politics from City University London, had his credentials as an official referendum observer removed by the Falkland Islands Government because he stated the referendum result would not be recognised legally. Betts responded to the article by pointing out that he had "never denied being an Argentine Malvinas war veteran" and that one of the requisites to collect the veteran's pension is to have been in the Falklands during the war.

The controversy over his treatment of his family led to the Argentine government under President Macri dropping Betts from the Argentine delegation to the UN decolonisation committee in 2018.

In early 2020 he was diagnosed with spinal cancer and died on 13 March 2020.