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Argentinian amateur racing driver who also represented his country at sailing

The Argentinian sportsman Roberto Mieres, who has died aged 87, was a fine example of the kind of gifted amateur racing driver who could still find a place in the grand prix races of the 1950s. At the wheel of a Gordini or a Maserati, he could be relied upon to give a decent account of himself, if seldom managing to embarrass the great stars of the day.

One of Mieres's finest performances came in the British Grand Prix of 1955, held at the Aintree circuit, formed from the perimeter road of the Grand National course. In front of a capacity crowd, he and his Maserati 250F succeeded in splitting the four cars of the all-conquering Mercedes-Benz team, leading the car of Piero Taruffi before retiring with engine failure.

Mieres was born into a wealthy family in the city of Mar del Plata, and took advantage of the opportunity to practise a number of sports, including tennis, rowing, rugby ? which he gave up after breaking a leg ? and sailing, in which he represented Argentina at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. But motor racing was his real love, and he began his career in 1947, first at the wheel of an MG and then with a Bugatti whose previous drivers included the Italian ace Achille Varzi.

In 1950 he was invited to join his compatriots Juan Manuel Fangio and José Froilán González on a trip to Europe. There, subsidised by their national motor club, they took part in several international races. Mieres's best result, at the wheel of a Maserati 4CLT-48, was fourth place in the Grand Prix of Geneva (Switzerland had not yet banned motor racing).

Back in Argentina, he raced a Jaguar XK120, but in 1953 he recrossed the Atlantic at the behest of Amédée Gordini, who offered him a seat in his team of little Simca-engined single-seaters. Mieres finished a praiseworthy sixth in the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, which was won by Fangio's Maserati, and at the end of the season he placed an order for one of the Maserati company's potent and beautiful new 250F models, on sale to private owners for £5,000 each. When delivery was delayed by several months, the factory gave him a year-old A6GCM model, updated with the 1954 engine. He drove the car, painted in his national colours of blue and white, to second place in front of his home crowd in the Buenos Aires Grand Prix. After finishing sixth in the 1954 British Grand Prix at Silverstone ? one of four Argentinians in the top six on a wet day ? he was invited to join the works Maserati team, alongside Stirling Moss and Luigi Musso. Fourth-place finishes in Switzerland and Spain in factory-run cars led to his retention for the following season, partnering Musso and Jean Behra.

After good finishes in the non-championship races in Turin (second), Pau (third) and Bordeaux (third again, behind his two team-mates), there was less luck once the 1955 championship proper began. He finished fourth in Holland and seventh at Monza in the last race of his grand prix career, two laps behind Fangio's winning Mercedes. The 250F he drove throughout the 1955 season was for many years to be seen in the Donington Park museum in Leicestershire.

At the end of the 1955 season, Mieres retired from serious racing to look after his business interests and pursue his interest in sailing. He returned to the track occasionally in the following years, and it is thought to have been on oil dropped from his Porsche during the 1958 Cuban Grand Prix that an inexperienced local driver, Armando Garcia Cifuentes, spun his Ferrari and crashed into the crowd, killing several spectators. The tragedy was overshadowed by the kidnapping of Fangio, the world champion, who was taken from a Havana hotel on the eve of the race and held for 24 hours by pro-Castro rebels.

Known to his fellow countrymen as "Bibito", a diminutive of his first name, Mieres spent his last 30 years on a farm in Punta del Este, Uruguay.

? Roberto Casimiro Mieres, racing driver, businessman and farmer, born 3 December 1924; died 26 January 2012

Leftwing protesters chant and burn the union flag outside the British embassy in Argentina over the Falklands debate

Duke of Cambridge's six-week posting comes amid rising tensions between Britain and Argentina over the disputed islands

Prince William has arrived in the Falkland Islands amid simmering tensions between Britain and Argentina over the disputed territory.

His arrival, ahead of a tour of duty as an RAF search and rescue pilot, came as the Royal Navy prepares to send one of its most advanced new warships to the area. It has already sparked controversy in Argentina, which claims the prince will be wearing the uniform of a "conqueror" when he deploys.

The Ministry of Defence said William's six-week posting to the remote outcrop, which Buenos Aires calls Las Malvinas, was part of a "routine operational deployment".

The Duke ? who has flown to the archipelago as part of a crew of four RAF personnel ? will attend a series of briefings and take part in a "familiarisation flight" before he begins his search and rescue work.

A Ministry of Defence (MoD) spokesman said: "MoD can confirm Flight Lieutenant Wales, as part of a four-man search and rescue (Sar) crew, has arrived in the Falkland Islands on a routine operational deployment and will shortly take up Sar duties post a period of briefings and a familiarisation flight."

The Duke's deployment in the Falklands comes amid a diplomatic war of words between the British and Argentinian governments.

It follows an announcement that HMS Dauntless, an ultra-modern Type 45 destroyer, is due to set sail for the South Atlantic on her maiden mission in the coming months. She is expected to replace frigate HMS Montrose in the region.

The Royal Navy has rejected suggestions the decision to send the destroyer to the area was a riposte to increased tensions over the sovereignty of the Falklands and said the ship's deployment was long planned.

William's posting has been similarly defended by the MoD as part of a normal squadron rotation.

But it has been branded as a provocative act by Argentina. In the latest salvo, the country's Foreign Ministry said it "rejected the British attempt to militarise [the] conflict" and expressed regret that an heir to the throne would arrive wearing "the uniform of a conqueror".

The Argentinian government on Thursday

The film, which shows Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands war, goes down badly on its release in Buenos Aires

Meryl Streep may have been nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, but Argentinian critics panned the film on its premiere in Buenos Aires on Thursday.

The film opened in Argentinian theatres amid anger over the Falkland Islands. In the film, Thatcher is shown ordering the sinking of the Argentinian warship Belgrano, which killed 323 sailors and remains controversial because the ship was considered to be outside the war zone.

She also dismisses the entreaties of the US ambassador to settle the dispute peacefully, suggesting that as a woman she had to "go to war every day" to maintain her hold on power.

Reducing the war to a question of feminism was "absurd, to say the least," the daily Clarin wrote in Thursday's review.

Others praised Streep's acting, but panned the script as mediocre. "A character so controversial for her own citizens, the citizens of the world and especially for Argentinians, Thatcher deserves a better movie," huffed La Nación.

Buenos Aires and London have escalated a war of words ahead of the 30th anniversary of Argentina's ill-fated invasion of the islands on 2 April 1982. More than 900 soldiers and sailors were killed in the conflict.

Britain has sent its most advanced warship, the HMS Dauntless, to the islands. Argentina's vice-president, Amado Boudou, said on Thursday that Britain had falsely accused his country of threatening another invasion in order to distract Britons from their economic worries.

The dispute over ownership of the south Atlantic islands has been blowing hot and cold for several centuries

As Britain and Argentina sound off yet again about their rival claims to sovereignty over the Falkland Islands, it would not be completely fanciful to blame the Borgias for a dispute that has been blowing hot and cold for more than 300 years.

More precisely, the root of the problem can be traced to the celebrated Bulls of Donation by which the Borgia pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) exercised what medieval doctrine still told him was a God-given right to divide between Spain and Portugal all the distant lands that European navigators were starting to discover. The lines he drew (they were revised) went straight through what is now modern Portuguese-speaking Brazil, leaving most of the South American mainland to the Spaniards, whose conquistador armies had not yet arrived in Mexico or Peru.

On the Spanish side of the line, still undiscovered 400 miles off the future Argentinian coast, lay the cluster of islands that the British would name after the naval entrepreneur Viscount Falkland, and the French Les Îles Malouine after St Malo, the favoured embarkation port of predatory privateers which ? like their British counterparts ? attacked Spanish imperial trade for decades. The Spaniards later adapted the French name and called them Las Malvinas.

All that came later. In the 16th century Protestant monarchs such as Elizabeth I rejected the "prerogative of the pope" (the pope reciprocated, and encouraged the doomed Armada of 1588), which rested not on the rights of discovery, let alone of settlement, but on the allocation of rights to lands ? empty or occupied ? not yet found by European explorers, the Magellans and Drakes of the period.

Some authorities claim that a Portuguese voyage, with Amerigo Vespucci on board, first sighted the Falklands around 1500, before Ferdinand Magellan navigated Cape Horn and went round the world in 1519-20 ? or that Magellan, another Portuguese, did. The British would later claim that their own seadogs, Hawkins or Davis, found the uninhabited islands in the 1590s. A Dutch voyage under Sebald de Weert named them the Sebaldines in 1600.

It is not entirely clear to scholars if any of them actually located the Falklands or other south Atlantic islands such as South Georgia. But the first recorded landing was made by an Englishman, Captain John Strong, in 1690, just ahead of the French (1701). The first settlement was established by Admiral Louis-Antoine de Bougainville of France in 1764 ? five years after his commander, Montcalm, had lost Quebec ? and French Canada ? to the British, as the English state had now become.

Such struggles still have a bearing on the case. Spain had superseded Portugal as the dominant expansionist power, but in its slow decline battled to retain its God-given monopoly over most of the Americas against more dynamic powers, the Dutch, the British and the French.

They failed in the colder north as the British, later the rebel ex-colonial Americans, drove out their rivals: in the Mexican-American war of 1846-48 ? ostensibly triggered by the Alamo massacre ? the US took 1m square miles including California and Texas.

All that lay ahead. In January 1765 a British expedition took possession of West Falkland and established a base at the new Port Egmont (still there), unaware for two years that the French were settled in East Falkland. When Madrid heard about it, the two Bourbon states nearly went to war, before France accepted Spanish rights (entrenched in the Treaty of Utrecht, the one that also ceded Gibraltar to Britain) in a formal handover ceremony.

In 1770 Spain tried to enforce its claims by sending a fleet from Buenos Aires ? five ships and more than 1,000 men ? to which the outnumbered British surrendered. Now emerges a crucial piece of manoeuvring.

George III and his struggling prime minister, Lord North, had their hands full with the soon-to-depart 13 American colonies. According to the scholarly account of Professor DW Gregg of the Australian National University (pdf), the government in London was in a weak position, but could not back down without falling to a hostile vote in the Commons ? a curious rehearsal of the drama when Margaret Thatcher's favourite, Nicholas Ridley, failed to sell a "leaseback" deal with Argentina to MPs in 1981, a year before the junta's invasion.

London insisted that the British settlement be restored (which it was), but gossip at the time ? published in hostile newspapers and pamphlets, but not found in any official document ? claimed that the British crown had struck a secret deal with Madrid to evacuate it "as soon as was convenient".

Either way, defence cuts ? another recurring theme of the Falklands saga ? ensured that the British did withdraw its forces in 1774 leaving a plaque proclaiming the islands to be the "sole right and property" of George III.

A vast doctrine of ever-evolving international law swirls around such claims. The rights of conquest of terra nullius ? empty lands ? was widely acknowledged, as was administrative subjugation via settlement and the imposition of order, neither acceptable since the League of Nations and, later, the UN tried to create globally enforcible rules.

As Spain's empire crumbled under the pressure of Napoleon's occupation and the march of liberal ideas ? encouraged by Britain and the US in Latin America ? the Spanish governor withdraw from the Falklands in 1807. The entire colony left in 1811, leaving their own version of the British plaque which they had carted off to Buenos Aires (the Brits would take it back).

Whalers, mostly from Canada and the US, would use the island's rudimentary harbours unimpeded until Louis Vernet obtained the permission of the newly independent government in Buenos Aires to re-establish a settlement in 1828, to the immediate consternation of the British, who had emerged from the long Napoleonic wars in 1815 as the world's hegemonic power, its navy master of the seas.

But it was Vernet's high-handed seizure of a US whaler, the Harriet, which he arrested and took off to Buenos Aires for infringing his rights as governor, that ushered in the British occupation that continues to this day.

Under the newly assertive presidency of Andrew Jackson, the US dispatched a warship, the Lexington, which accused Vernet of piracy and destroyed his settlement.

When the British returned in 1833-34 and finally established a formal colony in 1840, the US supported London. It was the British Royal Navy that enforced Washington's Monroe doctrine of European non-interference in the New World and no vital US interests were involved so far south. That would later change, but not yet.

The islands became a coaling station for the navy, the scene in 1914 of a revenge battle which destroyed the remnants of the German Pacific squadron as it tried to get home to its North Sea base.

The population grew steadily to a peak of 2,392 in 1931 and then declined slowly to the 1,500 who were there when the Argentininian forces landed in April 1982. Kelp, oil and greater British attention has since pushed it up to over 3,000 and helped ignite renewed Argentininian concern.

Argentina argues that the British abandoned the islands in the 1770s, never actually occupied East Falkland ? site of the modern capital, Port Stanley ? and did not return for 60 years. Ministers claim their own rights of succession as the heirs of Spain's empire, bolstered by the French concession in 1767.

The ancient doctrine of mare clausum by which states control the seas that protect their own borders and trade has its modern echoes, as evident the dispute between Beijing and its less powerful neighbours who each claim islands in the South China Sea.

Geography and anti-colonial sentiment in the UN tend to bolster Argentina's claims, as was evident in some quarters ? even in Washington ? in 1982. When peace talks failed, Ronald Reagan supported his British ally, as Jackson had done in the 1830s and Louis Vernet eventually did, possibly in search of compensation from London.

In 1982 the British taskforce that retook the islands did so under the UN charter, exercising the right of self-defence against an unpopular and brutal regime in Buenos Aires whose neighbours feared it. Feelings are very different in 2012 in a region that is richer, more confident and assertive, hence the support for the boycott of Falkland-flagged ships.

States abound with anomalies, none odder than British retention of the Channel Islands, the last remnant of William the Conquerer's Duchy of Normandy. Just a few miles off the French coast, it has survived countless wars and defeats for both sides, as well as German occupation. French names or not, the islanders seem happy to regard themselves as a British dependency. Gibraltar is another such anomaly, as are Spain's own Moroccan enclaves.

So Whitehall can play the self-determination card, also a powerful one at the UN, which recent reports suggest has some resonance among Argentinians who understand that the Falkland Islands' ingrained habits ? fish and chips and all ? are deeply British. A flavour of the mood can be found easily on the Falkland Islands government website here.

London says it never accepted the pope's authority over territorial disputes in Tudor times, or now.

But what about the Treaty of Utrecht? That related only to settled land, comes the reply. Discovery alone is not enough, and discovery of the Falklands/Malvinas is disputed.

Britain's early claim is strong and, if Britain abandoned the islands in 1774, so did the future Argentine republic in 1811. London has provided settlement and support without a break since 1834, including long periods in both 19th and 20th centuries when Buenos Aires' claims went quiet.

In truth, both sides have some substantial points, enough to keep diplomats busy and the military planners anxious ? both sides are weaker militarily than they were. But whichever country wins the latest Battle of the Falklands, the lawyers always win.

Britain's Prince William has arrived in the Falkland Islands for a stint as a military search-and-rescue pilot, the defense ministry said, even as tension resurfaces between London and Argentina over sovereignty of the British-ruled territory.

Prosecutors said Wednesday they broke up not one, but two Indiana Jones-style plots to "extract" the son of late dictator Moammar Gadhafi from Libya and bring him to Mexico.

Assailants in pickup trucks fired homemade mortars at a police station in this western town Thursday, killing at least six people and wounding more than 20, the regional police chief said.

Countries and country unions around the world join to condemn this week's terrorist attacks by Colombian rebel group FARC which have killed 18 people and injured more than 100.

Bogota's El Dorado airport is having technical issues that are endangering passengers and crews, reports Radio Caracol.

Panama denies Colombia's request for the extradition of the former head of Colombia's intelligence agency DAS who is charged with wiretapping political opponents of the government of former President Alvaro Uribe and the Supreme Court.

Colombia's ex-vice president Francisco Santos issues a public apology after reconciling with unions over libel and slander charges.

Authorities intercept a truck loaded with explosives in the Colombian department of Cauca, the fourth attempted bomb attack in three days.

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Guatemala. It is a very long and difficult fight and it will need the support and cooperation of all political parties, the private sector and civil society sectors.

The first steps the Government has taken on the 19th of August 2008, was to institute The Vice- Ministry of Transparency in the Ministry of Public Finance. The second step is the creation of the Commission for Transparency.

The Commission for Transparency is headed by Vice-President Rafael Espada and represents government and civil society sectors. This Commission will be conformed by Álvaro Mayorga and Armando Boesch, representatives of the Private -Industrial Sector, (CACIF), Comité Coordinador de Asociaciones Agrícolas, Comerciales, Industriales y Financieras.

2008 Olympic Games, Beijing. Guatemala?s Jose Amado García managed to obtain a very good 35th position out of 98 runners that participated in the marathon. Alfredo Arevalo obtained position 63. Both athletes did improve their performance from the previous Olympic Games in Athen, in time and positions.

Women of Virtue is an award presented to ten outstanding women from South Florida every year by LATINBIZ. Among the 2008 honorees is Ms. Ruby Ortiz, Guatemalan. She has been serving the South Florida business community for more than 10 years in management development, business consulting and Coaching. More than 1,000 managers from Florida and Latin America have benefitted from her professional consulting and training.
Ruby Ortiz is a member of the advisory board and professor at Florida International University -MTI-, she is Director of the new Florida Institute of Management and she is also Senior Consultant of RO International Inc.

Guatemala, Antigua - Cultural event at Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en Antigua Guatemala.

Invitation for next Saturday, November 22 at 18:00 pm. Play: "Women forging Dreams," Mujeres fraguando sueños, by the theater company Abrego (Cantabria / Spain). The entrance to the event is free. It will be held at Centro de Formación de la Cooperación Española en Antigua Guatemala.

"Women forging dreams", Mujeres fraguando sueños, is a show with an ethic committed to a social reality that requires all our efforts to make a forceful denunciation and a sober reflection on domestic violence. It is a contemporary piece that keeps a distance to the complex elaborations exclusive to intellectuals.

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Traffic cops are on the prowl for Jalisco-plated vehicles being driven without 2011 emissions test stickers.

Speaking in Guadalajara on Monday, President Felipe Calderon officially confirmed the city will host the federal government?s Ciudad Creativa Digital project.

The case of a Canadian woman assaulted in a Mazatlan hotel last month refuses to die down, with the plot thickening on a seemingly daily basis.

Some 50 residents of western Ajijic?s La Canacinta neighborhood, as well as several surrounding barrios, gathered Friday, January 27 to collect signatures for a petition calling on local authorities to reduce the latent dangers pedestrians face in transiting the zone.

Hundreds of lakeshore inhabitants answered the call to stand up against the second line of the Chapala-Guadalajara aqueduct, flocking to the state capital Wednesday, January 25 for a speech, rally and protest march held in the heart of the city.

AP - Cuban President Raul Castro flew to Caracas on Friday to attend a meeting with other allies of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez, who was at the airport for the arrival.