“Even if he got it right, calling it the Malvinas is practically siding with Argentina, as far as the Brits are concerned.”
You’re right; he fully intended to say “Malvinas” to pander to all of those countries. Many of them feel no affinity towards Argentina, but also accept that the islands should belong to them.
Americans rarely refer to them as “the Malvinas Islands”; it was pandering to Hispanic voters here as well.
Argentines are not popular with other Latin Americans. They have a serious arrogance problem, and barely regard themselves as Hispanic - they speak a heavily Italianized Spanish in the areas around Buenos Aires, with an accent that makes them the joke of Latin America, yet they still run Spanish as a Second Language programs that leave other Spanish speakers befuddled by their students. They also try to dominate Spanish language websites and everything else, although they have not only a strange accent but even a lexicon that is entirely their own.
Argentina also has a heavy English/Welsh influence, as well as many ... er, Germans...so I’m not sure catering to Argentina is going to buy Bambi much love from the rest of Latin America.
But he’s such an idiot that I doubt he has bothered to do any research into it. He thinks all those little brown non-English speaking people down there are the same. Arrogant S...