While I'm at it, many love to claim Argentina "killed at its slaves" or that Argentina "killed millions of black people" because there are no men with ***evident*** african genes in the futbol world cup team. I will be very clear. Every single person repeating this is dangerously ignorant.
Argentina didn't have a slave trade, mainly because Argentina did not exist when slaves were brought into the territory. It was the colonizers from Spain that brought them in, and the number of slaves they brought with them doesn't even come close to the MILLIONS of people colonizers from Portugal brought in as slaves into what would go on to become Brazil. We are talking thousands versus literal millions.
Most importantly, shortly after the declaration of independence, slavery was abolished in 1853 — a full 12 years before this happened in the USA, and many decades before it even happened in Brazil. Before this, in 1813 it had already been declared that anyone born in Argentina was born free (Libertad de Vientres).
Argentina never had segregation. There were no laws stopping people with different skin color from marrying each other, from sharing common spaces, etc. This doesn't mean there was no injustice, Argentina was and still is a deeply classist country. Most forms of discrimination, therefore, are rooted in social class rather than race.
Because everyone was allowed to marry anyone regardless of skin color, and because throughout history Argentina received more working class immigrants from Europe than they did from other countries, and because throughout the course of history there were several wars, the black population dwindled in numbers. No, they were not sent as "blood sacrifice" any more than any other poor young men from the provinces were. In every war, young men were sent to the front lines so that the rich ones could stay behind. Which is something that happened in every single war throughout history.
The fact is that there was a true "mix" of genes. I've seen some people online twisting this to say that "forced whitening" is evil and it's further proof that every single person from Argentina deserves to die. It wasn't forced whitening. Immigrants integrated into society and part of that integration involved getting, well, involved with others regardless of where they came from.
There are studies that estimate that around 15% to 20% of argentines have reported to have african genes. The percentage could potentially be higher since many might be completely unaware of it. Retracing your genealogy is a bit hard when for many of us our great grand parents, or great great grandparents, came into the country with fake names because they were escaping fascist regimes from different parts of the world, or because when they arrived the names on their papers were written with "approximation phonetics" (what the workers thought the names were written like according to spanish phonemes, even if the names themselves weren't in spanish).
Anyway. The Argentina team isn't white in the sense the USA thinks of white. Many are descendants of native tribes, mixed with immigrants from different parts of the world. Most importantly though, everyone from Argentina is from Latin America. Some of them happen to be fair skinned. That doesn't mean they aren't latino men.
