Argentine fans harassed the team with insults and racist gestures. streamer American IShowSpeed during the 2026 World Cup. The attacks, which occurred on July 3, prompted FIFA to open an investigation.
In football, cases of racism involving Argentine fans tend to come to light mainly during Copa Libertadores matches, but are not limited to them. In 2024, players from the Argentine national team sang a chant against French athletes of African descent, in a gesture interpreted as racist in countries like Brazil.
Beyond the four lines, an emblematic case marked the beginning of 2026. In Ipanema, Rio de Janeiro, Argentine tourist Agostina Páez was arrested for racial slurs against an employee of a Rio bar. In the neighboring country, the episode was explored by important figures from the Javier Milei government’s political base, such as senator Patricia Bullrich.
In isolation, the episodes can create, in common sense, the feeling that Argentine society, in general, is marked by the practice of racism.
There, the historical construction of the theme has particularities, when compared to the Brazilian case. “The idea of a white Argentina was consolidated, not based on miscegenation, but on the narrative of immigration from ships, which is one of the country’s founding myths”, says lawyer Alejandro Joma, founder of the collective Brown Identityin conversation with the Brazil in fact.
For Joma, in fact, the Argentine version involves the erasure of slavery. “In most Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, the national myth is more related to miscegenation”, summarizes Joma.
But this phenomenon, in itself, does not indicate that Argentina, as a whole, is more or less racist than other countries in the region, such as Brazil.
Historical roots
Throughout the colonization process in the Southern Cone, Africans arrived in the region through the ports of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Little by little, they began to work in domestic services, handicrafts, fields and mines. Since then, official history has promoted a historiographic erasure of this population.
One of the most emblematic cases is that of María Remedios del Valle. A black woman who accompanied Manuel Belgrano – one of the main names in the independence processes in countries such as Argentina and Paraguay – in several of the battles that marked the liberation from Spanish rule, María del Valle was proclaimed “mother of the country” in Argentina. But then it ended up being eliminated from the history books.
Only in 2024 did Del Valle’s image begin to circulate on 10,000-peso banknotes in Argentina, alongside Belgrano. The process began during the governments of former president Cristina Kirchner.
For journalist Erika Gimenez, coordinator of ARG Medios, the strength of the myth in Argentina even affects the relationship of the majority of society with its own genealogy. “None of us are fully, one hundred percent, European”, summarizes Gimenez.
For Joma, racism in Argentina has a peculiarity: the main focus on original peoples. This idea has to do with the use of the word “black” in the neighboring country. “When someone says ‘black’ in Argentina, most Argentines don’t imagine a person of African descent. They imagine a person of indigenous descent wearing urban clothes”, he explains.
The example given by Joma is in the Argentine team competing in the 2026 World Cup. He formulates the following image: “When asked if there are black people in the squad, someone from Brazil or the United States tends to say no; an Argentine, yes.”
Class issue, political dimension
The myth fulfills a power function. According to Gimenez, the most traditional families in Argentina are those most directly responsible for sustaining the myth of whiteness. “The myth of white Argentina is of interest to powerful groups, because they do not want the poor (brown or black people) to occupy spaces of power”, he explains. A similar attitude occurs in Brazilian society.
Upon coming to power, Milei tried to put an end to the National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (Inadi), created in 1996 by the Discriminatory Acts Law. The then spokesperson for Casa Rosada, Manuel Adorni, justified the extinction by the need to downsize the State, maintaining that it was necessary to dismantle institutes that served “absolutely no purpose”.
Despite the obvious dismantling of the organ, Joma goes beyond mere symbolism and proposes a problematization of the extinct organ. “If I said that the closure of Inadi represented a direct attack on the fight against racism, I would be oversimplifying it”, he ponders.
He recalls the complaint made against the agency’s former executive director, Victoria Donda, in 2021, who was accused by Arminda Banda Oxa, then a domestic worker at her home, of having kept her in an irregular work situation for years and of offering her a position at Inadi. Donda denied the irregularities, saying that he had proposed the position as a form of help, due to his close relationship with Oxa, in addition to the former employee’s health problems. In 2022, the complaint was closed with a legal settlement.
For Joma, the real loss of closing Inadi was of another order: “I would say it was an indirect attack on marginalized communities, which now no longer have a specialized body”.
In football, although the ball takes center stage, social tensions related to racism are often exposed. “Football ends up revealing aspects of our society that we don’t like, but that exist and need to continue to be debated”, reflects Gimenez.
In addition to criticizing racism itself, Jome critically considers the debate itself. The problem, according to the expert, is in the erasure. Because of this, the Brown Identity managed to obtain the first Argentine criminal sentence recognizing racial violence committed by police officers.
He makes a contrast: in the Brazilian case, reflection on racism must go through the weight of structural practice by the Brazilian State itself. Joma recalls the police operation carried out by the former governor of Rio de Janeiro, Claudio Castro, in October 2025, which led to the deaths of 128 people in Complexo da Penha. The majority were black.
Source: www.brasildefato.com.br
