Argentina’s remarkable football achievements often overshadow and sometimes highlight the racism problem that festers within the society. A group of Football fans at the 2026 FIFA World Cup were heard chanting-
“QUE VENGAN LOS FRANCESES CON EL DOCUMENTO, QUE JUEGUEN PARA ANGOLA SI LE DAN LOS HUEVOS”- which loosely translates to “Let the Frenchmen come with their ID/document, let them play for Angola if they’ve got the b*lls.”
These chants were not new; these derogatory chants targeting the African heritage of the squad members of the French National like Kylian Mbappé, were heard in the 2022 World Cup Final between France and Argentina, and then it was echoed by the Argentine Football team following their 2024 Copa América victory. Argentine midfielder Enzo Fernández was seen broadcasting a live stream on Instagram with the squad members chanting that song. Though he later apologised publicly. During the Argentina-Egypt fixtures of the Round of 16 at the 2026 FIFA World Cup, content creator and streamer IShowSpeed was subjected to a racist slur by Argentine fans, telling him to “go home”, even though he was a US citizen.
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Pattern of Racial abuses
Labelling French national players of African descent as not truly French because their skin colour is not an isolated event or World Cup phenomenon. Brazilians have also faced targeted racial slurs, specifically being called “monkeys” by Argentina fans.
In fact, Argentine midfielder Gianluca Prestianni was accused of racially abusing Real Madrid star Vinícius Júnior during a highly charged UEFA Champions League match. The incident occurred in February 2026, during a first-leg clash between Real Madrid and Benfica at the Estádio da Luz in Lisbon. He denied the allegations, but was suspended for one match.
A Paraguayan Senator, Celeste Amarilla, went on a racist tirade, calling French captain Kylian Mbappé a “colonised Cameroonian pretending hard to be French”, She also made dehumanising statements like instead of breast milk, he had “sucked coconuts” and most “educated” sounds the French captain had ever heard were from “chimpanzees.”
These incidents show that these behaviours are deeply systemic and not isolated to Argentina only. Argentina epitomises this colourism and colonial bias, which persists across Latin American football and society.
The “white myth” of Argentina
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Argentina’s relationship with race faces intense scrutiny because it is tangled up with a national myth. The idea is that the country is “white” is built on European immigration. Argentina was a European colony for nearly three centuries, primarily ruled by the Spanish Empire. It overlooks and does not acknowledge the Afro-descendant and Indigenous populations. In 1778, the Buenos Aires census showed 37 per cent of the city was Afro-descendant, and in fact, almost all the cities had more than one-third Afro-descendant.
That population was decimated by war, disease and later, by immigration policy explicitly designed to “whiten” the country by recruiting millions of Europeans. Black soldiers were disproportionately sent to the front lines in brutal conflicts like the Argentine War of Independence and the Paraguayan War, or the War of the Triple Alliance.
In 1871, a severe yellow fever outbreak, along with cholera epidemics, swept through Buenos Aires, while White Argentinians escaped, the relatively impoverished Afro-Argentinians were left in the cramped tenements of the city to die.
Indigenous peoples were structurally whitened, especially after campaigns like the “Conquest of the Desert” in the 1870s and 1880s. The government annexed millions of acres of Indigenous land through systemic destruction, displacement, and enslavement. The government called it the “Golden Age” of modernisation by distributing indigenous lands to a group of wealthy oligarchs. Men were drafted into forced labour in sugar plantations. Over 15000 survivors were put in concentration camps where disease and starvation took their lives. The rationale was civilisation vs barbarism. Modern historians and human rights legal frameworks widely characterise the Conquest of the Desert as a genocide.
Isolation of structural problems and collectivisation of systemic erasure
The result was a national identity built on erasure. Argentina told itself a story of European descent, distinct from neighbours like Brazil or Uruguay, which acknowledged more racially mixed populations. The state reinforced a narrative of “indigenous disappearance,” teaching generations of school children that the Native Americans had simply vanished in the face of oncoming civilisation. The government heavily subsidised and encouraged European migration. War, disease and systemic destruction of African and indigenous men left women isolated and partnering with White immigrants, resulting in the gradual erasure of the population. In 1875, the Argentine Government removed Black from national censuses under the pretense the population was nonexistent and erased them on paper.
It numbed the political and social reality of Argentine society, but didn’t eliminate racism. Argentine society developed a limited vocabulary and self-awareness around it, since the official narrative was that Argentina doesn’t have a race problem, they’re basically European. Systemic and structural racism became so normalised that these incidents in the football stadium and squad are treated as isolated cases. While the structural erasure of the indigenous and black population becomes a collective sacrifice for modernisation and the war of independence, stripping away the political intent, the laws, and the systemic planning behind racial engineering.
