In 1816, the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata declared their independence from Spain. After Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay went their separate ways, the area that remained became Argentina. The country’s population and culture were heavily shaped by immigrants from throughout Europe, with Italy and Spain providing the largest percentage of newcomers from 1860 to 1930. Up until about the mid-20th century, much of Argentina’s history was dominated by periods of internal political unrest and conflict between civilian and military factions.

After World War II, former President Juan Domingo Perón founded the Peronist political movement, which ushered in an era of populism and direct and indirect military interference in subsequent governments. A military junta took power in 1976, but democracy returned in 1983 after a failed bid to seize the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) by force. Despite numerous challenges, democracy has persisted, including a severe economic crisis in 2001-02 that led to violent public protests and the successive resignations of several presidents. From 2003-15, Néstor Kirchner and his spouse Cristina Fernández de Kirchner oversaw several years of strong economic growth (2003-11) followed by a gradual deterioration in the government’s fiscal situation and eventual economic stagnation and isolation. Argentina underwent a brief period of economic reform and international reintegration under Mauricio Macri (2015-19), but a recession in 2018-19 and frustration with Macri’s economic policies ushered in a new Peronist government in 2019 led by President Alberto Fernández and Vice President Fernández de Kirchner. Presidential elections are scheduled for November 2023.

Economy

Large diversified economy; financial risks from debt obligations, rapid inflation, and reduced investor appetites; resource-rich, export-led growth model; increasing trade relations with China; G20 and OAS leader; tendency to nationalize businesses and under-report inflation.

Population

The population is 46,621,847 (2023 est.) which consists of European (mostly Spanish and Italian descent) and Mestizo (mixed European and Amerindian ancestry) 97.2%, Amerindian 2.4%, African descent 0.4% (2010 est.).

Argentina has long taken pride in its European heritage. The mass migration of 7 million Europeans, mostly Spanish and Italian, between 1850 and 1950, created a racial profile many Argentinians feel distinguishes their country from the rest of Latin America even today.

“Mexicans descend from the Aztecs, Peruvians from the Incas – but Argentinians descend from the ships,” goes an old saying that encapsulates Argentina’s perception of itself as a nation of transplanted white Europeans.

According to the Associated Press (November 26, 2021), The 2010 census recorded about 150,000 people of African descent in Argentina, a nation of 45 million, but activists estimate the true figure is closer to 2 million following a surge of immigration — and because many Argentines have forgotten or ignored African ancestry.

“It’s a very contested figure,” said Nicolas Fernández Bravo, an anthropology professor at the University of Buenos Aires who is part of an Afro-Latin American studies group and a government policy adviser. “The state doesn’t have the slightest idea of the number because measuring race is difficult and the state is not taking it seriously.”

Argentine diversity once was obvious. In the early 1800s, as the slave trade — if not yet slavery itself — was being abolished, about a third of the population consisted of African slaves or their freed descendants. Even the tango — a dance tightly identified with the nation — has strong African influences.

Long before the wave of European migration – more than 200,000 enslaved Africans arrived at the twin ports of the River Plate, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, capital cities of what are now Argentina and Uruguay.

“The number of slaves who arrived to the region of the River Plate is almost half of those who arrived in the US, which gives an idea of the magnitude of slave traffic in the River Plate region,” according to Alex Borucki, a Uruguayan academic at the University of California Irvine, who co-manages the SlaveVoyages website that traces every ship carrying enslaved people that reached the Americas.

But the country’s leaders made concerted, long-lasting efforts to Europeanize Argentina, welcoming millions white immigrants while downplaying and swamping the country’s Indigenous and African heritage.  Afro-Argentine Activist Eli Delgado and university lecturer Patricia Gomes are other Afro-descendant researchers intent on demolishing Argentina’s mythical self-image as a white nation.  Gomes and Delgado argue that the idea of a European Argentina was a fabrication imposed by racist 19th-century leaders to erase Argentina’s rich black culture from the nation’s collective consciousness.

Some say that many Afro-Argentines died in mid-19th century wars where they were used as foot soldiers, the first casualties of battle, though other historians dispute that was the primary cause of the nation’s changing racial makeup.

A documentarian is finishing a project about Maria Remedios del Valle, a Black woman who fought against the British invasion of the Spanish colony and later in the wars for independence in the early 1800′s.

Afterwards, she was destitute until her military comrades rallied to her defense, calling her “The Mother of Argentina.”

This year’s November celebration of African culture in Argentina is dedicated to the memory of Maria Magdalena Lamadrid — “La Pocha” — an Afro-Argentine activist who died in September. In 2002, the fifth-generation Afro-Argentine was kept from leaving the country by a customs officer who insisted there were no Black Argentines and asserted her passport was fake.

According to the New York Times – Argentina at one time had a robust African presence because of the slaves who were brought there, but its black population was decimated by myriad factors including heavy casualties on the front lines in the War of the Triple Alliance against Paraguay in the 1860s; a yellow fever epidemic that rich, white Argentines largely escaped; and interracial offspring who, after successive generations, shed their African culture along with their features. And European immigration swelled the white population — 2.27 million Italians came between 1861 and 1914.

The demographic shift has been sharp. In 1800, on the eve of revolution with Spain, blacks made up more than a third of the country, 69,000 of a total population of 187,000, according to George Reid Andrews’s 2004 book “Afro-Latin America.” In 2010, 150,000 identified themselves as Afro-Argentine, or a mere 0.365 percent of a population of 41 million people, according to the census, the first in the country’s history that counted race.

Today there is still a notable Afro-Argentine community in the Buenos Aires districts of San Telmo and La Boca. There are also quite a few African-descended Argentines in Merlo and Ciudad Evita cities, in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area.

According to the United Nations Human Rights under The Working Group (Invisible No More:  People of African Descent demands rights in Argentina), said Afro-Argentines and people of African descent were not fully able to enjoy their economic, social and cultural rights. “In order to ensure that the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda truly leaves no one behind and racial discrimination is addressed, Afro-Argentines and other people of African descent must be recognized and specific programs developed to protect their human rights,” the group said.

In 1778, Africans and Afro-descendants made up 37% of the population of what is now Argentina, according to a census by its Spanish colonialist rulers. In some major provinces the proportion was more than 50%.

That number did not drop significantly after independence from Spain in 1816: Afro-descendants accounted for 30% of the population of Buenos Aires for decades after independence. But after that, the number is unknown, because Argentina’s census bureau stopped collecting racial information.

“Census data was manipulated to erase us first from the statistics – and then from the history books,” says Gomes. “From the end of the 19th century the state meticulously began to make us invisible to present Argentina as homogeneous and of European descent.”

Argentina’s “whitening process” has been studied in depth by US academic Erika Edwards in her book Hiding in Plain Sight, published last year by University of Alabama Press.

“The whitening project was a successful endeavor in terms of the erasure of blackness,” said Edwards. “The idea that somebody could be the descendant of a slave is just not there.”

That belief in a strictly European Argentina continues to percolate. “We are all descendants from Europe,” said President Mauricio Macri at the 2018 World Economic Forum in Davos.

It wasn’t until the 2010 census that an option was included for Argentinians wishing to self-identify as Afro-descendants. “That inclusion was very important but unfortunately it was restricted to only a small segment of the population, with the resulting projection suggesting that only half a percent of the population self-identify that way,” said Gomes.

Delgado and Gomes prefer data from a 2005 study conducted by Afro-descendant researchers that projects 5% of the population as having at least one African forebear.

A genetic study conducted by the University of Brasília in 2008 reached a different conclusion, finding that 9% of current-day Argentinians are of African ancestry.

Argentina’s pro-European immigration policy was initiated under its 1853 constitution at a time when the country’s post-independence thinkers and politicians were obsessed with the dichotomy of Civilization and Barbarism – the title of a 1845 book by Domingo Sarmiento, the country’s seventh president. In this Manichean view, Afro-descendants were placed squarely on the barbarism end of the scale.  A view which persists to this day under the new local terms “los negritos” associated with left-wing governance.

“If it was not possible to physically eliminate Argentina’s Afro-descendants, the decision was to at least eliminate them symbolically, to create a discourse that there are no blacks in Argentina, that Brazil has that problem,” says Edwards.

The entrenched poverty of many Afro-descendants goes hand in hand with Argentina’s structural racism, says Delgado.

“There are no black journalists or politicians, but Argentina’s poor barrios are full of Afro-descendants. So are our prisons, just like in the United States.”

Most present-day Afro-descendants are of mixed race because of inter-marriage between the male European immigrants who arrived after 1850 and Argentinian women of African descent.

“In the US, a drop of black blood makes you black, but in Argentina a drop of white blood makes you white,” said Gomes. “In a society where Afro-descendants were marginalized, many Afro-descendant families emphasized their whiteness to save themselves. They ripped up old photos and denied the existence of a black relative.”

The popularity of the two academics’ courses given now by the University of Buenos Aires School of Law on the issue of Argentina’s Black Ancestry suggest that Argentina is finally opening up a long-postponed debate about race and identity.

“It’s time for Argentinians to take their black grandmother out of the closet,” said Delgado.