Political scientist and founder of the NGO African Diaspora in Argentina (DIAFAR)

Several players of the Argentine men’s national football team were seen singing a racist, homophobic, and transphobic chant aimed at the French national team on Instagram live in the midst of their celebrations after winning the 2024 Copa América. Another video showing the players singing a homophobic chant directed at Colombia also made the rounds that day but went unnoticed. A French player saw the live stream and denounced its racism. That is where we stand now. 

Racism in Argentine football is not a rarity nor could it be, given that it is a cultural expression of a society that has not resolved its issues with racism. Given that it is an invisibilized phenomenon, the rarity is that Argentine society itself would denounce it or introduce the topic in public debate. In this case, the complaint came from abroad within the context of the most popular sport, which is why it gained heightened attention and made the most reactionary sectors of Argentine society deny or minimize the matter. 

In Argentina, racism is part of our DNA as a country. The Spanish conquest imposed a social organization based on race and a subsequent racial hierarchy. The main distinction was drawn between Europeans (white) and castes (non-whites), and the Europeans were superior. The breakup with Spain did not dismantle this order on the ground: peninsular Europeans (whites born in Spain), who until then held all political control, were replaced by European criollos (meaning whites born in America) but the racial division remained intact. 

The “new” criollo power continued enslaving Africans and those with African heritage, while also murdering, displacing, and seizing the land of Indigenous people. Slavery ended on all Argentine soil once the state was organized on the basis of a Constitution in 1860, but racism went on to have a constitutional rank: according to Article 25, the Argentine State would promote European immigration. 

This was because criollo elites (who descended from Europeans) continued to insist on the idea of race, as well as inferior and superior races, the Europeans being the latter. Immigrants, mostly Europeans who arrived during the migration waves of the late 19th century, found their place within this society without altering the racial stratification Argentina inherited from colonial times. Populations with African, Indigenous, or mixed heritage, which still make up the majority of our working class, continued to be relegated to the bottom of the social pyramid and were expelled from the national narrative. 

This expulsion, one of the distinctive features of criollo racism, was conducted through invisibilization and denial, as well as the systemic branding of people of African and Indigenous descent as foreigners, by those who owned power, prestige, and privileges. Statistical records were manipulated, ethnic-racial categories were eliminated, others were created, documents were forged, historiography was whitened, descendants of Europeans were overrepresented, vocabulary was changed… Wherever there was a black man or an Indian woman, they were hidden, denied, or labeled as a foreigner. In every book, registry, museum, census, statue, picture, film, and ID. The whiteness of a minority of the population was projected as a whole. These devices, sustained over time, resulted in a loss of identity and historical agency for Argentina’s racial majorities. Because of this, racial conflicts are not perceived as such, denunciations of racist conduct are rejected, and, many times, those very same racialized people write or repeat a racist song without knowing it. 

That is how we arrived at “Escuchan, corran la bola” (Listen up, spread the word). The original version was written by fans of a working class football club, themselves racialized people, insulting another club from another popular neighborhood, also with large amounts of racialized supporters. The 2022 version was written by privileged men of European descent but chanted by whites and non-whites alike. Among them, several players of the national football team, many of them racialized men who come from those former castes whose identities were stolen. 

In traditional and social media, the reactions denying the racism signaled by French players were noteworthy. Absent the possibility of invisibilization, a common response was to deny the phenomenon and label it a foreign concern. Saying that the chant is not racist because there is no racism in Argentina; that it is not racist because we direct that chant against other Argentines and none of them are black; that it is not a racist insult but rather teasing (and therefore, not racist); that it is a foreign problem; that it is a French problem because there is racism there and people are racialized.

Here in Argentina, however, racialized people cook and eat in soup kitchens that are not receiving food — black Argentine men and women in the most ample sense of the word: “the castes.” Fernando Baéz Sosa was killed by a group of young men calling him “negro de mierda” (dirty blacks). Lucas Gonzalez was gunned down because those “negros de mierda” deserve “a shot in the head.” Here in Argentina, celebrated actor and journalist Fernando Peña claimed that saying “negro de mierda” was not racist because it was not aimed at people based on the color of their skin, but that it was rather the national way of describing someone “who can’t put two words together.” The Argentine president fired the sports undersecretary for committing the audacity of suggesting that somebody else besides Enzo Fernández should apologize on behalf of the national team, defending the right to insult and offend. 

Racisms exists. It has robbed us of our identity and determined that some lives are worth more than others, discriminating, sidelining, kidnapping, and killing. As anti racism activists, we will continue working to raise awareness in society. We hope that football institutions take note of the debate and become involved in the struggle against racism in Argentina.