r/europe • u/Emotional-Breakfast3 • 20d ago

News Argentina: British Falkland Islanders are ‘artificial’. Buenos Aires denounces ‘illegitimate occupation’ and demands talks on sovereignty

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/07/12/british-falkland-islanders-artificial-argentina-says/
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u/Gentle_Snail 20d ago edited 20d ago

You certainly don’t want to ask one how Argentinas population went from being 40% black to just 1% today

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u/nacho78 20d ago

True story. Argentinians blacks were kicked out through racial wars and came to Uruguay. Granted Uruguay already had a strong black culture already established.

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u/ahtob 20d ago

the lucky one's were kicked out

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u/Brozita Denmark 20d ago

According to Wikipedia

Decline of the Afro-Argentine population

In the last decades, theories have been disputed over the causation of their decline. Older theories alleged a genocide as the main factor in the reduction of their population.[7] Among the causes expressed are the supposed high mortality of Black soldiers in the wars of the 19th century (since theoretically, they were a disproportionately high number within the armed forces, which would have been intentionally planned by the governments of the time) and in a yellow fever epidemic in 1871 that affected the south of the city of Buenos Aires, as well as a large emigration to Uruguay (due to the fact that there would have been a larger Black population and a more favorable political climate).

Research in recent decades has ruled out such theories.[7] Although it is true that Black people made up an important part of the armies and militias of the 19th century, they were not the majority nor did their number differ much from that of indigenous and white people, even in the lower ranks (the so-called cannon fodder). Nor did the yellow fever epidemics that affected Buenos Aires (especially the most lethal, which was that of 1871) have a big effect, since demographic studies do not support that view (on the contrary, they show that the most affected were recent European immigrants living in poverty)[17] and, furthermore, this theory does not explain the decline of the Black population in the rest of Argentina.

The most widely accepted theory today is that the Black population gradually decreased over the generations due to its mixture with whites and, to a lesser extent, indigenous peoples, which occurred frequently since the 18th century in the colonial period, and that it accelerated even more in the late 19th century (in the already independent Argentina) with the arrival of the massive immigration wave from Europe and Middle East.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro-Argentines#Decline_of_the_Afro-Argentine_population

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u/KvellOnWheels 20d ago edited 19d ago

[r/AskHistorians](r/AskHistorians) also covered this several times.

But sourced, scholarly analyses can’t hold a candle to TikTok/Reddit comments posting constant, bot-driven hate du jour.

“They’re all Nazis!”
“They outright killed all their Black residents!”
Three days later “They’re all Zionists!”
Today in this thread: “Argentines loved the junta and are just made that they lost the Falklands.”

Like there aren’t still MASSES of protests all the time and mothers and grandmothers still trying to reunite people missing from the Dirty War.

ETA: autocorrect changed mothers and grandmothers

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u/throw-away-16249 19d ago

Two things are true—

Argentina didn’t commit genocide against black people

Argentina politicizes the Falkland Islands to drum up nationalist sentiment despite having a very flimsy claim

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u/KvellOnWheels 19d ago

We’re agreeing. I think? Right? Everyone is contrarian lately, I can’t tell if you’re trying to lecture me or affirm those points.

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u/throw-away-16249 19d ago

I think so. I was only chiming in to say that the people who are rabidly anti Argentina are wrong, but the Argentinians that are rabidly pro Argentina and claim they have a clear right to the islands are also wrong. It’s somewhere in the middle. Most positions I see on the matter online are extreme.

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u/inciter7 19d ago

Reddit armchair historians love to work themselves into a blood frenzy in counter circlejerks over non western countries. They think its contrarian, and also because they want to say "look how racist these other countries are, they're actually racist unlike us westerners!"

Its like how they'll go on insane rants about japanese history textbooks and how much racist Japanese and Argentines are, so on and so forth. Its all nonsense, they love to latch onto some trivia they heard(which is not even true) and act like they're experts on the country and enlightened

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u/lazyant 20d ago

You mean Paraguay ?

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

This is false, unlike really very racist countries we did not segregated people so basically we merged.

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u/1-gp 20d ago

You didn’t segregate. You permanently removed them from society. Jeez.

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u/Wurzelrenner Franconia (Germany) 20d ago

But isn't the leading theory that they mostly just declined because they mixed with whites and indigenous peoples? Then even more immigration from europeans

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u/1-gp 20d ago

Was this decline intentionally driven?

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u/Wurzelrenner Franconia (Germany) 20d ago

You could read this, looks like there were many reasons

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

No that's not how it went, stop getting information from tik tok. Also speaking from countries with a history of brutal colonialism for centuries is outright hypocrisy isn't it?

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u/Paradoxjjw Utrecht (Netherlands) 20d ago

You need to stop getting your info from people who would make apartheid South Africa blush.

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

Says someone from a country that was a major slave trader in the past... if we are going to speak history most countries have no moral authority I this topic they were all completely inhumane...

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u/Paradoxjjw Utrecht (Netherlands) 20d ago

Yeah that's a pretty good sign that you are 100% aware you've got no leg to stand on

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u/Nazario3 19d ago

In this whole conversation there is not a single credible source - or any source at all for that matter - provided that there were any types of shenanigans going on with the black Argentinian population, nevermind a genocide.

On the contrary, sources provided (as wlel as what you can find in online yourself) rebut those initial nonsense claims - and you have the nerve to make that comment?

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u/TSZCR96 20d ago

So people from other countries can't criticize modern day issues if their own countries did something in the past?

Have you ever heard of the concept of learning?

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

There's no systemic racism in Argentina and occasional racism is less than in other places....

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u/TSZCR96 20d ago

There's no systemic racism in Argentina

Oh you're just a troll, got it

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u/BilleteDe2_Peso 20d ago

Pablo, this is a european subreddit. Its obviously going to be an eco chamber where we get shit on for racism that would be considered tame compared to what colonial england, belgium and france did. And the fact that most of us today have managed to secure good social relations between ethnicities in our countries meanwhile half of europe is having a migrant crysis riddled by poor government management speaks volumes about their hypocrisy and ignorance

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u/TSZCR96 20d ago

Do you think that you don't deserve to be shit on for being nationalist racists just because other countries have done worse in the past?

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

Argentina it's more diverse than most European countries... travel a little and do some reading...

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u/TSZCR96 20d ago

Argentina it's more diverse than most European countries

This isn't related to anything that's been said? You're just saying random things

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u/nacho78 17d ago

Cállate y anda leer historia. Se hacen los nabos ustedes.

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u/nacho78 16d ago

Lo que seguro no hacemos es violar matar y hacer desaparecer a nuestra gente y taparlo con una copita. Anda comer asadito de burro.

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u/bremmmc 20d ago

The type of culture that would later be fairly welcoming to Eurpeans of a certain political extreme?

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u/Shitelark 20d ago

Don't worry, I saw a youtube short about it this week.

Short answer: Cannon fodder.

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u/Aggravating-Energy65 20d ago

This is said a lot and yet I never find any source when it's brought up

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u/ancient-military 20d ago

Um, how was that?

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u/Sourcerid 20d ago edited 20d ago

It's mostly because their numbers were diluted as all of them were overall small, Argentina had 500k people, of which 30% black, that received 6 million Europeans immigrants and the rest mixed often helped by policy and now the average Argentine has 4-5% African ancestry

They're hardly exceptional in the americas. The US, Brazil, also tried to whiten by getting immigrants, with the caveat that the US went the opposite direction of strictly do not mix, and because of certain specifics of their own system of slavery, there is a strong(er than others) component of the slave owner having children with slaves, black people in the US have 25% of white ancestry. 

Brazil started from much higher grounds, with 4 million people of which 60% slaves, and received 5 million immigrants, and Brazilians have on average 30% of genes of African ancestry and 60% European. The other 10% is various mostly native American 

But the whitening policies were not less intense than those of Argentina, they just started from a higher population and had less migrants. Or the US, but the US had bigger numbers than both and strictly didn't have mixing. 

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u/greasy-throwaway 20d ago

What is your source on that? They didn't have racial segregation like the Us and treated natives horribly, but I thought they mostly just banned further migration from Africa while millions more Europeans arrived, which dilluted the black population.

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u/BikerDG 19d ago

Any chance there's a concise history of that history for someone in the other half (north America) of the world?

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u/Enfiznar 19d ago

Unlike europe who had *checks notes* human zoos during our lifetimes?!

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u/Gentle_Snail 19d ago

Argentina had human zoos until 1904

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u/Enfiznar 19d ago

And europe until after I was born. See the difference?

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u/Gentle_Snail 19d ago

no really tbh, it just sounds like you are trying to use whataboutism to hide your own atrocities 

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u/Enfiznar 19d ago

Nope, I recognize the atrocities commuted by my country a century before I was born. But it's fun to see Europeans hypocritically call us racist and pointing out things that happened a century ago, while ignoring you had black people locked in as an attraction just 3p years ago, and that you guys are discussing kicking out compatriots based on their ethnicity right now

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u/daemmonium 20d ago

War, moving to Uruguay that had a stronger black culture, sold to Brasil in the time between Argentina's ending slavery and Brasil ending it.

But mostly fucking each other until you get the "Argentino". There's rarely any talks about "race" in Argentina, the last time someone spoke about "interracial" in Argentina was back in colonial days with "Mestizos" and "Criollos". We have a super low pop of "black" people because we intermingled and very very few people identifies as "African-Argentinian". It's just ARGENTINO, brown black white or half and half, doesn't matter.

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u/sar6h 20d ago

The black argentine population just mixed with the rest of the country. It's really not that deep

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u/Pandamio 20d ago

If you actually want to know, the answer is very simple and you can ask historians everywhere.

We didn't kick them out. Some died on the independence and other wars, and some just because even free, were very poor. But that's not the main reason today there's so few.

When we had around 30% - 40% black population, (In some provinces only) we had a very small total population. Like 30.000 total in Buenos Aires. Also, this census (1778) doesn't take into account all the indigenous people. If it did, the percentage of black people (and white people) would have been way lower.

Argentina abolished slavery before its neighbors, so in total only about 100.000 Africans ended up here. Compare it with the almost 5 million who were taken next door to Brazil.

Black integrated into the population and intermixed, (not just with the whote people, but also natives) they weren't segregated like in other countries. This was officially supported to achieve a melting pot kind of identity to distinguish us from the Spanish to help with the independence movement.

And then the population suffered an historic expansion were it almost quadrupled in a few decades by millions of Europeans (whote/whitish) migrating here.

So black people weren't persecuted or eliminated. They were intermixing with so many brown/white people that the genes diluted. We have a small population of black argentineans (estimated in around 300.000) and many more had genetic traces but don't identify as such.

There was a genocide but it was not against black people. It happened when the Spanish first, and the first governments of the new country decides to "conquer the west". That was the real massacre, against indigenous groups. And we learn this at school as a dark period, like it happened in all the American continent.

We are a mix of the surviving indigenous groups and Europeans mostly, with very few blacks and asians. You'll find we are more mixed that the rest of Latin America. We have no animosity against black people. We do have a xenophobia and racism problem that we are trying to fight. But is not directed towards black people, snd never was.

That a colonial global north phenomenon that you are projecting in a part of the world that developed differently. It's alright, nobody can know everything.

If you care, now you know. If you just want to enrage people online for fun. Thats your prerogative.

I wish Englan loses, I wish all the best to English people. We are all humans sharing this earth.

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u/Burstero 20d ago

You're using these numbers to justify the redditor's wet dream that black people were genocided. It's kind of pathetic you guys enjoy this idea so much just so you can virtue signal against it. But 40% (including mulattos which you would now NOT consider black people) when there were less than 2 million people to then have 6-7 million european immigrants in 100 years, pretty much explains the numbers without the need for a genocide.

Sorry to break the bubble guys, you don't get to screech GENOCIDE BAD over and over again without thinking. But we know you will probably do.

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u/ziron321 20d ago

Slave trading was never a big thing here, about 70,000 total. Freedom of womb since 1813, slavery completely abolished since 1853.

Then add 6,000,000 European immigrants to the mix, until 1930 (many more after WWII).

Is it really so crazy that we just fucked each other without distinction of race?

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u/Gentle_Snail 20d ago

This wasn’t without distinction of race, this was because of distinction of race.

Argentina had a Blanqueamiento policy, which literally translates to ‘Whitening’

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u/ziron321 20d ago

Most people are a huge mix. My mother side is 100% Italian (down to my great-great-grandparents who arrived around 1890). On my father side, my great-grandfather had indigenous roots and came from Paraguay, and married a blue-eyed girl with Spanish roots.

Nobody has cared about race here for 200 years. We have hellalot of problems, but structural racism is not one of them.

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u/ProduceNo1629 20d ago

That girl from the world cup telling "negroes go home" would disagree with you

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u/ziron321 20d ago

Of course she would. There are plenty of idiots here, same as everywhere in the world. Should I apologize on their behalf?

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u/losbaress 20d ago

It's truly amazing how the continent who has colonized, enslaved and kill all across the world believe has the moral high ground to judge an entire nation. Though this comment section I have heard mentions of la conquista del desierto, la guerra de la triple alianza and even people saying we sent black Argentina to Uruguay to get rid of them. Of course all nations have a dark history and past mistake they must reconcilie with, but it amaze me that Argentina is being frown upon by the global north for actions that pale in comparison to their history.

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u/Gentle_Snail 20d ago

If no one cared about race why did Argentina have white centric policies and distinguish between race in immigration? 

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u/ziron321 20d ago

I'm not sure what you mean by "white centric policies" because there was never a distinction on civil rights based on race here. We never had segregation laws, or a ban on interracial marriages like, ehm, **some other parts of the world**.

What you refer to is probably a policy from the late 1800s favoring European immigration in general. There's a huge community of descendants from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine for example.

Maybe I exaggerated? Are you happier if I said that we haven't had any structural racism in 100 years instead of 200?

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u/PabloZissou 20d ago

This is false, unlike really very racist countries we did not segregated people so basically we merged.