In late March, the United Nations General Assembly
adopted a landmark resolution, spearheaded by Ghana and backed by the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), recognising the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as the gravest crime against humanity and calling for concrete steps towards reparations. A total of 123 member states backed the initiative. Most former European colonial powers abstained. Only three countries voted against it: the United States, Israel and Argentina under President Javier Milei.
While a large majority of countries acknowledged the need to address the contemporary consequences of slavery and colonialism, a smaller bloc of governments moved to defend an international order shaped by those very same experiences. Argentina’s vote defined which side the current government has chosen to be on. That decision, however, reflects a deep historical continuity. Argentina’s rejection of reparations is part of a state-sponsored tradition that has organised the nation, since its independence, based on specific racial hierarchies. The vote against the UN resolution projected onto the international stage an architecture of power that has structured Argentinian history since the 19th century.
The formation of the Argentinian state was marked by its elites’ explicit project of demographic and cultural whitening. Their vision framed European immigration as a privileged vehicle of civilisation and progress. Juan Bautista Alberdi, the main intellectual architect of the 1853 Constitution, summed it up in the phrase “to govern is to populate”. This logic was embedded in Article 25 of the Constitution, which instructed the state to actively promote European immigration. The clause has, since then, survived every constitutional reform. Neither the 1949 social constitution nor the democratic reform of 1994 altered the principle that associated Europe with the nation’s desirable horizon.
This institutional architecture consolidated one of Latin America’s most enduring national narratives, that Argentina is a white and European society. The myth that Argentinians “descended from the ships” shaped public policy, school discourse and knowledge production, while Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations were pushed to the margins. The result was a distinctive form of racial denial. The Argentinian state constructed a national identity that erased and denied large segments of its own population, elevating whiteness into the universal representation of the nation. Even today, a country composed largely of racialised majorities continues to be described institutionally as a homogeneous European society.
The erasure of Afro-Argentines is one of the clearest expressions of this process. In the early 19th century, people of African descent made up roughly a third of the population and played a decisive role in the country’s economic, social, cultural and military structures. Yet school discourse, censuses and mainstream historiography promoted the idea of their natural disappearance, transforming a history of exclusion into demographic inevitability. Indigenous peoples underwent a parallel process, portrayed as residual minorities despite their continued demographic, territorial and cultural relevance. Argentinian racial denial thus systematically minoritised Indigenous peoples and erased Afro-Argentinians from the national narrative.
The current libertarian administration has deepened this tradition through the dismantling of state structures aimed at recognition and redress. The closure of the National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia and Racism (INADI) eliminated one of the few institutional spaces dedicated to antiracist public policy: the Commission for the Historical Recognition of the Afro-Argentine Community. This commission was created to promote measures of recognition and repair for a population historically excluded from full citizenship, and its significance extended beyond Argentina. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its Special Rapporteurship on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) had identified its creation as an important institutional advance. Its dismantling reflects a political decision to undo some of the limited institutional tools built over decades of Afro-Argentine activism.
In recent decades, Western governments, monarchies and institutions have increasingly acknowledged historical crimes through symbolic gestures. This regime of symbolic recognition often functions as a form of what can be called a liturgy of forgiveness: it acknowledges historical injustice, condemns its most extreme expressions, but leaves intact the material architecture that produced its benefits. Reparations disrupt this boundary by shifting the debate from memory to the contemporary distribution of wealth, power and citizenship. In this context, Javier Milei has aligned Argentina with a political bloc articulated around the leadership of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, who won’t even discuss symbolism. This convergence goes beyond diplomatic affinity. It reflects a shared understanding of the international order, in which the defence of historical hierarchies — racial, geopolitical and economic — plays a central role. It is no coincidence that these leaders repeatedly invoke “the West” as a civilisation under threat that must be defended. Within this framework, demands for reparations for chattel slavery and colonialism appear less as an expansion of historical justice than as a challenge to the symbolic foundations upon which Western moral authority has been built.
The March vote reveals a historical continuity that extends beyond Milei himself. As the international community moves towards a new consensus on the contemporary legacies of slavery, the Argentinian state continues to act through a tradition that equates the nation with whiteness and renders its racialised majorities invisible. This is the deeper logic of Argentinian racial denial: a form of power that continues to speak in the name of a European Argentina that exists far more strongly in the state’s imagination than in the social reality of its people.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
<small>Source: Al Jazeera</small>
