Argentina Land of the Vanishing Blacks (Ebony Magazine 1973)

So much truth in that article! Although I am surprised they didn’t include one fact that is one of our most shameful pages in history: the War of the Triple Alliance, which could be considered a racial genocide in more than one way. During that war, Black and First Nation men were sent to the forefront, as the first line in combat, to what amounted to be a sure death. That war decimated the local Black population (at least as far as men were concerned) and I believe it to be one of the events that contributed to the erasure the most.

If we add the Yellow Fever epidemic which decimated a disproportionate amount of Black people to the mix, you end up with what is effectively a form of racial genocide. Now, of course, the Yellow Fever didn’t affect Black people in particular. What happened was that, in order to escape the epidemic, wealthy Whites left the city but didn’t include their Black service men and women, those were left behind to die mostly in the South of the city of Buenos Aires (what is now the area of San Telmo, Barracas, etc.).

This article in Wikipedia gives a succinct (very brief, but nonetheless it touches on some of these points) breakdown of all these issues I mentioned above, plus a few more. I suspect the article in Ebony didn’t have these facts back then (it was, after all, 1973) because all these historical points mostly started to emerge in the past 25+ years, when Argentina was no longer under dictatorial rule so, historians have more freedom for research and a better re-framing of what amounts to racial genocide. During the dictatorships, especially since the Argentinian Army had been heavily involved in these actions, historians weren’t allowed this research.