As Argentina advanced through the group stage and playoffs, typical football rivalry increasingly gave way to something uglier: conspiracy theories, misinformation, and xenophobic caricatures of an entire country.
Every refereeing decision was folded into an elaborate international conspiracy. At the same time, racist behavior by certain supporters, real contradictions in Argentinean history, and the reactionary politics of President Javier Milei were presented as proof that Argentina itself is uniquely corrupt, racist, and undeserving — a white European enclave in South America.
These narratives did not remain within football culture or anonymous online spaces. They entered workplaces, friendship circles, and political discussions. The hate campaign during the World Cup crossed a line.
People can choose any team to support, but when supposedly progressive arguments lie behind that choice, a politics that cannot distinguish a government from its population, an exploiting class from the exploited, or an imperialist power from a dependent nation will inevitably fall into false narratives.
What Kind of Country Is Argentina?
To understand Argentina’s place in the world, we must begin with its material position rather than the image circulated on social media.
Argentina is a dependent capitalist country with semicolonial features. Its economy is subordinated to foreign capital, international financial institutions, and the strategic interests of more powerful states.
One of the clearest expressions of this relationship is the continuing British control of the Malvinas Islands. In 1833, Britain sailed thousands of miles to seize the islands, expelling the settlement established there in order to secure a strategic military position off Argentina’s coast and project power across the South Atlantic and Antarctica.
To read more: “The Malvinas Debate and the World Cup: A Marxist Response to Bhaskar Sunkara.”
Another example is the U.S. backing of Argentina’s 1976–83 dictatorship, which kidnapped, tortured, and murdered 30,000 people, including workers, students, trade unionists, lawyers, journalists, and left-wing activists. The dictatorship participated in Operation Condor, a system through which South American military regimes coordinated intelligence, repression, kidnappings, and assassinations across national borders, counting on financial, military, communication, and intelligence support provided by the U.S.
To give a sense of this, the Ford factory in Argentina hosted a detention center, where workers were tortured and handed over to the military. A former production director and a former security manager were both found guilty of helping the regime kidnap and torture 24 of the factory’s workers.
Argentina’s economic subordination is equally visible in its relationship with the International Monetary Fund. This illegal and fraudulent external debt means increasing dependence and foreign intervention. As of June 30, 2026, Argentina had about SDR 42.55 billion (approx US$ 60 billion) in outstanding IMF purchases and loans. For millions of Argentinean workers, the debt’s practical consequences have repeatedly included austerity, cuts to public services, falling real wages, privatization, and the transfer of economic power to creditors and corporations.
In October, Donald Trump’s Treasury Department provided a $20 billion bailout for Argentina — not to help the people but to stabilize a regime that serves imperial interests and help Milei win the midterm elections.
Over the last decade, the Argentinean peso has massively depreciated against the U.S. dollar, collapsing from roughly 8.5 pesos per USD in 2016 to over 1,490 pesos per USD by mid-2026. This creates massive dependence on the dollar and the IMF, a never-ending cycle.
Dependency also operates through the ownership and organization of production. Foreign and multinational companies occupy decisive positions in finance, energy, mining, agribusiness, ports, telecommunications, and industry. Profits are transferred abroad — especially to the U.S., Spain, the UK, and the Netherlands — while the country assumes the social and environmental costs of production and low wages.
Argentina’s natural resources are presented as assets to be opened to global capital: lithium, oil, gas, agricultural land, and fresh water. Megamining and fracking are justified in the name of modernization and foreign investment, while affected communities are expected to accept polluted water, damaged ecosystems, and precarious employment.
To read more: “Milei Hands Over Argentina’s Glacial Regions to Multinational Mining Companies.”
Argentina’s position in the international economy, therefore, cannot be understood through cultural stereotypes about Buenos Aires or the ancestry claimed by its elites. It must be understood through debt, capital flows, extractivism, and imperialist subordination.
Some numbers to provide a sense of the levels of poverty, precarious work, and social inequality:
• Argentina has a population of about 46.5 million. According to the latest official measurement, which probably underestimates the situation, 28.2 percent of the population lives in poverty.
• Poverty statistics fluctuate with inflation, wages, welfare payments, and economic activity. They do not fully capture deteriorating public services, household debt, overcrowded housing, or the insecurity experienced by workers who do not know what they will earn from one month to the next.
• About 42 percent of employed people work under informal conditions, according to figures highlighted by the International Labour Organisation. Informality often means working without pension contributions, paid holidays, an annual bonus, adequate health coverage, or meaningful protection against dismissal.
• The Barrios Visibles report estimates that 6.3 million to 7.6 million people live in informal settlements. Most of these communities lack secure access to drinking water, sewage systems, paved roads, public transportation, and emergency services.
This is the social reality obscured when Argentina is imagined simply as a reactionary white European enclave in South America.
Argentina Is Also a Country of Class Struggle
Argentina is also a country with a long history of working-class organization, social movements, and revolutionary politics.
Under Milei, workers have organized national and sectoral strikes against austerity, privatization, layoffs, and attacks on labor rights. Transport workers, public employees, teachers, and other organized sectors have repeatedly disrupted the government’s attempts to present its program as uncontested.
Students and university workers have mobilized in defense of public education. Large demonstrations confronted cuts that threatened salaries, research, and the functioning of Argentina’s tuition-free public university system. Milei’s veto of legislation intended to protect university funding became one of the most visible confrontations between his government and the student movement.
The feminist movement has brought millions into political life through struggles against femicide, gender violence, and the criminalization of abortion. Milei’s government is openly misogynistic. Environmental movements have resisted mining, fracking, and the destruction of glaciers. Millions continue to defend the memory of those murdered and disappeared by the military dictatorship against a government that seeks to relativize or erase those crimes. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo continue searching for their grandchildren who were born in captivity or abducted as children during the dictatorship and whose identities were suppressed.
There have also been demonstrations, campus actions, and political campaigns in solidarity with the Palestinian people. The Left Workers’ Front–Unity has been among the clearest parliamentary opponents of Israel’s assault on Gaza and Milei’s alliance with Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2024, its representatives — including Myriam Bregman, Nicolás del Caño, and Christian Castillo — introduced a congressional declaration condemning the genocide against the Palestinian population.
These struggles do not erase Argentina’s contradictions. They reveal that the country, like any other, is a battleground between different projects rather than a unified political subject.
There is an Argentina of Milei, the IMF, agribusiness, multinational mining corporations, dictatorship apologists, racism, and elitism. But there is also an Argentina of striking workers, occupied universities, feminist assemblies, anti-racist collectives, Indigenous resistance, neighborhood organizations, human rights movements, and internationalist solidarity.
To read more: “The Revolutionary Left in Argentina and the Question of Self-Organization: An Interview with Emilio Albamonte.”
“The Most Racist Country in the World”?
Every nation in the Americas was shaped by colonization, dispossession, and the racial hierarchy imposed by European powers.
Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French colonial powers conquered Indigenous territories, imposed systems of forced labor, plundered, and constructed societies organized around the enrichment of European empires. Millions of Africans were enslaved and transported across the Atlantic. Brazil, for example, received around 5 million enslaved people, representing about 40 percent of the total trade. After independence, local elites preserved many of the racial and class structures created under colonialism.
Argentina was no exception.
In the mid-19th century, its ruling class promoted a national identity centered on European immigration and the aspiration to reproduce the culture of the so-called developed world. Military campaigns dispossessed and killed Indigenous peoples. Many Black Argentines were pushed out of the national story. The myth of Argentina as a white European country became a central part of elite ideology.
The consequences remain visible. Racism exists in Argentina. There is discrimination against Indigenous people, Black Argentineans, and migrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, Peru and other countries. Racist and xenophobic language is normalized in sections of football culture, the media, and everyday life. Denying this would be dishonest.
The current government has made matters worse. Milei represents a political current that is hostile to social movements and expresses enthusiastic support for Netanyahu’s government and Zionism. His politics deserve unequivocal opposition.
But acknowledging racism in Argentina does not require accepting the claim that Argentina is uniquely or exceptionally racist. Nor does it justify treating Britain, Spain, France, or the United States as morally progressive alternatives, like Yanis Varoufakis, who referred to Spain’s “healthy multiculturalism.”
Η υπέροχη ομαδικότητα επικράτησε του εκθαμβωτικού ατομικισμού, εξασφαλίζοντας το Παγκόσμιο Κύπελλο για την Ισπανία. Μαζί της νίκησε και ο λειτουργικός, υγιής πολυπολιτισμός. Το ποδόσφαιρο κατάφερε, αν και οριακά, να επιβιώσει την άγρια εμπορευματοποίηση και τα επιχειρηματικά…
— Yanis Varoufakis (@yanisvaroufakis) July 19, 2026
These countries have their own histories of colonialism, slavery, genocide, segregation, and anti-immigrant violence. They are imperialist powers: states whose corporations, financial institutions, and military alliances exercise power far beyond their borders.
During the World Cup, some commentary depicted European football as intelligent, disciplined, and civilized, while Argentinean football and its players were described as “thuggish” South Americans, “dirty”, “felons”, “bully boys”, engaging in “disgusting behaviour”, “miserable”, and “anti-football”.
This language carries a history.
For centuries, imperial powers have represented themselves as the bearers of order and civilization. Colonized and dependent peoples were depicted as irrational, violent, and incapable of governing themselves.
The idea that Argentina is simply “white” is misleading. It erases Black communities, more than 1 million people who identify as Indigenous or of Indigenous descent, millions of mestizo Argentines, historic Syrian and Lebanese immigration, and more recent migration from neighboring countries and elsewhere in the so-called Global South.
To declare Argentina fully European is not to expose the myth of its ruling class; it is to buy into it.
People Are Not Their Rulers, and Imperialism Is Never a Progressive Option
Spain’s World Cup victory offers an instructive example. When I think of the Spanish State, I have in mind the Asturia Comune (1934), the heroic fight against fascism in the 1930s, the independence movements, the indignados movement, the Rocafonda neighborhood, solidarity with immigrants from vast sectors of society, and the movement against the genocide in Gaza.
Thousands of people in Palestine celebrated the Spanish team because of the solidarity associated with Lamine Yama, who had previously displayed a Palestinian flag — a symbol that could be seen on the walls of Gaza.
But at the same time, the Spanish State still has a monarchy and is a NATO member with its own colonial history, racial inequalities, and violent borders. The Spanish State doesn’t allow the oppressed nations within its territory to have their own teams. Its official victory celebrations included a royal reception, while Ferran Torres appeared during the parade wearing a “Make Spain Great Again” cap modeled on Donald Trump’s slogan.
While an arms embargo was put in place, the Spanish State continues to maintain economic and diplomatic relations with Israel, including the trade in weapons based on “exceptions to the embargo.”
If you were not outraged by the king of Spain lifting the World Cup trophy, then your “progressive compass” is not working.
The same principle applies elsewhere.
The United States was built through Indigenous genocide and dispossession, slavery, and imperialist expansion. It is also the country of slave rebellions, the civil rights struggle, the uprising after the murder of George Floyd, the students who occupied campuses in solidarity with Gaza, and the ongoing struggle and resistance against deportations and ICE terror.
Egypt’s government has helped enforce the isolation of Gaza and guards one of its borders. Egypt is also the country of the millions who filled Tahrir Square and of the people whose solidarity with Palestine has repeatedly challenged the state.
England is an imperialist country. But it is also home to workers, migrant communities, and some of the largest pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Europe.
The problem is not that people supported Spain, England, or any other team against Argentina. The problem is the construction of a false moral map in which European powers appear clean, democratic, and progressive, while Argentina becomes the singular embodiment of racism, corruption, and violence. Such a construction becomes politically reactionary.
Social media can transform isolated facts into a totalizing account of a society. The result is not necessarily a complete lie. It is something more politically effective: a story constructed from selected truths. Algorithms reward outrage, negative comments, and repetition, making this campaign quite harmful.
In every capitalist society, exploitation and oppression generate multiple, conflicting histories. There is the official history written by presidents, business owners, and media corporations. There is another history written by workers, the oppressed, and ordinary people who continue fighting for a better world.
To understand a country is to understand the conflict between those histories.
Against Imperialism
Defending Argentina against xenophobic caricature does not mean defending Milei, racism, or the Eurocentrism of the country’s ruling class and privileged sectors. It means defending a materialist understanding of the world.
Argentina is neither a progressive heaven nor a uniquely reactionary society. It is a dependent capitalist country whose ruling class collaborates with imperialism and oppresses workers at home. It is also a country whose working class and social movements have repeatedly produced struggles of international significance.
The Trump administration is openly attempting to revive U.S. supremacy in Latin America through what officials and commentators called a new “Donroe Doctrine” — a militarized reworking of the Monroe Doctrine directed against regional independence and competing global powers. We are seeing it in Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and also in Argentina.
Milei’s government will present its submission to Washington, the IMF, and multinational capital as freedom. Resistance will require something entirely different: solidarity among workers and oppressed peoples throughout the Americas.
After the final whistle, the Argentina that the international Left must find as an ally is not the Argentina imagined by its oligarchy, its government, or a hostile social media campaign but the Argentina of millions who continue to resist exploitation and oppression.
Our loyalty is to the exploited and oppressed of the world. As the famous political slogan from the Communist Manifesto says: “Workers of the world, unite!”
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