https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/6/10/the-myth-of-white-argentina-still-shapes-the-nationSo I read this article and while it does make good points like how Milei is trying to distance Argentina away from South America and towards Europe and North America on seemingly racial grounds, I think the article is mistaken in portraying this as an aberration.
For once, Latin America is part of the west since all of its republics have been republics for much longer than most modern European states, with the Latin American republics being founded by criollo elites inspired by the enlightenment, particularly the two bourgeois revolutions of the American and French ones. There’s also the Catholic faith which is central to most Latinos such that even in places where Catholicism isn’t supermajority like in Guatemala, Christianity predominates. So even if you think Latin America is a peripheral region, it’s undeniable that it’s part and parcel of the west far more than Japan and south Korea are. As for Argentina itself…
Tbf, what Milei is doing is more like a return to the mean than an aberration. I read up Argentine history and the similarities between it and settler colonial states like the USA and Australia are eery.
For example, there are many similarities between the American “Manifest Destiny” with its westward expansion at the expense of Native peoples there, and the Argentine “Conquest of the Desert” insofar that both involved the displacement of Native American peoples by the land expansion of European settler-colonial states (southwards in Argentina’s case) via military and diplomatic means which enabled both countries to have a white majority to this day, with Native Americans nowadays living either on the fringes of society or in mainstream society in assimilated ways.
I remember that in the debate between Drew Pavlou and Joel Davis (which Drew lost, btw) both of them agreed that Australia was explicitly founded as a white nationalist state and that its founding fathers didn’t hide their intentions at the time. Indeed, various laws known collectively as “White Australia Policy” were used to enforce white nationalist ethos on the colony. In a similar manner, the current Argentine constitution specifically encourages European immigration in an exclusionary, and said passage was present since the time it was first drafted with the “father of the constitution” Juan Bautista Alberdi back in 1853, a few decades before the conquest of the desert which is a formative part of Argentine history. Indeed, Argentina can be said to be a white nationalist state by the same standards as Australia since inception given that Argentina’s founding fathers too didn’t bother to hide their white nationalist beliefs and, indeed, a key part of Argentine exceptionalism that makes up a large part of Argentine identity is the notion that Argentines came “from the boats” (i.e., derived from European immigrants) as opposed to other LatAm countries, with the implication that Argentina is a white state and remains so to this day.
I’m surprised at people being in denial about this aspect of Argentina’s history, considering how even its founders were explicit about their belief in European supremacy and how Argentina would strengthen by Europeanising.