Post #3844833
2026-07-15 21:26 UTC
Replies (2)
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@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io 2026-07-15 22:03
@mathowie@xoxo.zone That would be much less bad than what really happened. Many were forcibly drafted by the military, then sent to front lines to be canon fodder. The losses were staggering. "In the United States…4 million are Black, and within 20 years will be 8 [million]… What is [to be] done with such Blacks, hated by the white race? Slavery is a parasite that the vegetation of English colonization has left attached to the leafy tree of freedom." - Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, later president of Argentina. He implemented the military drafts that sent Black soldiers to die in mass casualty events in wars like the War of the Triple Alliance. That alone was ~30,000 deaths, disproportionately Black. There were only about 70,000 total Black people in the country at the time, so only about 35,000 men and boys of all ages. Sarmiento also implemented the intentional segregation and healthcare neglect that lead to Black mass casualty events from preventable diseases like yellow fever and cholera. Before Sarmiento, 1 in 3 people in Buenos Aires was Black. 33%. To give you an idea of what that feels like, that's Atlanta Georgia. Today, it's 1% Black. That's Boulder, Colorado.
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@adriano@lile.cl 2026-07-16 14:19
@mathowie@xoxo.zone It's a bit more complex than that. In the early 1800s, there wasn't an Argentina yet. It was a collection of provinces that did whatever they wanted, with some semblances of union sometimes. And the Year 13 (1813) Assembly (Asamblea del año 13) did grant freedom of wombs to slaves. But Argentina's constitution was only finally written and signed in the 1850s. Many Black people died in the war of Paraguay, an utter carnage where, as Mekka says, they were sent as fodder. @mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io