Independiente  1  Argentinos Juniors  1

This game entailed a trip across the stinking Riachuelo river that marks the border of the city of Buenos Aires with the Avellaneda neighbourhood in the province of Buenos Aires. I was at the home of Independiente whose brand new stadium is right next door to rivals, Racing Club.

And a fine stadium it will be too, when it’s finished. Which is more than can be said of the team, which was one of the worst I’ve seen this season. This game was there for the taking but Argentinos Juniors didn’t take it. They won almost everything in midfield but then dillied and dallied and dithered on the edge of the penalty area.

Always with Argentinos Juniors...

The home side took the lead thirty-five minutes into the second half with a Dario Gandin goal. I was contemplating the long journey home with the taste of defeat in my mouth when, in the last minute of the game, Gonzalo Prosperi, popped home a headed equaliser.  And well deserved it was too. At least I thought so.

Funny name, Prosperi. I’m not sure where it’s from. But generally you can scan any Argentine team sheet for a fair reflexion of where this nation of forty million people came from. The Independiente squad has a Gomez, a Sanchez and a Velazquez. Argentinos Juniors have a Garcia, a Salazar and a Fernandez. The Spanish names always lead the way.

They’re always followed by Italian. Argentinos has a Gianni and Independiente a Piatti. Tens of thousands of Italian immigrants, most of them from the south, flooded into Argentina from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards and probably make up the majority in the major cities of Buenos Aires and Rosario.

The Argentinos squad also boasts a German sounding Oberman, a French Mercier and an eastern European Pavlovich. While Independiente has a Kruspzky and a very English-sounding Wade.

There are an estimated one million Paraguayans living in Argentina, mostly labourers and domestic workers. The Argentinos Juniors number five, Nestor Ortigoza, is Argentine born and bred but will play for Paraguay in the 2010 World Cup since that’s where his father is from.

There are also more than a million immigrants from neighbouring Bolivia. Nearly every fruit and vegetable shop is Bolivian run and the Liniers neighbourhood, home to the Velez Sarsfield club, has one of the biggest Bolivian markets outside of the Andean country.

A huge proportion of Uruguay’s three-and-a-half million population lives in Buenos Aires, indistinguishable to my eye from the locals, unless you happen to spot them wearing a Uruguayan Penarol or Nacional football shirt.

Nearly all the independent supermarkets are Chinese run and Buenos Aires does have a small but lively Chinatown. But these are relatively recent arrivals and I’ve yet to see a player of Chinese origin break into a major Argentine football team.

Argentina has the largest Jewish population in Latin America – more than two-hundred thousand last time I counted. They’re mostly descendants of those escaping the late nineteenth century East European pogroms, with a second wave fleeing Nazi Germany and a third, smaller wave of Holocaust survivors.

Other escapees from persecution were the Armenians who still parade their extremely long surnames around their own neighbourhood in downtown Buenos Aires.

Argentines like to have the biggest of everything. So when Carlos Menem, whose family is Syrian-Lebanese, was president in the nineteen-nineties he ensured that Buenos Aires would have the biggest mosque in Latin America.

While travelling in the northern province of Salta a few years ago I stopped at a remote store where a bare-chested man behind the counter told me his name was Sam the Syrian. His family had emigrated to Chicago in the nineteen-twenties but had somehow fallen foul of Al Capone and fled to this remote corner of Argentina.

Capone’s men, I’m sure, gave up the search long ago and I should have told Sam that it was safe to move on. But he seemed happy where he was.

There are however two groups you won’t find many of in Argentina. The only black people you’re likely to come across on the streets of Buenos Aires are Brazilian or US tourists. Yet in the first half of the nineteenth century, one-third of the population of Buenos Aires were either African slaves or descendants of African slaves.

Neighbouring Uruguay and Bolivia both have small black communities. Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela and of course Brazil have large ones. So what happened to Argentina’s black population?

It’s a question that has never been properly answered.  Before the Europeans arrived, Argentina like North America was populated by indigenous tribes. And like their North American counterparts they lived on land craved by the white arrivals and had souls demanded by the Christian missionaries.

Throughout the nineteenth century Argentina was in an almost constant state of war. Those against the native Indians were as fierce and bloody as any romanticised in Hollywood Westerns.

After slavery was abolished in Argentina in 1813 many black men had few options and often joined the army. They were led by Juan Manual de Rosas who consistently put his black soldiers in the front line where they became cannon fodder. Rosas, who died in Southampton in 1877, was not solely responsible for wiping out Argentina’s black population. Disease, especially yellow fever, and assimilation also played their part. But I really don’t think Rosas’s face should be adorning the Argentine twenty peso note.

Rosas. Worth twenty?

The traces of Argentina’s indigenous population can be seen in the faces of those from the interior of the country, mixed with those of the Spanish conquerors and the waves of immigration that came afterwards. With the industrialisation of Buenos Aires in the first half of the twentieth century, many of these darker skinned Argentines moved to the cities where they’re to be found in neighbourhoods like Avellaneda.

What remains of the pure indigenous population – the Toba, Mapuche, Guarani and Wichi – are marginalised, forgotten, abused and exploited on the fringes of Argentina society.

The wealthy residents of what the guide books call Buenos Aires’s European style neighbourhoods – in the north of the city – are generally not even aware that Argentina still has an Indian population – and even if they did would be unlikely to care that some are still dying of preventable illnesses and starvation.

It was on that happy note that I trudged my way home through the streets of Avellaneda after a match that finished just before midnight, warmed by that last minute equaliser and the knowledge that sometimes justice, even if it’s only on the football pitch, can be done.