Cavani banned for 3 matches by FA for social media post

Nope, the word means the color black. In English it doesn't, its a racial slur used by slavers and racists. In most of South America its not the case.

You say "historically people in South America were categorised into castas and negros (for some reason you capitalised it) had the lowest position in society".

That is colonial history. Why does your historical frame stop when these countries actually became independent? When Spain colonised these parts they brought slaves and established the tiered system you reference. You might also want to know that pretty far down that tier were all the kinds of brown people, who overwhelmingly make up the South American population. So what happened when Venezuela (the example I can speak of confidently) gained independence and formed as a nation? Slavery was abolished and the colonial structure of race was gone.

That happened on the onset of the independence wars, black people were seen as a part of the population from the get go with the leaders (Bolivar, Paez, etc) declaring slavery ilegal during the revolutions. This is a key difference as the US went to a civil war heavily hinging on slavery because half of the country still wanted slaves to that degree.

So you had the US as a country were American slavers used the word negro to oppress black people. Even after slavery was abolished plenty of cultural and legal segregation remained and the word continues to be used to denigrate.

This is a completely different historical context than you have in a lot South America. In many places, as used the example of Venezuela, slavery was ended or started to be ended with the revolutionary wars. Even starting in colonial times there was a process called "el mestizaje", a historical population mixing between europeans, indigenous, and Africans, which resulted in the brown people of today. Not so say there wasn't plenty of racism, but calling the historical context the same is completely incorrect. The level of historical antagonism with black people was nowhere near the same in South than in North America.

Neither was the use of the word negro of course, which once again, its the actual name of the color black in Spanish. It wasn't a word made up to describe a group of people as it is the case when it was adopted in English.

Venezuela sounds like a lot more progressive than Argentina (and by extension Uruguay, since culturally we are very similar and both speak the same dialect). I made a post in the first page explaining how it can be used in a hateful manner. But it doesn't really matter as it's clear that wasn't the intent here.

That said, I agree with Rincon that even in Agentina the word negro has no associations at all to slavery, oppression or reference to people of African descent.

Yeah southern South America is a lot more heterogenous, but the northern part is way more mixed. Colombia and our neighbors are similar in this regard. It is one of the very few redeeming qualities of Venezuela

All the Uruguayan players are posting that to their insta, maybe we'll get some big names to pick a fight with the FA?

Unless it's Suarez, nobody will care