'The whiter, the better'?

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I have travelled in Latin America. Everywhere I encountered this view: the whiter the skin (rich or poor doesn't matter), the higher your status.
What could be the explanation for this phenomenon?

I don't know but in the earlier days it was definitely prevalent. The reason for white being a sign of status back then was that most peasants labored outdoors. So those who weren't tanned by the sun were far more likely to have a higher status ie. not working under the sun all day.

Also white skin is more or less a cultural thing. There are other factors that have also attributed to a sign of wealth such as long nails, bound feet, a person's figure, facial paint, length of knecks, size of breasts, ideal facial features, and other factors ppl don't bother to ask because it is something almost subconscious in us. We tend to mimick what we see in our status oriented cultures.

Yes, the locals told me that the slave owners often were jewish, btw.
I found that rather remarkable.

Humm.

I thought most of them were catholic, but I guess there could be a small percentage of jews living there.

I don't know what you mean by human but I do think most religionists in general are inhumane.

Legally, slavery was abolished everywhere in Latin America a fairly long time ago (slavery was legal under Spanish rule, when being Jewish was not), and in many places well before the US, though de facto slavery did continue for a long time in places - it continued for example early into the XX century in the sisal plantations in Yucatan, where the owners were overwhelmingly local Catholics and American WASPs, a pattern not uncommon in the region. Somebody is telling tall tales...

Latin America is a very racist place, primarily that is a colonial legacy the region has failed to shake off. Colonial society was a pyramid with Spanish-born whites at the top and the vanquished indigenous peoples and African slaves at the bottom.

The combination of hollywood and the fact that the whiter people (the people who didn't live there, but lived in some nearby regime) were several orders of magnitude richer.

Strangely enough, slavery wasn't abolished in Brazil until the 1880s. Some die-hard Southerners actually moved there and founded a town so they could still own slaves...their descendants remain.

in the old days only aristocracy could afford to be pale because they didn't have to work outdoors like the peasantry. so that way paler skin did show status. not sure how it works in other cultures though.

/pause racial-religiousbs
Sort of a side topic. Females on average have slightly lighter complexion than males. And the average couple shows that the women is some degree paler than the man.

Although this is a chemical thing, women have altering nutritional needs during childbearing, and this is sort of natures way of helping with that. Lighter skin = more vitamin D production from sun exposure.
/resume racial-religiousbs

I have it in my head that the darker skin comes mostly from the native tribes in those countries, while the lighter skin represents more colonial descendants. That the preference comes, as a result, from a connection to perceived status. I am not aware of any religious undertones; I've understood it to be about perceived ancestry (although, I guess, religious colonization was a part of that). A shame, really, when a descendent of a Mayan, for example, would be considered less desirable than a descendent from a Spanish conqueror.