Albener Pessoa

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Diesel Sweeties is a pixelated webcomic by Richard Stevens 3 that has been continuously updated since April 2000. Sometimes the people kiss the robots. Be warned.

You may know me from "Bacon is a Vegetable," "I'm a Rocker. I Rock Out." or "Music I Like. Music You Like. Music I Used to Like" elitism t-shirts.

All content (c) 2000-2069 Richard Stevens 3

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One day last spring, near an old rural cemetery in southern Brazil, a black man named Marcelo Gomes held up the corners of a Confederate flag to pose for a cell-phone photo. After the picture was taken, Gomes said he saw no problem with a black man paying homage to the history of the Confederate States of America. "American culture is a beautiful culture," he said. Some of his friends had Confederate blood.

Gomes had joined some 2,000 Brazilians at the annual festa of the Fraternidade Descendência Americana, the brotherhood of Confederate descendants in Brazil, on a plot near the town of Americana, which was settled by Southern defectors 150 years ago. The graveyard is usually empty save for its caretaker or the odd worshipper drawn to its little brick chapel. On the April morning of the festa, a public-address system blaring the Confederate battle song "Stonewall Jackson's Way" had interrupted the cemetery's silence. Brazilians in ten-gallon hats and leather jackets called out greetings.

For miles around the graveyard, unfiltered sun beat down on sugarcane fields planted by the thousands of Confederates who had rejected Reconstruction and fled the United States in the wake of the Civil War—a voluntary exile that American history has more or less erased. Their scattered diaspora has gathered annually for the past 25 years. The party they throw, which receives funding from the local government, is the family reunion of the Confederados, one of the last remaining enclaves of the children of the unreconstructed South.

Brazilians filed past a Rebel-flag banner emblazoned with the Southern maxim: heritage, not hate. They lined up at a booth where they traded Brazilian reals for the festa's legal tender, printout Confederate $1 bills. (The exchange rate was 1:1—the Southern economy had apparently survived.) Kids flocked to the trampoline and moon bounce. Old-timers staked out shade beneath white tents. Early on, the line for fried chicken grew almost too long to brave.

Under a tent, I picked at some chicken and watched a young blond Brazilian woman maneuver an enormous Confederate-flag hoop skirt into a chair. I wondered what she made of the symbol. She introduced herself as Beatrice Stopa, a reporter for Glamour Brazil. Her grandmother, Rose May Dodson, ran the Confederado fraternity. She'd been dancing at the festa since she was a kid.

I asked if she knew there was a connection between slavery and the American South. "I've never heard that before," she said. She wasn't sure why her ancestors had left the States. "I know they came. I don't really know the reason," she said. "Is it because of racism?" She smiled, embarrassed. "Don't tell my grandmother!"

Brazil itself outlawed slavery in 1888, more than two decades after the end of the American Civil War. Despite outwardly progressive efforts since then, the country has struggled to rid itself of the institution. The government passed legislation strengthening worker protections, including a 1940 constitutional amendment prohibiting employers from submitting their workers to "conditions analogous to slavery." But as Brazil grew more desperate to modernize in the early 20th century, farm owners started coercing wage laborers with debt and holding them in bondage. In recent years, government inspectors have found Brazilians trapped in debt on charcoal farms in Goiás, Haitian workers who have died on World Cup construction sites, and Bolivian immigrants in sweatshops at the center of São Paulo.

The town the Confederates built has been caught in this dragnet. On January 22, 2013, the Brazilian Ministry of Labor orchestrated a sting in Americana, the town where many of the Confederados had settled. It found Bolivian immigrants manufacturing baby clothes under the roof and supervision of two Bolivian bosses. The prosecutors broke up the factory, and in the suit that followed, they deemed the conditions they'd found execrable enough to constitute slavery.

Of all the people I asked at the Americana festival, not a single one had heard of slavery in his town.

Almost everyone had come to the festa dressed as an American—in jeans and boots, Johnny Cash T-shirts and camouflage. Visitors haggled at a booth stocked with Southern paraphernalia: aprons, quilts, commemorative glasses, a used copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. An amplified voice called the crowds to pull their chairs up to the main stage—an enormous concrete slab with a flag painted across it and the words XXVI FESTA CONFEDERADA emblazoned at its top. The mayor of the nearby town Santa Bárbara d'Oeste surveyed his assembled constituents and welcomed the state representatives in attendance. "It's the first time I have the honor being here as mayor," he beamed, leaning over the microphone as descendants in homemade hoop skirts and sewn Confederate grays standing behind him hoisted flags up long, thin wooden poles. "But I've been here many times as a spectator, a fan." The banners of São Paulo, Brazil, Texas, the United States, and the Confederacy flapped languidly in the breeze. "North American immigration has helped build our region, has helped build Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, has helped build the city of Americana," he proclaimed. "That's what we celebrate today."

By and large, the thousands of Texans and Alabamans and Georgians who sailed to Cuba and Mexico and Brazil failed. They folded into cities and set up doomed plantations on rain-forest plots. By 1918, they'd dwindled enough to merit ethnographic study, and the American Geographical Society dispatched researchers to learn their ways.

But not Americana. Led by an Alabaman colonel, its settlers introduced cotton and turned the town into an industrial textile powerhouse. For generations their children spoke English with a drawl. Today the city of 200,000 boasts Latin America's largest cowboy-rodeo arena. The festa brings it great pride.

Men dressed as soldiers led the crowd in the Brazilian national anthem; one trumpeted an off-key "Taps." In the States this kind of gathering usually culminates in a battle reenactment, but the Confederados offered tamer fare, mostly dance performances headlined by a long-bearded local celebrity known as Johnny Voxx, whose black hat, sunglasses, black-leather-trimmed jeans, and black cowboy boots made him look like the hero of a spaghetti western.

"This is nearly perfect... This is what we want. I don't attach anything political. I like black people." – Philip Logan

Passing me a business card, Voxx said he'd googled a bit before he booked the Confederado gig. "I started studying just to know if the people here were racist or not," he said. "But like they say, 'Heritage, not hate.' I wouldn't be here if it was a party to celebrate racism." He stumbled through the English—what little he knows he learned from music and watching Bonanza—and I wondered what his interpretation of country music could possibly sound like. But when he belted out "Cotton Fields," the crowd doubled. His intonation was perfect—the man sounded like Hank Williams.

I couldn't help bringing up the historical contradictions over and over—to Voxx, to descendants, to a group of local men who ran a weekly country-western movie club. But nobody seemed as uncomfortable as I was. "Our prejudice is very small compared with other people's," Pedro Artur Caseiro, a member of the movie club, told me. I asked what he loved about westerns, and he smiled dreamily, his chest puffed in affected military decorum, his hand on his wooden sword. "Good always trumps evil," he said. "Today what's missing, it seems like people don't believe in goodness."

Real Southerners—Confederate enthusiasts—had made the pilgrimage too. Ambling through the yard in his uniform, Philip Logan, a tall and portly Civil War reenactor from Centreville, Virginia, inspected the headstones: Ferguson, Cullen, Pyles. Born: Texas. Died: Brazil.

Accompanied by his girlfriend, a Brazilian woman with a bonnet and parasol whom he'd met online, Logan exhaled. "This is nearly perfect," he said. "This is what we want. I don't attach anything political. I like black people." As an active member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, he reckoned constantly with what he considered exploitations of his heritage. "There's just so much animosity," he said. "Here it's like, seeing the Confederate flag, nobody cares. If I waved a Russian flag nobody would care."

At the entrance to the festa, two muscled bodyguards patted the attendees down, checking their arms and necks against four Xeroxed sheets of paper that outlined in Portuguese 42 white-supremacist symbols—the SS, the Iron Cross, the swastika, KKK. They'd been instructed to eject anyone with these markings from the party. It had been a problem in years prior.

As the party wound down and attendees made their way back to the fields where their cars were parked, I asked Érico Padilha, a non-descendant local, what he thought of the Confederate-slave connection. "I really don't like this idea, celebrating something about the South, because of slavery. I really don't like it," he said. "But here this party is not about politics, I think. It's about the culture."

The Confederados decamped for Brazil for a number of reasons—their children still bicker over why. Brazil had been trying for years to match North American and European agricultural development, and Emperor Dom Pedro II saw in these disaffected Southerners an opportunity to import American prosperity. He set up informational agencies across the South and offered subsidized passage to any American willing to emigrate. Newspaper ads for chartered ships appeared nearly every day, as did editorials mocking the plan, and Confederates jumped at the offer of cheap land on which to build new plantations, fantasizing about restoring the economy they'd watched crumble in the States. This would be possible because Brazil would allow them to keep their slaves.

Although Brazil outlawed the slave trade in the mid 1800s, it dragged its feet in banning slavery outright. Southerners wouldn't have been able to produce competitive cotton without it, and both the Confederates and Dom Pedro knew it. Even before the Civil War, Southerners had held conferences on moving slavery to the country. Once they emigrated, prominent Confederate officers scrambled to buy operational fazendas already staffed with slaves. Cotton and tobacco didn't grow well in Brazil's soil, but established crops like coffee, orange, and sugarcane certainly did.

Brazil's race relations shocked Confederate sensibilities enough to send many émigrés back to the United States. "The black, who some admit will one day be our equal here, will already be found occupying the foremost and most honorable walks in society," one prospector wrote of Brazil in the Galveston Tri-Weekly News after scouting the country for plots. He added, "Although the white fears he will someday cast his ballot in the same box with him here, he will find him not only voting there, but making laws—laws to govern whites who go there."

"So pronounced was their distaste," writes descendant Eugene Harter in The Lost Colony of the Confederacy, "that in 1888, when a senator opposed to slavery was assassinated on the eve of Brazil's emancipation, the Confederados were first suspected." The public, however, felt differently. Lore holds that crowds gathered to celebrate outside Princess Isabel's palace as she signed abolition into law more than two decades after the American Civil War had ended.

"We never had a war in Brazil about slavery," João Leopoldo Padoveze, a Confederado whose ancestors were once slaves, told me. Like many, he asserted that the abolition of slavery was peaceful because Brazil never had a problem with racism. The concept that Brazil is a "racial democracy" has shaped the country's cultural identity for decades as a point of national pride. The Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre coined the term after he witnessed a man being lynched when he was a student in the Jim Crow South. Horrified, he came home with a newfound appreciation for his country as a place where ethnicities mixed freely, which he argued was evidence that in Brazil racism did not exist.

But even as Brazil wrote racism out of its history, slavery continued. Landowners, including Confederados with fazendas, hired wage laborers in place of their slaves. In turn, these laborers—impoverished farmworkers—have been replaced by a workforce that includes the tens of thousands of slaves, many of them immigrants, who live in Brazil today.

It wasn't until the 1970s that rural activists set up rescue centers for escaped workers and started to collect the stories in an effort to eradicate the practice. They presented their findings—evidence of thousands of Brazilian workers whose abuse and bondage the state had systematically tolerated—to the International Labour Organization, and in 1995 the ILO declared Brazil in contempt of its own constitution.

The shaming moved President Fernando Cardoso to make a now famous radio address that summer. "In 1888, Princess Isabel signed the famous Golden Law, which should have ended slave labor in this country," he said. "I say 'should' because, unfortunately, it hasn't stopped." Brazil would establish a task force to find and punish slavery across all industries. In the two intervening decades the government has taken multinational companies like Zara to task and freed 47,000 workers legally defined as "slaves."

Brazil's "secret inspection operations," as one ILO brochure dubs them, are some of the world's most rigorous. The country has publicly acknowledged and committed to reforming its abuses of labor on a scale few others have. This June, for example, activists won a 15-year battle to pass a constitutional amendment allowing the state to expropriate the land of businesses and farms found using slavery—an unthinkable penalty in the US.

Beatrice Stopa, a Confederado descendant and reporter for Glamour Brazil

In a drab office in Campinas, labor inspector Joao Baptista Amancio slid a stack of files on the Americana slavery case across a table. The sting had ended in a great, and rare, success. Amancio's office had followed the case to the top of the supply chain and levied $95,000 in fines on Lojas Americanas, the national brand that was selling the clothes. Though Brazil's antislavery operations are some of the world's finest, successfully prosecuting a case is slow and arduous. Conditions need to be egregious.

Amancio, a soft-spoken bureaucrat in Reeboks and khakis, raided the factory along with another inspector, four federal police officers, a prosecutor, and a judge. They were following up on a 2011 case in which they'd found six undocumented Bolivians making clothes in a home factory but had elected not to prosecute the work as slavery. They wanted to make sure that the sweatshop had stayed closed.

Instead they found five Bolivians making baby clothes in a broken-down shed with cracked walls, water damage, and a moldy ceiling caving in. Four young women shared a grimy concrete cell, sleeping on makeshift bunks, their clothes strewn across their beds and on the floor. They had no furniture to speak of; they couldn't close their doors. Amancio said they worked 12-hour days, six days a week, churning out fabric on faulty sewing machines. They were paid, but irregularly and based only on how much they produced.

Two of the workers fled when the Ministry of Labor descended. Amancio's office never found them—he suspects they'd run to São Paulo. Flight is not uncommon, Amancio told me. Factory overseers trap workers in abusive conditions by convincing them that the Brazilian authorities will deport them for working illegally, even though Brazil accepts Bolivian migrant workers as a part of a free-trade agreement.

"They fear being caught by authorities," Amancio said. "That's what holds them. They only trust the employer, the guy exploiting them. He exploits that fear." The three who stayed in the Americana factory all listed Gabriel Miffia Alanes, their overseer, as their emergency contact for the ministry.

The workers hardly spoke. They hunched over their machines, feet exposed, looked at the ground, and avoided questions. So the ministry used its discretion, picked up on subtler things. Workers glanced at Alanes for visual cues, regarded him with what the ministry called "reverential terror." But the clincher was the door. When the authorities asked the workers to show them the keys they used to get in and out of the factory, none could produce one. The door locked from within, and the ministry said this showed that Alanes kept his employees trapped inside.

A hillside near Americana

The case in Americana is somewhat typical of Brazil. It matched the story of another Bolivian immigrant I met one night outside a Peruvian restaurant near a strip called Cracolândia,* a drug-plagued strip in São Paulo. Edwin Quenta Santos worked there as a server—the first real job he'd had since escaping his violent cousin's factory in Guarulhos, not far from the São Paulo airport. He lived in a rat-infested, windowless concrete changing room near the restaurant and slept in a child's plastic race-car bed. He still wasn't working legally, and made minimum wage, though he consistently worked a few hours past the supposed end of his shift. "We could say it's still a little bit like slavery," he said, letting out a laugh.

Edwin called his story his "testimony"—he'd never spoken to the police, never told his children or his wife what he'd endured. He'd moved on and tried to forget, but then he'd heard rumors that his cousin Severo Oyardo Santos was running a sweatshop once again. He wanted people back home to fully understand what Severo had done.

In 2009, Severo visited Edwin in La Paz, Bolivia. Severo had lived in São Paulo for about ten years, and Edwin was shocked at how well he seemed to be doing. He bragged that he owned a factory that was expanding, and he was looking for more help. He told Edwin that he could triple his income if he moved to Brazil to work. Edwin said he borrowed about 500 reals ($190) from Severo for a plane ticket and an additional 500 reals to tide his family over until he could send back his first check.

"I thought, Well, if he is lending me five hundred reals just like that, it means everything is going to be OK over there," Edwin said.

When Edwin arrived in São Paulo, paid traffickers known as gatos sidled up to him as he waited with his suitcase for his cousin. Gatos prey on Bolivians who arrive in the country with no connections, offering work in unlicensed clothing factories hidden in back offices or homes. This kind of work—dispersed, small-scale exploitation rather than obvious torture on farms—is booming. Last year was the first on record that Brazil busted more urban slavery rings than rural ones. "They offered to pay for my hotel, said they had rooms available for work. They kept offering," Edwin said. "Then my cousin arrived."

Severo drove Edwin to his compound near the airport and introduced him to the 20 or so extended family members already working there. They threw a little welcome party in the cramped kitchen. The concrete house was three stories high, and it had no front door—just a gated carport with a padlock, whose key Severo kept hidden. Severo parked his car on the street, reserving the carport instead as a home for his guard dogs. If Edwin wanted to leave outside of the one trip a week his cousin allowed, he'd have to scale the back wall and make sure to be back before he was caught. He knew the kind of punishment his cousin could inflict—he recalled watching him beat his children. "He's bigger than me," Edwin said.

The workers followed a strict schedule, rising at five and working till midnight, sometimes stopping only for a 15-minute lunch. They drank water from a well covered in algae. They slept six to a room on the compound's top floor or else in the sewing factory itself, pushing their machines aside at night and sliding in thin mattresses. Edwin didn't know how to make clothes, so he started out cooking and cleaning as his family members sewed.

According to Edwin, when he asked his cousin for money, he screamed that it was Edwin who owed him money. They'd talk wages only once he put a dent in his debt for the plane ticket and loan. Severo was evasive and would lie to family members who wanted to settle their accounts, refusing to pay them in full. In Edwin's time at the factory, the only worker who managed to persuade Severo to give him the money he was due was a cousin with papers who had threatened to report his boss to the federal police if he didn't pay up and let him go.

The workers followed a strict schedule, rising at five and working till midnight, sometimes stopping only for a 15-minute lunch.

Edwin struggled to learn to sew. He fumbled with the machines, ruining fabric. It took him a month to make what his cousins could make in four days. A businessman who contracted with Severo would show up at the house and demand faster production. "If my cousin said he couldn't do it, he would say, 'That's your problem, you have to deliver tomorrow,'" Edwin told me. On those nights, he and the others often did not sleep.

His family in Bolivia begged him to send money. Eventually they moved to a cheap rental house, and his wife took their children out of private school. Edwin lied when his son and daughter asked how he was doing; he felt too ashamed to admit the situation. "Imagine that I came from Bolivia with a good plan in order to overcome the low lifestyle of my family," Edwin explained. "Imagine how my children would have reacted, or my wife, or my parents. That's why I contained myself. I felt incapable of doing anything."

It grew increasingly obvious that Severo had no intention of compensating anyone fairly, and they all slowly stopped working. A cousin or a nephew would say he wanted to leave, and Severo would tell them to pack their bags. He'd load them into his car and drop them off penniless at the bus station in Guarulhos. Edwin didn't know where each had gone. He waited, still in debt and without connections in Brazil, as work in the factory slowed and then came to a halt. Eventually, only he and Severo's children remained. Then one evening he found his bags packed and out on the curb. Edwin slept in the locker room at a soccer field for three days, collecting himself before he headed into São Paulo to look for work. He ultimately made his way to the Peruvian restaurant near Cracolândia.

The afternoon after I met Edwin, I drove to Severo's compound in Guarulhos and waited for his car to pull up. A stout man with a puggish face slammed the door and waddled toward the gated carport.

"Who's judging me?" he demanded when asked if he'd been running a factory. "I have to know." There was no factory inside, he said, just his children, home from school, and a cousin or two visiting. He showed me his home. On the second floor there was an empty, white-tiled room filled with gleaming sewing machines. A heap of felt filled a bin in the corner. Nobody was working, but the machines were spooled.

"It's all lies made up by jealous people, good-for-nothings," Severo said.

I asked why there were so many machines inside if he wasn't running a factory. There'd been one in the past, he confessed. But he'd closed it.

"Seamstresses only want to work little and earn lots, and that can't be, you know?" he said. "So better to end that."

Severo Oyardo Santos's compound in Guarulhos, Brazil, where Edwin Quenta Santos was held in slave-like conditions

The morning after the Confederado festa, I drove the 30 miles from the old Southern graveyard to the address the ministry's records listed as the sweatshop run by Gabriel Miffia Alanes and Eusebia Villalobos Tarqui, the Bolivian couple who'd been caught with slaves in Americana. The GPS led to a bulldozed lot, the plywood and steel skeleton of a house built atop it. On the corner I saw a shoddy two-room building, its yellow-brown walls the same color as the dirt. I wondered, as I walked out to a man in a bucket hat and work boots, if that shack had been the factory.

The man squinted at me as I asked him what he was doing. Puzzled, he said he was at work building a bank. He hadn't heard that there had been a factory here, but there were some Bolivians currently living in the house right across the street. He didn't know anything about them—who they were, if they worked—but they only ever left in the morning and at night. They walked by with their heads down and never said hello.

It took a few minutes of knocking on the house's rust-red-painted metal door for a man with black hair and sallow cheeks to stick his head out. His forearm, stuffed into the pocket of his shorts, bore a scorpion. Behind him baby clothes hung on a clothesline against a concrete wall.

I asked him if there had been a factory in his house. "Yes," he said. "But it's been closed for a while." The ministry had come around months ago. "There were no problems," he said. "Everyone had their papers."

When I asked if he'd heard about slavery across the street, he bristled. "It's not slavery," he said. "When I first came from Bolivia, I worked from seven till midnight. I wanted to work those hours. The owner never forced me. If I worked like a Brazilian, from seven till five, I wouldn't make enough money."

Grasping, I brought up Alanes, the Bolivian neighbor caught with slaves in his factory the year prior. Did he know him? He hesitated, and then he said, "That's me."

Of course. The address I'd gone looking for—the one in the ministry's files—led to the house where Alanes and his family slept. This was their workplace, the factory across the street, where he'd allegedly kept his workers locked inside. A year after the ministry raided Alanes's sweatshop, freed his workers, and successfully linked the case to a national chain, the sweatshop still stood, and Alanes was still inside it.

He disappeared into the house, but soon after, a woman wearing a scrunchie came to the door—Tarqui, his wife. She laid out the situation: The only people working in the factory these days were herself and her husband. They made shorts for a São Paulo private school, but if they showed the logo, they'd lose the business, which they couldn't afford. That understood, she opened the gate and motioned for me to follow.

A year after the ministry raided Alanes's sweatshop, freed his workers, and successfully linked the case to a national chain, the sweatshop still stood, and Alanes was still inside it.

A concrete walkway led past small cinder-block dwellings to an enormous tin-roofed pavilion propped up by plywood poles at the back of the lot. Fabric, plastic wrapping, and cardboard boxes covered the floor. Two faded laminate posters—one with an old lineup for Palmeiras, a São Paulo soccer club, another with an aerial mountain shot of La Paz—were tacked onto the water-stained walls. Light fixtures dangled from the ceiling. Part of the roof had collapsed and showed the sky. A dozen yellowed sewing machines rested on card tables.

Tarqui turned toward me in the room's corner, picked up a pair of red nylon school athletic shorts, and folded her arms. She said the school paid 90 centavos—about 35 cents—per pair and she and her husband churned out about 2,000 per week. In exchange, her children attended the school. She insisted that her children never worked. (Amancio, the labor inspector, said he suspected otherwise.)

To hear Tarqui tell it, she fell into managing a sweatshop by accident. In 2001, she moved to Brazil at the invitation of a Bolivian she knew who'd married a Brazilian man and needed a nanny. She boarded a bus and braved the two-day ride to São Paulo. She eventually left the nanny job to work in a factory; after a while, she and her husband opened their own. They'd pick up contracts, have a week to make 1,000 pairs of shorts. Unable to do the job themselves, they'd go meet Bolivians in the town square. They hired one, then another, and by 2011 the Ministry of Labor was knocking on their door.

"Here I feel a little lost," Alanes told me. "Tired too."

The ministry ordered HippyChick Moda Infantil, the company that sold Alanes and Tarqui's clothes to Lojas Americanas, to pay both the workers and the factory owners severance and "moral damages." It took five days or so for HippyChick to pay the workers. After that, they boarded buses and left for good. Alanes had no idea where they'd gone. It's this absence, more than anything, that marks Brazil's record of the case in Americana, and of its slavery operations writ large. The workers gave no testimony and left no trace.

As for the lock and key: At first, Alanes said the ministry was lying. Later, on the phone, Tarqui admitted that they'd kept the door locked, but insisted that workers had access to a key. She said that they'd been robbed before. In November of last year, Brazil's federal judiciary opened a criminal case against Alanes for keeping workers in conditions analogous to slavery, a crime punishable by up to eight years in prison.

Gabriel Miffia Alanes continues to operate a home factory even after being convicted in 2013 of using slave labor.

Daniel Carr de Muzio, the de facto Confederado genealogist, swung open the heavy wooden door to his house in a gated ten-year-old development called Jardim Buru in the São Paulo countryside. A pickup truck with a Confederate flag sat in the driveway. De Muzio grew up in Brazil steeped in his family's Confederate heritage. His grandmother referred to Abraham Lincoln as "that man" until the day she died, and his grandfather threw away his baseball cards depicting black players. In adulthood, de Muzio remained devoted to his American roots, making his money by translating English to Portuguese and speaking with a Southern drawl.

Inside de Muzio's house, a sunken den with chandeliers gave way to floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over a backyard filled with eucalyptus trees and subtropical varieties of lemon. On a credenza next to a glass tray of alcohol sat three miniature flags: Brazil's, the United States', and the Confederacy's. Walking through the house in madras shorts and a T-shirt, de Muzio showed off his collection of family and Confederado memorabilia—books and papers and crinkled old photos. A stained copy of Facts the Historians Leave Out: A Youth's Confederate Primer rested near his computer alongside a book called Lost White Tribes, in which de Muzio is featured.

Sitting in his back-porch rocking chair, looking over his verdant yard, he tried to disabuse me of the notion that the Confederados came to Brazil to keep practicing slavery. Slaves had nowhere to go after the Civil War, he told me. Brazil looked like a great option. "I'm sure they came voluntarily," he said. "These people, you know, they were raised by their masters—and they knew very little of how to get along by themselves on their own. They probably were very afraid of being alone."

For the Confederados, the legacy of the South is all innocence, no reckoning.

When I asked de Muzio if he'd heard of contemporary slavery in Brazil, he told me that he had—Haitians on construction sites, Bolivians in factories. His brow furrowed as he threw eucalyptus charcoal on the stove. "Now, that hasn't got a thing to do with us," he said.

Today, the Confederados are, for the most part, light-skinned upper-middle-class Brazilians, the legacy of the few Southerners who succeeded in preserving a simulacrum of their crumbling plantations. They celebrate a mythology that hardly contends with the past and keeps itself blind even to the present.

At the festa, I had met Cindy Gião, who was a visitor, not a descendant. She said she knew next to nothing about the Confederacy. She'd come on the invitation of her father's friend, Robert Lee Ferguson. Gião guessed she was Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and maybe Dutch in heritage. But she couldn't say for sure, and neither could most of her friends. No one knew, she said, "because it's so mixed." That's what so many Brazilians envy in the Confederados—a connection to one's past.

For the Confederados, the legacy of the South is all innocence, no reckoning. Their Confederacy is a collection of sounds and words and images: a Johnny Cash song, a western, a flag. White Southern bitterness has melted into kitsch—or else denial, oblivion. These are the blindnesses that render slavery invisible today.

"Brazilians are not very into our history," Gião said. "We learn it in school, but we don't have parties to celebrate what our ancestors did for us." Then she turned toward the stage to listen to a rendition of "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess and watch as a man hoisted the Brazilian flag up alongside the Stars and Bars.

In 340, Chinese alchemist Ko Hung described the difference between smallpox and measles; a Christian priest, Ahrun, did the same in Egypt about 300 years later. In 910, the Persian physician Rhazes published the most widely celebrated early diagnoses of the two diseases.

1492: In a pattern that would be repeated across the world for centuries, Christopher Columbus and his fellow European explorers arrived in the Americas, bringing a raft of deadly diseases — including measles — with them.

Native Americans had no natural immunity to many of these diseases. Measles, smallpox, whooping cough, chicken pox, bubonic plague, typhus and malaria — already dangerous and often deadly in Europe — became even more efficient killers in the New World. By some estimates, the Native American population plunged by as much as 95% over the next 150 years due to disease.

1824-48: As was the case with many diseases, measles’ risk to Pacific Islanders was particularly dangerous in the 19th century as traders and travelers crisscrossed the globe. In 1824, Hawaii’s King Kamehameha II and Queen Kamamalu traveled to London to meet King George IV, but instead swiftly contracted measles. Both died within a month. The virus, along with several other diseases, struck Hawaii in 1848, killing up to a third of the native population.

1846: Danish physician Peter Ludwig Panum traveled to the Faroe Islands between Iceland and Norway to study a measles outbreak that had sickened more than 75% of the islands’ 7,782 residents — killing at least 102. Measles had not appeared on the isolated islands in decades, and Panum discovered that “not one” of the elderly residents who had been infected in 1781 “was attacked a second time.” Such immunity would later become key to defeating the virus. Panum observed measles’ contagiousness as it leaped from village to village.

1875: The HMS Dido brought measles to Fiji, killing 20,000 people — up to a third of the island’s natives. Measles outbreaks would continue to hopscotch Pacific islands for much of the next century.

1912: The United States required physicians to start reporting measles cases, which gave scientists a precise grasp of the disease’s widespread impact inside the country. Almost all Americans caught measles sometime in their life – mostly when young – and the outcome could be deadly. A study in the U.S. from 1912 to 1916 found 26 deaths for every 1,000 measles cases.

1954: Thomas C. Peebles, a World War II bomber pilot turned doctor, isolated the measles virus in an infected 11-year-old boy named David Edmonston. Peebles’ work paved the way for a vaccine.

1963: The first measles vaccines were licensed in the U.S.

Measles’ lethality had dropped by the 1960s, thanks to improved treatment and nutrition, with less than one death reported for every 1,000 cases. But before the vaccines, millions of American children were infected every year, and many developed serious side effects: An annual average of 48,000 measles patients required hospitalization, with 400 to 500 deaths per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most serious side effects included pneumonia and encephalitis – swelling of the brain. Hearing loss from measles-related ear infections was also common.

Measles vaccines slashed those infection rates. Over several decades, the vaccines were were bundled with vaccines for mumps and rubella into a booster shot parents now know as the MMR. State legislatures began mandating vaccination for school students in the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually every state and the District of Columbia adopted such laws, with some exemptions for medical, philosophical or religious reasons.

1989-91: A measles outbreak in the U.S. brought 55,000 cases, 11,000 hospitalizations and 123 deaths. The virus infected some vaccinated patients in the U.S., leading experts to begin recommending a second dose of MMR.

For the next decade, measles infection rates grew so low that, by 2000, measles was declared effectively eliminated in the U.S. But the virus remained prevalent around the world.

1998: A report in the British journal Lancet claimed a possible link between the measles vaccine and autism. Although the report was later debunked as fraudulent, its publication and a 1982 documentary called “DPT: Vaccine Roulette” aroused parents’ fears that vaccines might harm their children and spurred requests for vaccination exemptions.

The Lancet retracted that paper in 2010, and its author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, lost his medical license. An investigation found that Wakefield had manipulated his data and altered patients’ medical histories to make his assertions more convincing.

“The MMR scare was based not on bad science but on a deliberate fraud,” Dr. Fiona Godlee, editor in chief of BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, wrote in 2011. Such “clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare.”

That did not happen, however. If anything, vaccination refusal rates continued to grow in some American communities. Scientists say at least 92% of a population must be vaccinated for so-called herd immunity to protect virtually everyone. As the vaccination percentage drops, the risk of outbreak rises.

2014: The worst American measles outbreak in two decades erupted, with more than 600 cases reported -- more than triple the 2013 total. One outbreak came in unvaccinated Amish communities in Ohio, where a missionary had traveled to the outbreak-ridden Philippines and returned home with the virus. Another outbreak came at Disneyland in December.

The Disneyland outbreak caused at least 52 of the 79 measles cases reported in California near the end of January, state officials said. By Jan. 31, a total of 102 measles cases had been reported in 14 states. At least two cases were reported in Mexico.

The Disneyland outbreak continues to draw scrutiny to anti-vaccination sentiments in California, where the rate of personal-belief vaccination exemptions at kindergartens with at least 10 students doubled to 3.1% in 2013 from 1.5% in 2007. That increase was driven largely by parents in wealthier school districts, many of which have fewer than 92% of kindergarteners immunized.

In the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, for instance, nearly 15% of students last year were not vaccinated; that number has now dropped to 11.5%, school officials say.

Measles continues to survive around the globe, causing 145,700 deaths in 2013, the World Health Organization says. Although the number of deaths have dropped by 75% between 2000 and 2013 because of vaccine use outside the U.S., the WHO says the virus remains “one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.”

Rosanna Xia and Rong-Gong Lin II contributed to this report. Sources include: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; “Smallpox and its Eradication,” the World Health Organization; “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” by Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian. “Observations Made During The Epidemic Of Measles On The Faroe Islands In The Year 1846,” by Peter Ludwig Panum. “Measles Elimination in the United States,” the Journal of Infectious Diseases. “Diseased Goods: Global Exchanges in the Eastern Pacific Basin, 1770-1850,” by David Igler.

Follow @MattDPearce for national news

Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

Marvel's Kevin Feige to Produce Next Installment of the Spider-Man Franchise with Amy Pascal

(Culver City, California, and Burbank, California February 09, 2015) – Sony Pictures Entertainment and Marvel Studios announced today that Sony is bringing Marvel into the amazing world of Spider-Man. 

Under the deal, the new Spider-Man will first appear in a Marvel film from Marvel's Cinematic Universe (MCU). Sony Pictures will thereafter release the next installment of its $4 billion Spider-Man franchise, on July 28, 2017, in a film that will be co-produced by Kevin Feige and his expert team at Marvel and Amy Pascal, who oversaw the franchise launch for the studio 13 years ago. Together, they will collaborate on a new creative direction for the web slinger. Sony Pictures will continue to finance, distribute, own and have final creative control of the Spider-Man films.

Marvel and Sony Pictures are also exploring opportunities to integrate characters from the MCU into future Spider-Man films.

The new relationship follows a decade of speculation among fans about whether Spider-Man – who has always been an integral and important part of the larger Marvel Universe in the comic books – could become part of the Marvel Universe on the big screen. Spider-Man has more than 50 years of history in Marvel's world, and with this deal, fans will be able to experience Spider-Man taking his rightful place among other Super Heroes in the MCU.

Bob Iger, Chairman and CEO, The Walt Disney Company said: "Spider-Man is one of Marvel's great characters, beloved around the world. We're thrilled to work with Sony Pictures to bring the iconic web-slinger into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which opens up fantastic new opportunities for storytelling and franchise building."

"We always want to collaborate with the best and most successful filmmakers to grow our franchises and develop our characters. Marvel, Kevin Feige and Amy, who helped orchestrate this deal, are the perfect team to help produce the next chapter of Spider-Man," said Michael Lynton, Chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment. "This is the right decision for the franchise, for our business, for Marvel, and for the fans."

"Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios share a love for the characters in the Spider-Man universe and have a long, successful history of working together. This new level of collaboration is the perfect way to take Peter Parker's story into the future," added Doug Belgrad, president, Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group.

"I am thrilled to team with my friends at Sony Pictures along with Amy Pascal to produce the next Spider-Man movie," said Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige. "Amy has been deeply involved in the realization on film of one of the world’s most beloved characters. Marvel's involvement will hopefully deliver the creative continuity and authenticity that fans demand from the MCU. I am equally excited for the opportunity to have Spider-Man appear in the MCU, something which both we at Marvel, and fans alike, have been looking forward to for years."

Spider-Man, embraced all over the world, is the most successful franchise in the history of Sony Pictures, with the five films having taken in more than $4 billion worldwide.

ABOUT SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE's global operations encompass motion picture production, acquisition and distribution; television production, acquisition and distribution; television networks; digital content creation and distribution; operation of studio facilities; and development of new entertainment products, services and technologies. For additional information, go to http://www.sonypictures.com/.

ABOUT MARVEL ENTERTAINMENT

Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is one of the world's most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of more than 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media over seventy-five years.  Marvel utilizes its character franchises in entertainment, licensing and publishing.  For more information visit marvel.com. © 2015 MARVEL

We told them this would happen.

We told them that it was only a matter of time before a childhood disease that had nearly been eliminated from the US would come roaring back if they failed to vaccinate their children. And that’s precisely what has happened. Measles has come roaring back, but not simply because a child incubating measles visited Disneyland.

Twenty years ago, if the same child had visited Disneyland, the measles would have stopped with him or her. Everyone else was protected — not because everyone was vaccinated — but because of herd immunity. When a high enough proportion of the population is vaccinated, the disease simply can’t spread because the odds of one unvaccinated person coming in contact with another are very low.

Of course, we told them that. We patiently explained herd immunity, debunked claims of an association between vaccines and autism, demolished accusations of “toxins” in vaccines, but they didn’t listen. Why? Because we thought the problem was that anti-vax parents didn’t understand science. That’s undoubtedly true, but the anti-vax movement is NOT about science and never was.

The anti-vax movement has never been about children, and it hasn’t really been about vaccines. It’s about privileged parents and how they wish to view themselves.

1. Privilege

Nothing screams “privilege” louder than ostentatiously refusing something that those less privileged wish to have.

Each and every anti-vax parent is privileged in having easy and inexpensive access to life saving vaccines. It is the sine qua non of the anti-vax movement. In a world where the underprivileged may trudge miles to the nearest clinic, desperate to save their babies from infectious scourges, nothing communicates the unbelievable wealth, ease and selfishness of modern American life like refusing the very same vaccines.

2. Unreflective defiance of authority

There are countless societal ills that stem from the fact that previous generations were raised to unreflective acceptance of authority. It’s not hard to argue that unflective acceptance of authority, whether that authority is the government or industry, is a bad thing. BUT that doesn’t make the converse true. Unreflective defiance is really no different from unreflective acceptance. Oftentimes, the government, or industry, is right about a particular set of claims.

Experts in a particular topic, such as vaccines, really are experts. They really know things that the lay public does not. Moreover, it is not common to get a tremendous consensus among experts from different fields. Experts in immunology, pediatrics, public health and just about everything else you can think of have weighed in on the side of vaccines. Experts in immunology, pediatrics and public health give vaccines to their OWN children, rendering claims that they are engaged in a conspiracy to hide the dangers of vaccines to be nothing short of ludicrous.

Unfortunately, most anti-vax parents consider defiance of authority to be a source of pride, whether that defiance is objectively beneficial or not.

3. The need to feel “empowered”

This is what is comes down to for most anti-vax parents: it’s a source of self-esteem for them. In their minds, they have “educated” themselves. How do they know they are “educated”? Because they’ve chosen to disregard experts (who appear to them as authority figures) in favor of quacks and charlatans, whom they admire for their own defiance of authority. The combination of self-education and defiance of authority is viewed by anti-vax parents as an empowering form of rugged individualism, marking out their own superiority from those pathetic “sheeple” who aren’t self-educated and who follow authority.

Where does that leave us?

First, it explains why efforts to educate anti-vax parents about the science of immunology has been such a spectacular failure. It is not, and has never been, about the science.

Second, it suggests how we must change our approach. Simply put, we have to hit anti-vax parents where they live: in their unmerited sense of superiority.

How? By pointing out to them, and critiquing, their own motivations.

Anti-vax parents are anxious to see themselves in a positive light. They would almost certainly be horrified to find that others regard them as so incredibly privileged that they can’t even see their own privilege.

We need to highlight the fact that unreflective defiance is just the flip side of unreflective acceptance. There’s nothing praiseworthy about it. Only teenagers think that refusing to do what authority figures recommend marks them as independent. Adults know that doing the exact opposite of what authority figures recommend is a sign of immaturity, not deliberation, and certainly not education.

Finally, we need to emphasize to parents that parenting is not about them and their feelings. It’s about their children and THEIR health and well being. It’s one thing to decline to follow a medical recommendation. Most of us do that all the time. It’s another thing entirely to join groups defined by defiance, buy their products, and preach to others about your superiority in defying medical recommendations. That’s a sign of the need to bolster their own self-esteem, not their “education.”

We have to confront anti-vax parents where they live — in their egos. When refusing to vaccinate your children is widely viewed as selfish, irresponsible, and the hallmark of being UNeducated, anti-vax advocacy will lose its appeal.