Why do Argentine teens wear Confederate flags?

White supremacy, rebranded for South American malls
August 9, 2015 2:00AM ET
by Mimi Dwyer

... Ramiro Fita, Cook’s founder, first picked up a rebel flag in Baltimore during a stint in the merchant navy ... They talked of opening a label together, sensing an appetite in the country for the cultural products of the United States. They picked out the name John L Cook, an American-sounding mantle of mysterious provenance. For its logo, they’d use the old flag from Baltimore ...

Irina Bergman, a 14-year-old from Zarate, a small city in Buenos Aires province, posted a photo of a Cook flag notebook her mother had given her ... She’d never heard of the Confederacy. I told her that in the States the logo was controversial, that for many it represented slavery. “I think that if a person likes their clothes, then they like them,” she said ...

Ariadna’s friend Mercedes Larosa said she stayed away from flag clothing not because of the Confederacy but because the flag represented another form of white supremacy: the hegemony of the United States writ large ...

“For me those flags represent two countries that have done us so much harm. The IMF’s external debt brought hunger and poverty to lots of families in Argentina and in Latin America,” Larosa added ...

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/8/why-do-argentine-teens-wear-confederate-flags.html