Tournament: Notre Dame | Round: 4 | Opponent: Niles North OW | Judge: Nathaniel Haas
Vote Neg on presumption—90 of solvency in specification of the plan
Elmore 80
Richard Elmore, Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 94, No. 4 (Winter, 1979-1980), pp. 601-616
The emergence of implementation as a subject for policy analysis coincides closely with the discovery by policy analysts that decisions are not self-executing. Analysis of policy choices matters very little if the mechanism for implementing those choices is poorly understood. In answering the question, "What percentage of the work of achieving a desired governmental action is done when the preferred analytic alternative has been identified?" Allison estimated that, in the normal case, it was about 10 percent, leaving the remaining 90 percent in the realm of implementation. Hence, in Nelson's terms, "the core of analysis of alternatives becomes the prediction of how alternative organizational structures will behave over . .. time."6 But the task of prediction is vastly complicated by the absence of a coherent body of organizational theory, making it necessary to posit several alternative models of organization.7

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lake City | Judge: Paige Spraker
Their relationship to climate change divides human influences on nature from “natural” variations
Uggla 7 (Ylva, Orebo University in Sweden , Journal of Political Ecology, Vol. 17, http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume_17/Uggla.pdf)JFS
The theory of global warming as a consequence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was raised  several times in the twentieth century, but it was not until the 1980s
.....climate change exclusively concern human survival

This assumption is pure environmental dualism – the result is ecocide and extinction
The Dark Mountain 9 (Uncivilization, network of writers, artists, and thinkers, The Dark Mountain Manifesto, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/, 2009)JFS/NAR
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature.
or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated... on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.

The alternative is to reject the 1ac’s environmental dualisms – this eliminates the concept of an “environment” and solves destruction of the planet
Rowe 96 — Stan Rowe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, 1996 (“From Shallow To Deep Ecological Philosophy,” Trumpeter, Volume 13, Number 1, Available Online at http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/278/413)JFS
Organisms can be “alive” one moment and ..... the very roots of evolutionary creativity.

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 5 | Opponent: Lake City | Judge: Paige Spraker
Their relationship to climate change divides human influences on nature from “natural” variations
Uggla 7 (Ylva, Orebo University in Sweden , Journal of Political Ecology, Vol. 17, http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/volume_17/Uggla.pdf)JFS
The theory of global warming as a consequence of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions was raised  several times in the twentieth century, but it was not until the 1980s
.....climate change exclusively concern human survival

This assumption is pure environmental dualism – the result is ecocide and extinction
The Dark Mountain 9 (Uncivilization, network of writers, artists, and thinkers, The Dark Mountain Manifesto, http://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/, 2009)JFS/NAR
The myth of progress is founded on the myth of nature.
or locally-produced lettuces; yet for the most part glutted, but not sated... on the fruits of the horrors on which our lifestyles depend.

The alternative is to reject the 1ac’s environmental dualisms – this eliminates the concept of an “environment” and solves destruction of the planet
Rowe 96 — Stan Rowe, Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, 1996 (“From Shallow To Deep Ecological Philosophy,” Trumpeter, Volume 13, Number 1, Available Online at http://trumpeter.athabascau.ca/index.php/trumpet/article/view/278/413)JFS
Organisms can be “alive” one moment and ..... the very roots of evolutionary creativity.

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 3 | Opponent: Torrey Pines NH | Judge: Gino Velto
The neoclassical economic models employed in the 1AC calculate rationality based on masculine perceptions of what holds value. This narrow thinking excludes constructivist, feminist analyses of economics. 

Nelson 96 Julie, Economics Professor at Brandeis University, “The Masculine Mindset of Economic Analysis,” Chronicle of Higher Education 42(42), June 1996, p. B3

This masculine interpretation ignores cooperation, empathy, and other values which influence economic bargaining. The affirmative’s subscription to this gendered version of economic modeling leads nations to war and environmental destruction by perpetuating the idea of competition

Strober 05 Myra, Labor Economist and Professor at the School of Education at Stanford University, “Feminist Economics,” Chapter 12 in Fineman, Martha, and Terence Dougherty. Feminism confronts homo economicus: gender, law, and society. Cornell University Press, p. 261-291

The alternative is an abandonment of economist’s love affair with Adam Smith’s competitive economy model. We must turn to cooperative bargaining models and constructivist analyses

Strober 94 Myra, Labor Economist and Professor at the School of Education at Stanford University, “Rethinking Economics Through a Feminist Lens,” American Economic Review, 84(2), May 1994, p. 143-147

Tournament: Notre Dame | Round: 4 | Opponent: Niles North OW | Judge: Nathaniel Haas
The aff’s technocratic attempt to manage the environment sells nature out to power-knowledge regimes seeking to manage the health and longevity of the population. Environmentalizing biopolitics risks extinction.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,1999, Discourses of the Environment, p. 142-44

Our alternative is to reject the aff. Domination is perpetuated by the ability of those in power to define the discursive framing of the field of contestation. Neither corporate managerialism nor traditional environmental activism has any hope of securing lasting change in contemporary environmental debates – literally the ONLY hope for change is a representational strategy like ours.
Timothy W. Luke, Professor of Political Science at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, June-July 2003, Alternatives, p. 413-14

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: Octas | Opponent: Damien CS | Judge: Fletcher, Lopez, Carter

1. The 1AC presents a neoconservative theory of international relations that focuses on democracy promotion and bandwagoning through military power – this is decidedly NOT REALIST. Hardocre realists think this theory is stupid and dangerous.
   Mearsheimer, 05 – the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and the co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago. Ph.D. in political science, He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. (John J., “Hans Morgenthau and the Iraq war: realism versus neo-conservatism” Published on Democracy News Analysis, May 18th 2005, pdf, p. 1-5, MT)

2. The neoconservative departure from realism causes wars and serial policy failure
Hulsman and Lieven, 2005.
John C., a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor to The National Interest and Anatol, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, “The Ethics of Realism.” The National Interest.  Summer 2005. Iss. 80. pg. 37.  
http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=862633751andsid=5andFmt=3andclientId=17822andRQT=309andVName=PQD 

3. The alternative is realism, which is key to survival
Mearsheimer, Professor of Political Science at U Chicago, 2001
(John, “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics”, p. 1-28)

Tournament: LCC | Round: 6 | Opponent: University SS | Judge: Ian Beier
Text: The United States Federal Government should substantially increase its economic engagement with Mexico by dissolving the U.S.-Mexican Border

The construction of the border perpetuates biopolitics—it is a physical and symbolic notion of governmentality and discipline over migration
Nail, ’13
(Thomas, University of Denver, PhD in Philosophy from the University of Oregon, The Crossroads of Power: Michel Foucault and the US/Mexico Border Wall, Page 122-123, ARH) 

We internalize border-thinking—the disciplinary capacities of border security reach into the very core of human being and reduce life to mere calculability.
Ajana, Lecturer in Culture, Digital Humanities and Creative Industries at King’s College London. 2005 Btihaj, 2005 “Surveillance and Biopolitics,” Electronic Journal of Sociology. RH

influx of immigrants fuels economic growth - solves right-wing extremists who act based on economic downturn
Delacroix, former professor of management, and Nikiforov, business development specialist, 9
Jacques and Sergey, 9, “If Mexicans and Americans Could Cross the Border Freely,” The Independent Review, Volume: 14, p. 114-116, MM

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Claremont ES | Judge: Carson Zeller
Democracy promotion perceived as façade for US imperialistic and economic goals
Gilbert, 2008 (Steven Gilbert, Geospatial Analyst at Navanti Group Past Consultant - GIS Analyst at The World Bank Intern- Latin America and the Caribbean at National Endowment for Democracy Intern at Inter-American Foundation, “The U.S. Policy of Democracy Promotion in Latin America”, Eastern Michigan University, 04/28/2008, http://commons.emich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1147andcontext=honors)

US neoliberal policies destabilize Pink Tide economies
Bohacek, 05/2013 (Petr Bohacek, “The Leftist Shift inLatinAmerica”, Academia, 05/2013, http://academia.edu/3570964/The_Economic_Impact_of_Pink_Tide_in_Latin_America)
Pink Tide reforms are necessary to push back neoliberalism in Latin America
Raby, 2007 (Diana Raby, senior fellow at the Research Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool, “Latin America's Pink Tide”, 02/02/2007, Venezuela Analysis, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2207)

Extinction---tech and reforms fail
Richard A. Smith 7, Research Associate at the Institute for Policy Research and Development, UK; PhD in History from UCLA, June 2007, “The Eco-suicidal Economics of Adam Smith,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, Vol. 18, No. 2, p. 22-43

Tournament: LCC | Round: 3 | Opponent: Chaminade CK | Judge: Brian Saipramouk watch out for this dude
The affirmative is a psychological construct—their scenarios for conflict are products of paranoia that project our violent impulses onto the other
Mack 91 – Doctor of Psychiatry and a professor at Harvard University (John, “The Enemy System” http://www.johnemackinstitute.org/eJournal/article.asp?id=23 *Gender modified)

Their paranoid projections guarantee extinction—it’s try or die
Hollander 3 – professor of Latin American history and women's studies at California State University (Nancy, "A Psychoanalytic Perspective on the Politics of Terror:In the Aftermath of 9/11" www.estadosgerais.org/mundial_rj/download/FLeitor_NHollander_ingl.pdf)

Vote negative to interrogate cycles of enemy creation—this can create a fissure in dominant narratives that make war inevitable
Byles 3—English, U Cyprus (Joanna, Psychoanalysis and War: The Superego and Projective Identification, http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/articles/art_byles01.shtml,

Tournament: LCC | Round: 1 | Opponent: Torrey Pines JC | Judge: AJ Jenkins
The affirmative distances themselves from the real world within an academic cloister – Revolution is not writing an essay, revolution happens at the end of a gun barrel, and the negative is passing out rifles
The Honorable Chairman Mao Zedong in 1927 (report on an investigation of the peasant movement in hunan to CCP headquarters in Shanghai, Mao Zedong 1927)JFS

Their leftist criticism traps us in a marsh where our freedoms are limited and there is no authentic freedom to ACT – only the action of our alternative solves
Lenin 1902 (Vladimir, What is to be Done?)JFS

The alternative is a violent revolution – non-violent reforms fail – if they succeeded then power would not exist – we internal link turn the aff’s impacts.
Sonfar 8 (larik, Helium Political and Economic Theory, Revolution in the Face of Oppression, http://www.helium.com/items/1059931-revolution-in-the-face-of-oppression)JFS

Violence is the only means for which social movements have succeeded
Churchill 1 (Ward, Keetoowah Band Cherokee, Professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies at University of Colorado, Pacifism as Pathology, pg. 44-45.)

Without violent acts, social movements only prop up the status quo
Webb 1 (Carl, Collusion Online, volume 20, February 2001, accessed May 24, 2004, http://www.collusion.org/Article.cfm?ID=280.  NP.

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 3 | Opponent: Torrey Pines NH | Judge: Gino Velto
CP TEXT: The United States federal government ought not substantially increase its economic engagement towards Mexico unless Mexico adopts and enforces legislation for sea turtle conservation abiding by standards outlined in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna.

CP’s conditional engagement solves case and prevents sea turtle population extinction.
Center for Biological Diversity, 7-15-2013, a nonprofit membership organization known for its work protecting endangered species through legal action and scientific petitions, “Tell Mexico: Stop Killing Endangered Sea Turtles,” http://action.biologicaldiversity.org/o/2167/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=13749

Destruction of the sea turtle population causes extinction – brink is now.
Todd Steiner, xx-xx-2010, Sea Turtle Restoration Project, Executive Director at Turtle Island Restoration Network, San Francisco Bay Area, “Are Sea Turtles Worth Saving?” http://www.bonaireturtles.org/explore/are-sea-turtles-worth-saving/

Tournament: Gonzaga | Round: 2 | Opponent: Squilicom | Judge: J McGougan
Text: (Partner) and I advocate (plan text)
By locating their imagination in the state, the 1ac relocates violence outside of the self.  The end point is stasis and atrocity.  
KAPPELER 1995 Susanne Kappeler, The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, pg 1-4

What is striking
this is am unmistakable signal to society that racist violence does indeed 'pay off'.
Text: Kris and I advocate(plan text)
The result is terminal failure.  Localized politics is key.  
KAPPELER 1995 Susanne Kappeler, The Will To Violence: The Politics of Personal Behavior, pg 4-5

If we nevertheless
including our own... at the centre of political reflection.''

Their advocacy internalizes powerlessness and effaces agency.  
Colebrook 2
(Claire, Understanding Deleuze, Pg. xxxviii)

Human freedom became the problem.
and organises our bodies.
The 1ac’s global focus destroys utopian possibilities and justifies genocide.
Fasching 93 Darrell J Fasching, THE ETHICAL CHALLENGE OF AUSCHWITZ AND HIROSHIMA: APOCALYPSE OR UTOPIA?, 1993; pg 193

Utopians seem to offer vague
" (1 Corinthians 7:30-31).

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Claremont ES | Judge: Carson Zeller
A. Violation – economic engagement is the exchange of goods, services, capital and labor – energy is a non-economic partnership.
Rose, 8 -- UC Berkeley Haas School of Business Administration Andrew, and Mark Spiegel, "Non-Economic Engagement and International Exchange: The Case of Environmental Treaties," April 2008, www.nber.org/papers/w13988.pdf?new_window=1

Tournament: Notre Dame | Round: 2 | Opponent: Desert Vista | Judge: Jack Gugino
A) Interpretation - Economic engagement means trade and financial contacts – it excludes political, military, and cultural engagement.
Resnik, 1 – Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yeshiva University (Evan, Journal of International Affairs, “Defining Engagement” v54, n2, political science complete)
A REFINED DEFINITION OF ENGAGEMENT
In order to establish a more effective framework for dealing with unsavory regimes, I propose that we define engagement as the attempt to influence the political behavior of a target state through the comprehensive establishment and enhancement of contacts with that state across multiple issue-areas (i.e. diplomatic, military, economic, cultural). The following is a brief list of the specific forms that such contacts might include:
DIPLOMATIC CONTACTS
Extension of diplomatic recognition; normalization of diplomatic relations
Promotion of target-state membership in international institutions and regimes
Summit meetings and other visits by the head of state and other senior government officials of sender state to target state and vice-versa
MILITARY CONTACTS
Visits of senior military officials of the sender state to the target state and vice-versa
Arms transfers
Military aid and cooperation
Military exchange and training programs
Confidence and security-building measures
Intelligence sharing
ECONOMIC CONTACTS
Trade agreements and promotion
Foreign economic and humanitarian aid in the form of loans and/or grants
CULTURAL CONTACTS
Cultural treaties
Inauguration of travel and tourism links
Sport, artistic and academic exchanges(n25)
Engagement is an iterated process in which the sender and target state develop a relationship of increasing interdependence, culminating in the endpoint of "normalized relations" characterized by a high level of interactions across multiple domains. Engagement is a quintessential exchange relationship: the target state wants the prestige and material resources that would accrue to it from increased contacts with the sender state, while the sender state seeks to modify the domestic and/or foreign policy behavior of the target state. This deductive logic could adopt a number of different forms or strategies when deployed in practice.(n26) For instance, individual contacts can be established by the sender state at either a low or a high level of conditionality.(n27) Additionally, the sender state can achieve its objectives using engagement through any one of the following causal processes: by directly modifying the behavior of the target regime; by manipulating or reinforcing the target states' domestic balance of political power between competing factions that advocate divergent policies; or by shifting preferences at the grassroots level in the hope that this will precipitate political change from below within the target state.
This definition implies that three necessary conditions must hold for engagement to constitute an effective foreign policy instrument. First, the overall magnitude of contacts between the sender and target states must initially be low. If two states are already bound by dense contacts in multiple domains (i.e., are already in a highly interdependent relationship), engagement loses its impact as an effective policy tool. Hence, one could not reasonably invoke the possibility of the US engaging Canada or Japan in order to effect a change in either country's political behavior. Second, the material or prestige needs of the target state must be significant, as engagement derives its power from the promise that it can fulfill those needs. The greater the needs of the target state, the more amenable to engagement it is likely to be. For example, North Korea's receptivity to engagement by the US dramatically increased in the wake of the demise of its chief patron, the Soviet Union, and the near-total collapse of its national economy.(n28) Third, the target state must perceive the engager and the international order it represents as a potential source of the material or prestige resources it desires. This means that autarkic, revolutionary and unlimited regimes which eschew the norms and institutions of the prevailing order, such as Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany, will not be seduced by the potential benefits of engagement. This reformulated conceptualization avoids the pitfalls of prevailing scholarly conceptions of engagement. It considers the policy as a set of means rather than ends, does not delimit the types of states that can either engage or be engaged, explicitly encompasses contacts in multiple issue-areas, allows for the existence of multiple objectives in any given instance of engagement and, as will be shown below, permits the elucidation of multiple types of positive sanctions.

Tournament: LCC | Round: Quarters | Opponent: Loyola AC | Judge: Williamson, Su, Wheeler
Our interpretation is that should means an obligation to resolve something.
Oxford 10(Oxford dictionaries online, http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/should, May 22 2010, 6/20/11, OST)

Tournament: LCC | Round: 6 | Opponent: University SS | Judge: Ian Beier
Interpretation - Engagement requires DIRECT talks – means both governments must be involved
Crocker ‘9 9/13/09, Chester A. Crocker is a professor of strategic studies at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, was an assistant secretary of state for African affairs from 1981 to 1989. “Terms of Engagement,” http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/opinion/14crocker.html?_r=1and

Tournament: Fullerton | Round: 2 | Opponent: Claremont ES | Judge: Carson Zeller
Text: The United States Federal Government should lift the entirety of the Cuban embargo if and only the Cuban Government abides by the protocols of the UN ban on chemical weapons. 

Cuba violated the ban this summer – Kreil ‘8/28
(Lomi, writer for reuters, Panama says Cuban weapons shipment violated UN sanctions, http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/08/28/20237228-panama-says-cuban-weapons-shipment-violated-un-sanctions?lite) 

Chemical Weapons trade and possession is a violation of international law
---ICRC 8/4 ( International Committee for Red Cross, Chemical and biological weapons, http://www.icrc.org/eng/war-and-law/weapons/chemical-biological-weapons/overview-chemical-biological-weapons.htm)~-~--

That’s key to heg – it’s a leader’s obligation to uphold the law.
---Krisch’05 (nico 2005, journalist/ author for the EJIL, Instrumentalization: Dominant States as Driving Forces behind the Development of International Law, http://www.ejil.org/pdfs/16/3/301.pdf )---

Hegemony solves great power war – any other system makes it more likely – extinction.
Wolforth et. al 2011 (William is the Daniel Webster Professor at Dartmouth College, where he teaches in the Department of Government.  Edited by Michael Mastanduno, Professor of Government and Dean of Faculty at Dartmouth College, and G. John Ikenberry, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, “Unipolarity, status competition, and great power war” International Relations Theory and the Consequences of Unipolarity pg. 65-66)

Tournament: Stanford | Round: 1 | Opponent: Pinecrest MM | Judge: Vinay Pai
Mignolo 5
(Walter, Professor of Literature and Romance Studies at Duke University, “THE IDEA OF LATIN AMERICA”, 2005, 6/28/13|Ashwin) 

The logic of coloniality can be understood as working through four wide domains of human experience: (1) the economic: appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, and control of finance; (2) ¶ the political: control of authority; (3) the civic: control of gender and sexuality; (4) the epistemic and the subjective/personal: control ¶ of knowledge and subjectivity. The logic of coloniality has been in ¶ place from the conquest and colonization of Mexico and Peru until ¶ and beyond the war in Iraq, despite superficial changes in the scale ¶ and agents of exploitation/control in the past five hundred years of ¶ history. Each domain is interwoven with the others, since appropriation of land or exploitation of labor also involves the control of ¶ finance, of authority, of gender, and of knowledge and subjectivity.8¶ The operation of the colonial matrix is invisible to distracted eyes, ¶ and even when it surfaces, it is explained through the rhetoric of ¶ modernity that the situation can be “corrected” with “development,”  “democracy,” a “strong economy,” etc. What some will see as “lies” ¶ from the US presidential administration are not so much lies as part ¶ of a very well-codified “rhetoric of modernity,” promising salvation ¶ for everybody in order to divert attention from the increasingly ¶ oppressive consequences of the logic of coloniality. To implement ¶ the logic of coloniality requires the celebratory rhetoric of modernity, as the case of Iraq has illustrated from day one. As capital and ¶ power concentrate in fewer and fewer hands and poverty increases ¶ all over the word, the logic of coloniality becomes ever more ¶ oppressive and merciless. Since the sixteenth century, the rhetoric ¶ of modernity has relied on the vocabulary of salvation, which was ¶ accompanied by the massive appropriation of land in the New ¶ World and the massive exploitation of Indian and African slave labor, ¶ justified by a belief in the dispensability of human life – the lives ¶ of the slaves. Thus, while some Christians today, for example, beat ¶ the drum of “pro-life values,” they reproduce a rhetoric that diverts ¶ attention from the increasing “devaluation of human life” that the ¶ thousands dead in Iraq demonstrate. Thus, it is not modernity that will ¶ overcome coloniality, because it is precisely modernity that needs and produces ¶ coloniality.¶ As an illustration, let us follow the genealogy of just the first of ¶ the four domains and see how the logic of coloniality has evolved ¶ in the area of land, labor, and finance. Below I will complement the brief sketch of this first quadrant by going deeper into the fourth ¶ one (knowledge and subjectivity) to show how knowledge transformed Anáhuac and Tawantinsuyu into America and then into ¶ Latin America and, in the process, how new national and subcontinental identities were created. But, first, think of the massive ¶ appropriation of land by the Spanish and Portuguese, the would-be ¶ landlords of the Americas during the sixteenth century, and the same ¶ by the British, French, and Dutch in the extended Caribbean (from ¶ Salvador de Bahia in Brazil to Charleston in today’s South Carolina, ¶ and including the north of Colombia and Venezuela in addition to ¶ the Caribbean islands). The appropriation of land went hand in hand ¶ with the exploitation of labor (Indians and African slaves) and the ¶ control of finance (the accumulation of capital as a consequence of ¶ the appropriation of land and the exploitation of labor). Capital ¶ concentrated in Europe, in the imperial states, and not in the colonies. You can follow this pattern through the nineteenth century ¶ when England and France displaced Spain and Portugal as leading ¶ imperial countries. The logic of coloniality was then reproduced, ¶ and, of course, modified, in the next step of imperial expansion into ¶ Africa and Asia.¶ You can still see the same projects today in the appropriation of ¶ areas of “natural resources” (e.g., in the Amazon or oil-rich Iraq). ¶ Land cannot be reproduced. You can reproduce seeds and other ¶ “products” of land; but land itself is limited, which is another reason ¶ why the appropriation of land is one of the prime targets of capital ¶ accumulation today. The “idea” of Latin America is that of a large ¶ mass of land with a wealth of natural resources and plenty of cheap ¶ labor. That, of course, is the disguised idea. What the rhetoric of ¶ modernity touted by the IMF, the World Bank, and the Washington ¶ consensus would say is that “Latin” America is just waiting for its ¶ turn to “develop.” You could also follow the exploitation of labor ¶ from the Americas to the Industrial Revolution to the movement ¶ of factories from the US to developing nations in order to reduce ¶ costs. As for financial control, just compare the number and size of ¶ banks, for example, in New York, London, or Frankfurt, on the one ¶ hand, versus the ones in Bolivia, Morocco, or India, on the other.¶ Thus, if we consider “America” from the perspective of coloniality (not modernity) and let the Indigenous perspective take center  stage, another history becomes apparent. The beginning of the ¶ Zapatista “Manifesto from the Lacandon Jungle” gives us a ¶ blueprint:¶ We are a product of 500 years of struggle: first against slavery, ¶ then during the War of Independence against Spain; then to ¶ avoid being absorbed by North American imperialism, then to ¶ promulgate our constitution and expel the French empire from ¶ our soil; later the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz denied us the ¶ just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled ¶ and leaders like Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men just like ¶ us. We have been denied by our rulers the most elemental ¶ conditions of life, so they can use us as cannon fodder and ¶ pillage the wealth of our country. They don’t care that we have ¶ nothing, absolutely nothing, not even a roof over hour heads, ¶ no land, no work, no health care, no food or education. Nor ¶ are we able to freely and democratically elect our political ¶ representatives, nor is there independence from foreigners, nor ¶ is there peace or justice for ourselves and our children.9¶ The “Manifesto from the Lacandon Jungle” precedes a long history ¶ rewritten from an Indigenous perspective (as opposed to the perspective of Mexican Creoles and Mestizos/as or French or US ¶ “experts” on Mexican and “Latin” American history). You may ¶ wonder whether the Indigenous people had a perspective because ¶ you imagine that history is history and what happened just happened, ¶ and argue that there are of course “different interpretations” but ¶ not “different perspectives.” Different interpretations presuppose a ¶ common and shared principle of knowledge and of the rules of the ¶ game, while different perspectives presuppose that the principles of ¶ knowledges and the rules of the game are geo-historically located ¶ in the structure of power of the modern colonial world. To show ¶ how this works, we need something such as “dependency theory” ¶ for the epistemological domain.10 “Dependency theory” showed the ¶ differential of power in the economic domain insofar as it described ¶ a certain structure of differential power in the domain of the ¶ economy. But it also proved the epistemic differential and the distribution of labor within an imperial geo-politics of knowledge in ¶ which political economy moved in one direction: from First to ¶ Third World countries and to contain Second World communism. ¶ In this sense, dependency theory is relevant in changing the geopolitics of knowledge and in pointing toward the need for, and the ¶ possibility of, different locations of understanding and of knowledge ¶ production.¶ The first part of the “Manifesto from the Lacandon Jungle” is a ¶ history and a description of the current economic and social situation in Chiapas, subdivided into the “First Wind” and the “Second ¶ Wind” in emulation of sixteenth-century Spanish chronicles of the ¶ New World. Cast in terms familiar to those conversant with globalization, the first wind is the wind from above and the second that ¶ from below. The declaration, then, outlines the direction of a project ¶ to rewrite the colonial history of modernity from the perspective ¶ of coloniality (instead of writing the history of coloniality from the ¶ perspective of modernity). This framing is subject to questions and ¶ criticisms by critical and inquisitive readers. Professional historians ¶ could argue that there is little historical rigor in this “pamphlet” ¶ and that what we need is serious and rigorous histories of how ¶ things “really” happened. Again, that argument assumes that the ¶ events carry in themselves their own truth and the job of the historian is to discover them. The problem is that “rigorous historiography” is more often than not complicitous with modernity (since ¶ the current conceptualization and practice of historiography, as a ¶ discipline, are a modern rearticulation of a practice dating back to ¶ – again – Greek philosophy). In that respect, the argument for disciplinary rigor turns out to be a maneuver that perpetuates the myth ¶ of modernity as something separate from coloniality. Therefore, if ¶ you happened to be a person educated in the Calmemac in Anáhuac ¶ and were quite far away from the legacies of the Greeks, it would ¶ be your fault for not being aware what civilized history is and how ¶ important it is for you.¶ Other criticisms may stem from the fact that the division of above ¶ and below still originates in the concept of the “above.” Indeed, it ¶ was the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas who first described ¶ (but did not enact himself ) the perspective now being enacted by ¶ the Zapatistas. The most suspicious reader would add that it is SubComandante Marcos (a Mexican Mestizo who studied at the Universidad Autónoma de México) who narrates. Legitimate ¶ and interesting objections, these. However, such objections remain ¶ entangled in the web and the perspective of modernity; that is, in ¶ the expectations created by the hegemonic perspective of modernity ¶ itself. To unfold this last statement, let’s take another step and perhaps ¶ a detour and come back to the inception of the logic of coloniality ¶ implied in the very idea of both “America” and “Latin” America..4ever

Eduardo Galeano, 1973
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics. Ball says that it is still possible to act with impunity because the poor cannot set off a world war, but the Imperium is worried: unable to multiply the dinner, it does what it can to suppress the diners. "Fight poverty, kill a beggar!" some genius of black humor scrawled on a wall in La Paz. What do the heirs to Malthus propose bur to kill all the beggars-to-be before they are born? Robert McNamara, the World Bank president who was chairman of Ford and then secretary of defense, has called the population explosion the greatest obstacle to progress in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in its loans to countries that implement birth control plans. McNamara notes with regret that the brains of the poor do 25 percent less thinking, and the World Bank technocrats (who have already been born) set computers humming to produce labyrinthine abracadabras on the advantages of not being born: "If," one of the Bank's documents assures us, "a developing country with an average per capita income of $150 to $200 a year succeeds in reducing its fertility by 50 percent in a period of twenty-five years, at the end of thirty years its per capita income will be higher by at least 40 percent than the level it would otherwise have achieved, and twice as high after sixty years." Lyndon B. Johnson's remark has become famous: "Let us act on the fact that less than $5 invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth." Dwight D. Elsenhower prophesied that if the world’s inhabitants continued multiplying at the same rate, not only would the danger of revolution be increased, but there would also be a lowering of living standards for all peoples, including his own. The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the horizon from the third world. Plato and Aristotle considered the question before Malthus and McNamara; in our day this global offensive plays a well-defined role. Its aim is to justify the very unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance of the masses. While intrauterine devices compete with bombs and machine-gun salvos to arrest the growth of the Vietnamese population, in Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros in the womb than in the mountains or the streets. Various U.S. missions have sterilized thousands of women in Amazonia, although this is the least populated habitable zone on our planet. Most Latin American countries have no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they have too few. Brazil has thirty-eight times fewer inhabitants per square mile than Belgium, Paraguay has forty-nine times fewer than England, Peru has thirty-two times fewer than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, the human antheaps of Latin America, have lower population densities than Italy. The pretexts invoked are an insult to the intelligence; the real intentions anger us. No less than half the territory of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela has no inhabitants at all. No Latin American population grows less than Uruguay's— a country of old folk— yet no nation has taken such a bearing in recent years, with a crisis that would seem to drag it into the last circle of hell. Uruguay is empty, and its fertile lands could provide food for infinitely more people than those who now suffer in such penury. Over a century ago a Guatemalan foreign minister said prophetically: "It would be strange if the remedy should come from the United Stares, the same place which brings us the disease." Now that the Alliance for Progress is dead and buried the Imperium proposes, more in panic than in generosity, to solve Latin America's problems by eliminating Latin Americans; Washington has reason to suspect that the poor peoples don't prefer to be poor. But it is impossible to desire the end without desiring the means. Those who deny liberation to Latin America also deny our only possible rebirth, and incidentally absolve the existing structures from blame. Our youth multiplies, rises, listens: what does the voice of the system offer? The system speaks a surrealist language. In lands that are empty it proposes to avoid births; in countries where capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital is lacking; it describes as "aid" the deforming orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that results from foreign investment; it calls upon big land-owners to carry out agrarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice social justice. The class struggle only exists, we are told, because foreign agents stir it up; but social classes do exist and the oppression of one by the other is known as the Western way of life. The Marines undertake their criminal expeditions only to restore order and social peace; the dictatorships linked to Washington lay foundations in their jails for the law-abiding state, and ban strikes and smash trade unions to protect the freedom to work. Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development is not one of God's mysterious designs. Redemptive years of revolution pass; the ruling classes wait and meanwhile pronounce hellfire anathema on everybody. In a sense the right wing is correct in identifying itself with tranquillity and order: it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an order nonetheless; it is a tranquillity in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry. If the future turns out to be a Pandora's box, the conservative has reason to shout, "I have been betrayed." And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the master's eyes, are not slow to join in the outcry. The bronze eagle of the Maine, thrown down on the day the Cuban Revolution triumphed, now is abandoned. Its wings broken, in a doorway in the old town in Havana. Since that day in Cuba, other countries have set off on different roads on the experiment of change; perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime. Recovery of the resources that have always been usurped is recovery of our destiny. The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America's tortured history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the contradictions of the past. History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what was, it announces what will be. And so this book, which seeks to chronicle our despoliation and at the same time explain how the current mechanisms of plunder operate, will present in close proximity the caravelled conquistadors and the jet-propelled technocrats; Hernan Cortes and the Marines; the agents of the Spanish Crown and the International Monetary Fund missions; the dividends from the slave trade and the profits of General Motors. And, too, the defeated heroes and revolutions of our time, the infamies and the dead and resurrected hopes: the fertile sacrifices. When Alexander von Humboldt investigated the customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogota plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant "door"; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a new cycle of 185 moons.

Mignolo ‘5 (Walter, Literature @ Duke. The Idea of Latin America, pp. xviii-xx)
There is one proviso: at this point in time, the colonial difference must be kept in view, because Creoles in the Americas of European descent (either Latin or Anglo), as well as Creoles of European descent around the world, may still see civilization and barbarism as ontological categories, and therefore they may have trouble accepting Indian (or Islamic, for that matter) civilizational processes and histories when entering into dialogue.There are no civilizations outside of Europe or, if there are, like those of Islam, China or Japan (to follow Huntington’s classification: see chapter 1), they remain in the past and have had to be brought into the present of Western civilization. That is the colonial difference that should be kept in mind. The future can no longer be thought of as the “defense of Western civilization,” constantly waiting for the barbarians. As barbarians are ubiquitous (they could be in the plains or in the moun- tains as well as in global cities), so are the civilized. There is no safe place to defend and, even worse, believing that there is a safe place that must be defended is (and has been) the direct road to killing. Dialogue, properly speaking, cannot take place until there are no more places to be defended and the power differential, consequently, can be redressed. Dialogue today is a utopia, as we are witnessing in Iraq, and it should be reconceived as utopistic: a double movement composed of a critical take on the past in order to imagine and construct future possible worlds. The decolonial shift is of the essence if we would stop seeing “modernity” as a goal rather than seeing it as a European construction of history in Europe’s own interests. Dialogue can only take place once “modernity” is decolonized and dispossessed of its mythical march toward the future. I am not defending “despotism” of any kind, Oriental or Occidental. I am just saying that “dialogue” can only take place when the “monologue” of one civilization (Western) is no longer enforced. This book can be read in two different, but complementary, ways. Readers not familiar with current academic debates can enter through the argument that America was not discovered but invented, and from there follow the path that made of “Latin” America an extension of the initial imperial/colonial invention. Those who are familiar with conversations in the humanities could see the argument itself as an attempt to shift the geography, and the geo-politics of knowledge, of critical theory (as introduced by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s) to a new terrain of decoloniality. The first reading can still be performed within the paradigm of modernity that emphasizes the linear evolution of concepts and, above all, newness. The second reading, however, demands to be performed within the paradigm of (de)coloniality that implies modernity but emphasizes “co-existence” and simultaneity instead. I will introduce a concept of historico-structural heterogeneity at the end of chapter 1 to locate the argument in that paradigm of co-existence and to critique the paradigm of newness and historical progression.f Within the limits of European local histories, critical theory pushed humanists and critical social scientists toward critical explorations of the conditions that make events and ideas possible, instead of taking ideas for granted and seeing events as carrying their own, essential, meaning. A critical theory beyond the history of Europe proper and within the colonial history of America (or Asia or Africa; or even from the perspective of immigrants within Europe and the US who have disrupted the homogeneity) becomes decolonial theory. That is, it is the theory arising from the projects for decolonization of knowledge and being that will lead to the imagining of economy and politics otherwise. By going to the very roots of modern coloniality – the invention of America and of “Latin” America – this book is a contribution to that decolonization of knowledge and being; an attempt to rewrite history following an-other logic, an- other language, an-other thinking.