The us uses economic engagement as a disguise to hide their colonialist efforts towards Latin America

Humanitarianism

there are no “humanitarian” missions, we don’t do things to help the people of Latin America, only to further our interests and the interests of neo-liberals – NGOs are a prime example of this

Petras ’97 [James Petras – writer for The Monthly Review (a quasi-Marxist think tank) and professor of Sociology at the State University of New York, “Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America”, Volume 49, Issue 07 (December), 1997, accessed 7/16/13, < http://monthlyreview.org/1997/12/01/imperialism-and-ngos-in-latin-america> ] //pheft
The confusion concerning the political character of the nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) stems from their earlier history in the 1970s during the days of the dictatorships. In this period they were active in providing humanitarian support to the victims of the military dictatorship and denouncing human rights violations. The NGOs supported “soup kitchens” which allowed victimized families to survive the first wave of shock treatments administered by the neoliberal dictatorships. This period created a favorable image of NGOs even among the left. They were considered part of the “progressive camp.”¶ Even then, however, the limits of the NGOs were evident. While they attacked the human rights violations of local dictatorships, they rarely denounced the U.S. and European patrons who financed and advised them. Nor was there a serious effort to link the neoliberal economic policies and human rights violations to the new turn in the imperialist system. Obviously the external sources of funding limited the sphere of criticism and human rights action.¶ As opposition to neoliberalism grew in the early 1980s, the U.S. and European governments and the World Bank increased their funding of NGOs. There is a direct relation between the growth of social movements challenging the neoliberal model and the effort to subvert them by creating alternative forms of social action through the NGOs. The basic point of convergence between the NGOs and the World Bank was their common opposition to “statism.” On the surface the NGOs criticized the state from a “left” perspective defending civil society, while the right did so in the name of the market. In reality, however, the World Bank, the neoliberal regimes, and western foundations co-opted and encouraged the NGOs to undermine the national welfare state by providing social services to compensate the victims of the multinational corporations (MNCs). In other words, as the neoliberal regimes at the top devastated communities by inundating the country with cheap imports, extracting external debt payment, abolishing labor legislation, and creating a growing mass of low-paid and unemployed workers, the NGOs were funded to provide “self-help” projects, “popular education,” and job training, to temporarily absorb small groups of poor, to co-opt local leaders, and to undermine anti-system struggles.¶ The NGOs became the “community face” of neoliberalism, intimately related to those at the top and complementing their destructive work with local projects. In effect the neoliberals organized a “pincer” operation or dual strategy. Unfortunately many on the left focused only on “neoliberalism” from above and the outside (International Monetary Fund, World Bank) and not on neoliberalism from below (NGOs, micro-enterprises). A major reason for this oversight was the conversion of many ex-Marxists to the NGO formula and practice. Anti-Statism was the ideological transit ticket from class politics to “community development,” from Marxism to the NGOs.¶ Typically, NGO ideologues counterpose “state” power to “local” power. State power is, they argue, distant from its citizens, autonomous, and arbitrary, and it tends to develop interests different from and opposed to those of its citizens, while local power is necessarily closer and more responsive to the people. But apart from historical cases where the reverse has also been true, this leaves out the essential relation between state and local power—the simple truth that state power wielded by a dominant, exploiting class will undermine progressive local initiatives, while that same power in the hands of progressive forces can reinforce such initiatives.¶ The counterposition of state and local power has been used to justify the role of NGOs as brokers between local organizations, neoliberal foreign donors (World Bank, Europe, or the United States) and the local free market regimes. But the effect is to strengthen neoliberal regimes by severing the link between local struggles and organizations and national/international political movements. The emphasis on “local activity” serves the neoliberal regimes since it allows its foreign and domestic backers to dominate macro-socio-economic policy and to channel most of the state’s resources toward subsidies for export capitalists and financial institutions.¶ So while the neoliberals were transferring lucrative state properties to the private rich, the NGOs were not part of the trade union resistance. On the contrary they were active in local private projects, promoting the private enterprise discourse (self-help) in the local communities by focusing on micro-enterprises. The NGOs built ideological bridges between the small scale capitalists and the monopolies benefitting from privatization—all in the name of “anti-statism” and the building of civil societies. While the rich accumulated vast financial empires from the privatization, the NGO middle class professionals got small sums to finance offices, transportation, and small-scale economic activity.¶ The important political point is that the NGOs depoliticized sectors of the population, undermined their commitment to public employees, and co-opted potential leaders in small projects. NGOs abstain from public school teacher struggles, as the neoliberal regimes attack public education and public educators. Rarely if ever do NGOs support the strikes and protests against low wages and budget cuts. Since their educational funding comes from the neoliberal governments, they avoid solidarity with public educators in struggle. In practice, “non-governmental” translates into anti-public-spending activities, freeing the bulk of funds for neoliberals to subsidize export capitalists while small sums trickle from the government to NGOs.¶ In reality non-governmental organizations are not non-governmental. They receive funds from overseas governments or work as private subcontractors of local governments. Frequently they openly collaborate with governmental agencies at home or overseas. This “subcontracting” undermines professionals with fixed contracts, replacing them with contingent professionals. The NGOs cannot provide the long-term comprehensive programs that the welfare state can furnish. Instead they provide limited services to narrow groups of communities. More importantly, their programs are not accountable to the local people but to overseas donors. In that sense NGOs undermine democracy by taking social programs out of the hands of the local people and their elected officials to create dependence on non-elected, overseas officials and their locally anointed officials.

Immigration Link

Aff’s Economic and Immigration Dialogue flawed- fails to contextualize benefits within the dimensions of US-Mexico economic interaction and labour migration

Delgado-Wise 04 [Raul Delgado-Wise, “Critical Dimensions of Mexico-US Migration under the Aegis of Neoliberalism and NAFTA”, Canadian Journal of Development Studies 25.4 (2004): 591-605, Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies, Professor of Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico]

Another dimension for debunking the myth of the Mexican export “miracle” is the peculiar dialectic¶ that is interwoven between what is euphemistically called the successful sector and the rest of the¶ economy. This dialectic questions two classical concepts that attempt to explain the underdeveloped¶ insertion of economies in classical Latin American economic development theory. The functionalist¶ concept of “structural dualism” (Germani 1974) does not apply, and neither does the concept of¶ “enclave” (Cardoso and Faletto 1974), which has been dusted off to explain the economic integration¶ of Mexico and the United States (Calva 1997, 71–101). In contrast to what those concepts assume,¶ there is no divorce between the successful sector and the rest of the economy, nor can the two be¶ analysed in isolation. On the contrary, the relative increases in the export sector are based on the¶ impoverishment of the remaining sectors.¶ The export orientation of the Mexican economy demands certain macroeconomic conditions¶ that are obtained by squeezing internal accumulation: in particular, reduced public investment¶ expenditure, the state’s withdrawal from strictly productive activities, privatizations, budget deficit¶ controls, and interest rates that are attractive to foreign capital but that, in contrast, depress domestic¶ activity within the economy. This further heightens social inequalities and generates an ever-growing¶ mass of workers who cannot find a place within the country’s formal labour market; as a result, a¶ third of the economically active population work in what is called the “informal sector.” This is the¶ breeding ground that fuels the vigorous process of cross-border migration that currently exists.¶ The contradictory dynamic that arises between migration and economic growth in that context¶ can be summarized as follows.

Immigration policies with Mexico justify US imperialism and a regime of terror while Mexico willingly submits for petty economic “benefits”

Delgado-Wise 04 [Raul Delgado-Wise, “Critical Dimensions of Mexico-US Migration under the Aegis of Neoliberalism and NAFTA”, Canadian Journal of Development Studies 25.4 (2004): 591-605, Director of Doctoral Program in Migration Studies, Professor of Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico]

Neither Mexico nor the United States recognize an international migration agenda commensurate¶ with a reality that exists. They consequently fail to act in accordance with this agenda. However, given¶ its importance to the two countries, it is impossible to ignore.¶ Using strict cost–benefit calculations (with the clear aim of avoiding a confrontation with the United States, particularly with regards to undocumented migrants), from 1974 until very recently¶ the Mexican government chose to follow a peculiar strategy that García y Griego (1988) calls “the¶ policy of no policy,” entailing the absence of any explicit policy on migration matters.¶ The negotiation and enactment of NAFTA served as a fundamental point of reference for the¶ subsequent course of bilateral relations and, in particular, of international migration. The Mexican¶ government’s agreement to exclude the issue of migration from the negotiation agenda and adhere¶ acritically to the principle of free movement for investments and goods reaffirms not only its lack of¶ commitment toward the migrant sector but also its frank and, in this instance, open subordination to¶ the hegemonic interests of the United States.¶ The same attitude can be seen in the Mexican government’s lukewarm stance vis-à-vis¶ Washington’s ferocious assault on the human and labour rights of Mexican migrants. Among the¶ many measures introduced by the United States to install a regime of terror along the border with¶ Mexico are the countless operations deployed by its Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to¶ curtail, at any cost, the growing flow of labour migrants. Bearing in mind that Mexico ranks as the¶ United States’ number two trading partner, this is far from a civilized “good neighbour” policy¶ between partners. One clear indicator of the vehemence with which the anti-immigration policy is¶ being pursued is the increasingly generous — some might say exorbitant — budget given to the INS,¶ totalling US$ 4.18 billion in 1999. In line with the xenophobia behind the failed Proposition 187 of¶ California Governor Pete Wilson, on 30 September 1996 the Illegal Immigration Reform and¶ Immigrant Responsibility Act came into effect. This legislation (which is still in force) was important¶ in that it institutionalized the criminalizaton of labour migration through a series of arbitrary procedural provisions that violate the human and labour rights of cross-border workers (Mohar 2001, 51).¶ One of the most reprehensible outcomes of this “hard-line” approach within US immigration policy¶ has been the proliferation of Mexican deaths along Mexico’s northern border, totalling 1236 between¶ 1998 and 2000 (Villaseñor and Morena 2002, 13); recourse is thus being made to “death as an¶ element in dissuading migration,” ratifying the predisposition toward state terrorism as an essential¶ ingredient in US foreign policy and domestic security.

Investment Link

Economic investment, even if it seems “benign”, is a form of capitalist imperialism

Parenti ’95 [Michael Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, in the United States and abroad, “Imperialism 101”, published in Against Empire in 1995, accessed 7/19/13, http://www.michaelparenti.org/Imperialism101.html] //pheft
The Dynamic of Capital Expansion¶ Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, transforming and dominating their economies, cultures, and political life, integrating their financial and productive structures into an international system of capital accumulation.¶ A central imperative of capitalism is expansion. Investors will not put their money into business ventures unless they can extract more than they invest. Increased earnings come only with a growth in the enterprise. The capitalist ceaselessly searches for ways of making more money in order to make still more money. One must always invest to realize profits, gathering as much strength as possible in the face of competing forces and unpredictable markets.¶ Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and Engels described a bourgeoisie that "chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It creates a world after its own image." The expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disfranchised wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shanty towns, autonomous regions by centralized autocracies.¶ Consider one of a thousand such instances. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented lives. They hunted, fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their entire way of life was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the hardwood for quick profits. Their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas and they themselves were transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages—when fortunate enough to find employment.¶ North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84 percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.¶ Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. firms, earns about 75 percent of its profits from overseas operations. While profit margins at home sometimes have had a sluggish growth, earnings abroad have continued to rise dramatically, fostering the development of what has become known as the multinational or transnational corporation. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global free market and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe.¶ Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars, trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such "multiple sourcing" enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various nations against each other in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union strategies.

Mexican Engagement Link

Discourse link – The way the 1ac frames the interactions between the US and Mexico spreads imperialism by maintaining a distance between the colonizer and the colonized

Toths ‘09

[Margaret A. Toth, “Framing the Body: Imperialism and Visual Discourse in María Cristina Mena's Short Fiction”, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, 2009, http://muse.jhu.edu.proxy.lib.umich.edu/journals/legacy/v026/26.1.toth.html]

In 1913, Century magazine commissioned Mexican American writer María Cristina Mena, only twenty years old and unknown at the time, to write a series of stories about life in Mexico. Over the course of the next few years, these stories were published in Century, while several others appeared in journals like American Magazine. When Mena's final short story was printed in Household Magazine in 1931, the periodical billed her as "the foremost interpreter of Mexican life" (Mena, The Collected Stories 137).1 Largely forgotten today, Mena carved a distinct, if modest, space for herself on the early-twentieth-century US cultural landscape. She cultivated professional friendships with such literary figures as D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, published numerous short stories in well-known periodicals (most appearing between 1913 and 1916), and, later in life, authored several children's books.2 Recently, critics have revisited Mena's stories, interrogating, among other things, the author's tricksteresque discourse, gender politics, and role as cultural interpreter.3 In this essay, I adopt a new interpretive lens through which to read Mena's work, as I situate her short fiction within a framework attentive to the colonialist dynamics at work in early-twentieth-century US-Mexico relations. Broadly speaking, Mena's stories provide a sustained, if at times veiled, commentary on the imperialist interests of the United States in Mexico. More specifically, they think through how this particular imperialist drama plays itself out in and on subaltern bodies. By engaging both theoretical questions about imperialist visual production and pragmatic ones about living within the shadow of US colonialism, Mena asks us to see how bodies of people of color are shaped not only figuratively, within the imperialist imaginary, but also literally, by the daily realities of imperialism.4 To argue these claims, I turn first to stories in which Mena grapples with [End Page 92] broad, conceptual questions about imperialist visual practices.5 In the opening section of this essay, I illustrate that Mena's stories, themselves steeped in ocular language, respond in complex ways to imperialist art's construction of the other. In their discussion of colonialist photography, Eleanor M. Hight and Gary D. Sampson maintain that the genre relies on "[t]he colonial constructions of racial, cultural, and geographic difference" (2). This emphasis on and often production of difference in colonialist photography, and in imperialist visual texts more generally, abets imperialist political projects, fueled as they are by a power distribution that requires maintaining a distance between colonizer and colonized. Imperialist images of human subjects, in particular, turn upon a self/other dichotomy, with the separating bar representing an insurmountable difference: On the one side, we have the normative white, western, imperialist subject; on the other, the colonized, exoticized, and racialized other, emptied of subjectivity. Images grounded in this ideology were popular in early-twentieth-century US publications, including Century. Yet Mena's stories, published alongside exoticizing pieces like the photo-essay "Unfamiliar Mexico," which I will discuss below, challenge images that position Mexicans' bodies as ineradicably other. In the first part of this article, I examine two stories, "The Vine-Leaf" and "The Gold Vanity Set," in order to show how Mena undermines such imperialist practices. In these stories, Mena implicitly destabilizes the status of the image as bearer of truth. That is, she exposes images—including the photograph, which tends to carry an objective truth value—as manipulable, biased, and, therefore, suspect. Yet while Mena debunks exoticizing myths—those that would emphasize the difference of Mexicans, representing them, whether textually or visually, as other—she is more overtly concerned with the threat of sameness inherent in the tangible processes of imperialism and globalization. The characters in her stories consistently confront the infiltration of US values and market goods—including the imported, generic white Anglo body itself—into their daily lives, and this confrontation sets in motion a renegotiation of identity, both psychological and corporeal. Therefore, in the second half of this essay, I will shift gears, turning to stories in which Mena articulates this danger of sameness. This issue isn't entirely unrelated to imperialist visual production. Indeed, as a transition into this section, I will gesture toward a very relevant, and under-examined, facet of imperialist media: the systematic use of visual apparatuses, particularly photography, to identify assimilable bodies, a practice that turns on sameness rather than difference. In the second half of the essay, I will largely leave behind the theoretical concerns of imperialist images to focus instead on stories about what I call embodied imperialism. Along with "The Gold Vanity [End Page 93] Set," both "John of God, the Water-Carrier" and "Marriage by Miracle" register the real, lived burdens that imperialism thrusts upon native bodies. While the characters in these stories face various physical dilemmas, they are all targets of an imperialist machinery that would wipe out difference, leaving behind a homogenous, markedly anglicized culture and people. Before examining how Mena's stories engage with and disrupt imperialist narratives, I want to turn briefly to an example of how Century participated in the project of conditioning its target audience, "the Anglo-American middle- and upper-class" (Doherty, Introduction xvii), to read racialized images of Mexico. According to Tiffany Ana López, "Century promoted itself" as "cosmopolitan" but built this reputation on written and visual practices that tended to devalue non-Anglo cultures ("'A Tolerance for Contradictions'" 64, 65). The magazine's most popular genre stories—travel and adventure narratives—are shot through with covert and often overt racism. Its visual production, including photo essays, drawings, and advertisements, tends to reproduce not only racist but also imperialist thought, as it takes up and redeploys a hegemonic way of seeing non-Anglo peoples, cultures, and landscapes common in other visual media from the period. Century's visual texts resemble, both formally and ideologically, early-twentieth century tourist photography and pictorial postcards of non-Anglo subjects. For example, postcards of Mexico from the period fall into several identifiable categories: views of various laborers, including water carriers and pulque drawers; hand-painted illustrations and photographs of Mexican architecture, most commonly dilapidated churches and simple dwellings; landscapes; and exotic pictures of people generally classified as "natives."6 Such postcards, often titled generically as "Aspecto Tipico" 'Typical Sight,' emphasize how different Mexicans are from the US patrons who are buying and sending the cards, a difference that supports a hierarchical system. For example, the visual and textual elements of a postcard like "A Mexican Bath Tub" (Fig. 1), which depicts partially clad women and naked children in a stream, are structured around a cluster of value-laden binaries that produce a gap between Anglo-American and Mexican experience, including, to name just a few, progress versus regress, culture versus nature, and private versus public. The production and reception of such images are governed by what Homi K. Bhabha calls the "rules of recognition." These rules refer to "dominating discourses" that "articulate the signs of cultural difference and reimplicate them within the deferential relations of colonial power—hierarchy, normalization, [End Page 94] marginalization, and so forth" (110–11). In other words, the rules demand and in fact beget an epistemological framework organized around hierarchical difference, most commonly cultural and racial. While Bhabha uses his rules to describe colonialist literature and the colonialist encounter more generally, his metaphorical references to vision—the rules rely on "the visible and transparent mark of power" (111)—suggest that a visual logic undergirds the system. Indeed, it is not difficult to see how such codes apply to visual production, since visual texts like "A Mexican Bath Tub" have the capacity literally to make visible the power dynamics that Bhabha describes.

L- US economic engagement in Mexico assumes and legitimates the genocide of its indigenous peoples. Immigration reform veils the root issue of a failing, dictatorial, Mexican government alienating its own peoples

S Marcos 95 [Subcomandante Marcos, “Sub-Commander Marcos’ letter to the people of the U.S.”, La Jornada, Subcommander Insurgent of the National Zapatista Liberation Army, September 13, 1995]

The U.S. government has been wrong more than once in regards to its foreign policy. When this has occurred it is due to the fact it is making a mistake as to the man it ought to be backing up. History is not lacking in this type of examples. In the first half of this decade, the U.S. government made a mistake backing Carlos Salinas de Gortari. It made a mistake signing a NAFTA which lacked a majority support from the North American people and which meant an order of summary execution against the Mexican Indigenous people.¶ On the dawn of 1994 we rose up in arms. We rose up not seeking power, not responding to a foreign order. We rose up to say "here we are." The Mexican government, our government, had forgotten us and was ready to perpetrate a genocyde without bullets or bombs, it was ready to annihilate us with the quiet death of sickness, of misery, of oblivion. The U.S. government became the accomplice of the Mexican government in this genocide.¶ With the signing of NAFTA, the U.S. government acted as guarantor of and gave its blessing to the murder of millions of mexicans. Did the people of the U.S. know this? Did it know that its government was signing accords of massive extermination in Mexico? Did the people of the U.S. know that his government was backing a criminal? That man is gone. We remained. Our demands had not been solved and our arms kept saying "here we are" to the new government, to the people of Mexico, to the people and governnments of the world. We waited patiently for the new government to listen to us and pay attention to us. But, within the dark circles of U.S.power someone decided that we, the insurgent Indigenous people of the Mexican South East, were the worst threat to the United States of America. From the darkness came the order: Finish them up!¶ They put a price on our brown skin, on our culture, on our word, because, above all they put a price on our uprising. The U.S. government decided, once more, to back a man, someone who continues with the politics of deceit of his predecessor, someone who denies the people of Mexico democracy, freedom and justice. Millions of dollars were lent to that man and his government. Without the approval of the American people, an enormous loan, without precedent in history, was granted to the Mexican government. Not to improve the living conditions of the people, not for the democratization of the country's poltical life, not for the economic reactivation promoting factories and productive projects. This money is for speculation, for corruption, for simulation, for the anihilation of a group of rebels, Indians for the most part, poorly armed, poorly nourished, ill equipped, but very dignified, very rebellious, and very human.¶ So much money to finance deceit can only be explained by fear. But, what does the U.S. government fear? Truth? That the North American people realize that their money is helping to back the oldest dictatorship in the modern world? That the North American people realize that their taxes pay for the persecution and death of the Mexican Indian population? What is the North American people afraid of? Ought the people of North America fear our wooden rifles, our bare feet, our exhausted bodies, our language, our culture? Ought the North American people fear our scream in demand of democracy,liberty, and justice? Aren't these three truths the foundation which brought forth the birth of the United States of America? Aren't democracy, libertu, and justice rights that belong to all human beings?¶ How many millions of dollars justify that one may deny, to any human being, anywhere in the world, his right to be free in the thoughts that bring about words and actions, free to give and receive that which he justly deserves, to freely elect those who govern him and enforce the collective goals? Should the North American people on the other hand fear money, modern weapons,the sophysitcated technology of drug-trafficking? Should the North American people fear the complicity between drug-trafficking and governnments? Should the North American people fear the consequences of the single party dictatorship in Mexico? Should it fear the violence that the lack of freedom, democracy and justice usually brings about irrevocably?¶ Today, the American government, which for decades prided itself in promoting democracy in the world is the main support of a dictatorship which, born at the beginning of the XXth Century, pretends to end this century with the same lie, governing against the will of the Mexican people. Sooner or later, in spite of the support of the U.S. government, in spite of the millions of dollars, in spite of the tons of lies, the dictatorship that darkens the Mexican sky will be erased. The people of Mexico will find the ways to achieve the democracy,liberty and justice that is their historical right.¶ Americans: The attacks against the Mexican nation brought about by political U.S. personalities have been big and numerous. In their analysis they point out the awkwardness and corruption of the Mexican government (an awkwardness and corruption which have increased and are maintained under the shadow of the U.S. government's support) and they identify them with an entire people who take shelter under the Mexican flag. They are wrong.¶ Mexico is not a government. Mexico is a nation which aspires to be sovereign and independent, and in order to be that must liberate itself from a dictatorship and raise on its soil the universal flag of democracy, liberty and justice. Fomenting racism, fear and insecurity, the great personalities of U.S. politics offer economic support to the Mexican government so that it controls by violent means the discontent against the economic situation. They offer to multiply the absurd walls with which they pretend to put a stop to the search for life which drives millions of Mexicans to cross the northern border.¶ The best wall against massive immigration to the U.S. is a free, just, and democratic regime in Mexico. If Mexicans could find in their own land what now is denied them, they would not be forced to look for work in other countries. By supporting the dictatorship of the state party system in Mexico, whatever the name of the man or the party, the North American people are supporting an uncertain and anguishing future. By supporting the people of Mexico in their aspirations for democracy, liberty and justice, the North American people honor their history...and their human condition.¶ Today, in 1995 and after 20 years and tens of thousands of dead and wounded, the American government recognizes that it made a mistake getting involved in the Vietnam war. Today, in 1995, the U.S. government has begun to get involved in the Mexican government's dirty war against the Zapatista population. War material support, military advisors, undercover actions, electronic espionage, financing, diplomaticc support, activities of the CIA. Little by little, the U.S. government is beginning to get involved in an unequal war condemned to failure for those who are carrying it on, the Mexican government. Today, in 1995 and 20 years before 2015, it is possible to stop and not to repeat the error of other years. It is not necessary to wait until 2015 for the U.S. government to recognize that it was an error to get involved in the war against the Mexican people.¶ It is time for the people of the U.S. to keep its historical compromise with respect to its neighbor to the South. To no longer make a mistake as to which man to support. To support not a man but a people, the Mexican people in its struggle for democracy, liberty and justice. History will signal, implacable, on which side were the people and the government of the U.S. On the side of dictatorship, of a man, of reactionarism, or on the side of democracy, of a people, of progress.¶ Health and long life to the people of the United States of America

Trade with Mexico is always associated with domination and imperialism – best source proves

Shor ’12 [FRANCIS SHOR is a professor in the History Department at Wayne State University, “U.S. Economic Imperialism and Resistance from the Global South: A Prelude to OWS”, published in NewPolitics Summer 2012 Vol:XIV-1 Whole #: 53, accessed 7/17/13, ] //pheft
The devastation and disruption wrought by U.S. economic imperialism was obviously co-determined by willing ruling classes in certain countries. In numerous instances, foreign governments and their colluding political and economic elites helped to construct financial and political arrangements conducive to the array of domestic and foreign economic interests and detrimental to the poor majority. For example, in between the near bankruptcy in 1982 and the financial collapse in the mid-1990s, the Mexican Government and various bankers aided a "Washington Consensus" that tied the Reagan and Clinton Treasury Departments together with the IMF and private banks. Under Clinton’s Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin, a former Citibank and Wall Street manager, private banks, including Citibank, used both the Mexican and U.S. governments to salvage their bad economic investments. With the full participation of the Mexican presidents during this time, but especially by Carlos Salinas de Gortari, neoliberal policies and programs were adopted that, among other changes, privatized former communal farms and, in the process, forced Mexican peasants into the cities or across the U.S. border. Furthermore, in taking away land that had been used for subsistence farming and the growing of corn, U.S. corn imports, primarily the less nutritious and even GMO yellow corn, flooded the Mexican markets. NAFTA accelerated U.S.-subsidized agricultural imports, in particular, even though it did lead to the emergence and resistance by the Zapatistas and others in Mexican civil society.¶ ¶ While primarily a response to the debt crisis and neoliberal policies in Mexico, including the implementation of NAFTA, which, in turn, drove those on the margins into further economic and political deprivation, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional—EZLN) opened a significant front against U.S. economic imperialism and global neoliberalism. Embracing the legacy of political struggles from the Mexican past, the Zapatistas also looked forward to creating a new and better world. In the January 1 missive that accompanied their occupation in Chiapas, the legacy of past conflicts acknowledged the role of the poor, despised, and marginalized: "We are the product of 500 years of struggles: first against slavery, in the War of Independence against Spain led by the insurgents, then to keep from being absorbed by U.S. expansionism, then to enact our Constitution and expel the French Empire from our land, then the Porfiro Diaz dictatorship prevented the just application of the Reform laws and the people rebelled, developing their own leadership, Villa and Zapata emerged, poor men like ourselves." After close to a year of public engagement that saw the intervention of the Mexican army and the establishment of a wary truce, the EZLN issued another declaration about their political intentions: "The Zapatista plan today remains the same as always: to change the world to make it better, more just, more free, more democratic, that is, more human."

Mexican Infrastructure Link

Mexican infrastructure is the weapon of imperialists, it allows capitalism to expand and destroy our resources unless we stop to recognize the people suffering from the insatiable beast

Marcos ’92, [Subcomandante Marcos, August 1992, leader of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), a Mexican rebel movement fighting for the rights of the indigenous peoples of Mexico, “Our Word is Our Weapon” http://faculty.washington.edu/caporaso/courses/203/readings/marcos_our_word_is_our_weapon.pdf]

Suppose that you live in the north, center, or west of this country. Suppose that you heed the old Department of Tourism slogan: "Get to know Mexico first." Suppose that you decide to visit the southeast of your country and that in the southeast you choose to visit the state of Chiapas. Good, suppose you have. You have now entered by one of the three existing roads Into Chiapas: the road into the northern part of the state, the road along the Pacific coast, and the road by which you entered are the three ways to get to this southeastern comer of the country by land, but the state's natural wealth doesn't leave just by way of these three roads. Chiapas loses blood through many veins: through oil and gas duets, electric lines, railways; through bank accounts, trucks, vans, boats, and planes, through clandestine paths, gaps, and forest trails. This land continues to pay tribute to the Imperialists: petroleum, electricity, cattle, money, coffee, banana. honey, com, cacao, tobacco, sugar, soy, melon, sorghum, mamey, mango, tamarind, avocado, and Chiapaneco blood all flow as a result of the thousand teeth sunk into the throat of the Mexican Southeast. These raw materials, thousands of millions of tons of them, flow to Mexican ports, railroads, air and truck transportation centers. From there they are sent indifferent parts of the world the United States, Canada, Holland, Germany, Italy, Japan—but all to fulfill one same destiny: to feed imperialism. Since the beginning, the fee that capitalism imposes on the southeastern part of this country makes Chiapas ooze blood and mud. A handful of businesses, one of which is the Mexican state, take all the wealth out of Chiapas and in exchange leave behind their mortal and pestilent mark: in 1989 these businesses took 1,222,669,000,000 pesos from Chiapas and only left behind 616,340,000.000 pesos worth of credit and public works. More than 600,000,000,000 pesos went to the belly of the beast. In Chiapas, Pemex has eighty-six teeth sunk into the townships of Estacion Juarez, Reforma, Ostuacan. Pichucalco, and Ocosingo. Every day they suck out 92,000 barrels of petroleum and 517,000,000,000 cubic feet of gas. They take away the petroleum and gas and, in exchange, leave behind the mark of capitalism: ecological destruction, agricultural plunder, hyperinflation, alcoholism, prostitution, and poverty. The beast is still not satisfied and has extended its tentacles to the Lacandon Jungle: eight petroleum deposits are under exploration. The paths are made with machetes by the same campesinos who are left without land by the insatiable beast. The trees fall and dynamite explodes on land where campesinos are not allowed to cut down trees to cultivate Every tree that is cut down costs them a fine that is ten times the minimum wage, and a jail sentence. The poor cannot cut down trees, but the petroleum beast can, a beast that every day fells more and more into foreign hands. The campesinos cut them down to survive, the beast cuts them down to plunder.

NGO’s Links

NGOs can be devised with government aid to promote neoliberalism in autonomous communities.

Stahler-Sholk 07 [Richard Stahler-Sholk, Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Autonomy Movement, Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 34, No. 2, Globalizing Resistance: The New Politics of Social Movements in Latin America (Mar., 2007), pp. 48-63]

Economic "autonomy" from the state and from the global market entailed ¶ other trade-offs. The Zapatistas had to improvise a mode of relations with ¶ NGOs to preserve community control. Since the 2003 creation of Juntas de ¶ Buen Gobierno headquartered in five caracoles, the regional juntas and municipal autonomous councils review NGO projects to decide whether and on what terms they can proceed (Earle and Simonelli, 2005) instead of letting NGOs drive the development process, which could be just as divisive as the government's deliberate counterinsurgency aid. This has reinforced the autonomous authorities' legitimacy and participatory experience in self-government. As the Zapatistas explained (Marcos, 2003: pt. 2): ¶ It was a matter of time before people came to understand that the Zapatista ¶ indigenous people had dignity and were not looking for alms, but rather respect. ¶ . . . There is a more sophisticated kind of handout which is practiced by some NGOs and international organizations. It consists more or less in their deciding what the communities need and, without even consulting them, imposing not just particular projects but also the timing and form of their execution. Imagine the desperation of a community that needs potable water and instead is given a library or needs a school for children and is given a course in herbiculture. ¶ Where projects were established in specific communities, the Juntas some ¶ times charged a 10 percent tax for the region. The collective fund would create a ¶ counterbalance to the uneven development that reflected the convenience and ¶ preferences of NGO funders, reaffirming the concept of community empower ¶ ment. The Zapatistas would now have some modest revenues to respond to ¶ needs and proposals emanating from the communities-an escape from the ¶ "autonomy without resources" trap, though it meant defining self-sufficiency in ¶ terms of wider networks of fair trade and solidarity. It also meant tightening the ¶ criteria for Zapatista-affiliated communities "in resistance" (i.e., rejecting gov ¶ ernment aid), a trade-off that sacrificed some pluralism and flexibility in pushing ¶ communities to define themselves as "in" or "out." The new structure of the ¶ caracoles-extending the movement into state like functions- posed broader ¶ questions of whether a social movement/rebellion/revolution must eventually ¶ institutionalize and in the process lose some of its mobilizational impetus. The ¶ Juntas included a governing council of two representatives from each of the ¶ autonomous municipalities composing the region, who rotated every 10-15 days. This new dynamic logically entailed some trade-offs. The frequent rotation ¶ of representatives fostered grassroots participation and accountability but perhaps at some cost of efficient continuity. The new task of regional representation also required travel and extended shifts outside the community, which in light of gender roles in the indigenous communities might reduce women’s participation in governance structures. ¶ In reformulating the structure of community representation at the regional ¶ level, the Zapatistas were explicitly cutting out the intermediary roles of both ¶ the political-military apparatus of the EZLN itself and the self-appointed ¶ leaders and organizations of civil society (Marcos, 2003: pt. 6): ¶ The military structure of the EZLN "contaminated" in some ways ¶ a democratic ¶ and self-governing tradition. The EZLN was, shall we ¶ say, ¶ one of the "antidemoc ¶ ratic" elements in a relation of direct community democracy. ¶ . . . Since the EZLN, ¶ on principle, is not fighting to take power, none of the military leadership or ¶ members of the Clandestine Revolutionary Indigenous Committee can occupy positions of authority in the community ¶ or in the autonomous municipalities. ¶ . . . ¶ Often dishonest people deceive national and international civil society by pre ¶ senting themselves in the cities as "Zapatistas.". . . Now it will just be a matter ¶ of contacting ¶ one of the Juntas de Buen Gobierno . . . and in a matter of minutes ¶ one can find out if it is true or not, and if he is a Zapatista or not. ¶ This reaffirmation of the authority of the communities fit the Zapatista commitment to mandar obedeciendo (lead by obeying), reflecting the attention to ¶ process that characterizes new social movements. Yet it left unclear the role of ¶ the EZLN leaders (or of the civic Frente Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional ¶ [Zapatista National Liberation Front-FZLN]) in connecting to a national ¶ movement, particularly during periods of "strategic silence" when there was no dialogue with the government. ¶ It was this dilemma of potential isolation within their autonomous regions- containment within a space that could be ignored, the "indio permitido" (Hale, ¶ 2004)-that the Zapatistas sought to address with their June 2005 Sixth ¶ Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle. They broke a four-year silence to hold a ¶ series of conferences /forums with civil society, inaugurating the "Other ¶ Campaign," in which Zapatista leaders would visit other movements through ¶ out the country from January to July 2006 to refocus the national agenda away ¶ from election-year politicking (Harvey, 2005). In November 2005 the Zapatistas dissolved the FZLN and curtailed the role of Enlace Civil (an organization that had served as a clearinghouse for NGOs working in autonomous territories), ¶ reflecting the new emphasis on direct decision making by Zapatista community-based civil authorities.

Venezuela Links

The US has and continues to view Latin America as its backyard and Venezuela has historically been at the forefront – this is especially true with Chavez dead now

Greene ‘5 [Cort Greene – Writer for US Hands Off Venezuela, “The Monroe Doctrine, US Imperialism and Venezuela”, published 11/8/5, accessed 7/16/13, < http://www.handsoffvenezuela.org/monroe_doctrine_venezuela.htm>] //pheft

US Hands Off Venezuela Campaign organizer Cort Greene writes: This December marks the anniversaries of two of the most important documents of the United States ruling class’ imperialist policy. These documents epitomize the American imperialists’ paternalistic worldview, which they use to maintain their political and economic interests, and to expropriate the markets, raw materials and labor of the peoples of not only the western hemisphere but of the world.¶ The Monroe Doctrine of December 2, 1823, and the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine of December 6, 1904, are the bedrocks of expansionism and intervention which has caused so much misery, death and impoverishment for millions across Latin America.¶ The country of Venezuela has played no small part in this history.¶ In the early decades of the 19th century, the South American Wars of Liberation were raging against Spanish domination in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela.¶ One figure who rose to international prominence during these struggles was Simon Bolivar. His vision of freedom from foreign domination, as well as the necessity of economic and social integration of the region has become the inspiration for Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution¶ But he was not just a man of words.¶ At the Battle of Carabobo on June 24, 1821, his brilliant military maneuvers sealed the fate of the Spanish forces in Venezuela, and shortly thereafter, assured the demise of their empire in the region.¶ The Monroe Doctrine was created to project the United States’ sphere of influence into the Americas and fill the void left by Spain. It was also due to the upstart nation’s fear of Latin American colonization by other more powerful European imperialists. In short, they saw Latin America as their own "backyard" and field for exploitation. Even before setting out to impose their will on the peoples of Latin America, one of the first applications of the spirit of the doctrine was the "internal imperialism" against the indigenous peoples of North America, oppressing and obliterating entire civilizations in the country’s move westward. Hundreds of thousands of square miles belonging to Mexico were "acquired" as well.¶ A succession of presidents invoked the Monroe Doctrine in the annexations of Texas, California, Oregon and to fend off European interest in the Yucatan and Mexico, and it was used as the justification for the building a canal in Central America to control shipping and commerce. President Cleveland used it to force a settlement in land dispute between Venezuela and Britain in 1895.¶ The Roosevelt Corollary¶ In 1902, Venezuela could no longer placate the demands of European bankers and pay back its debt, so the navies of Great Britain, Italy and Germany blockaded and fired on its coastal fortifications. Theodore Roosevelt became fixated on the prospects of re-colonization of the hemisphere, and in 1903, he matched threat with threat, warning the combatants that Admiral Dewey’s fleet would intervene. The navies withdrew, and negotiations returned to the field of diplomacy.¶ Roosevelt’s Corollary, in an address to Congress, became an amendment to the Monroe Doctrine which launched the era of the US as an international police force through the use of its infamous "big stick." This opened the bloody history of US involvement on a grand scale, which haunts the peoples of the region and the world to this day.¶ Though it has gone through many ideological contortions including "dollar diplomacy," the "good neighbor" policy, the "Reagan Doctrine" and most recently, the "Bush Doctrine," the content has remained the same. Some of the mechanisms of control include the School of the Americas, the Organization of American States, the Inter-American Defense Board, Plan Colombia, the IMF and World Bank, NAFTA, CAFTA, and now the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas. It is clear from the above how the Monroe Doctrine has been used to dominate the cultures, political life, and economics of the Latin America, all the while integrating the labor, natural resources, productive and financial structures into a system of capital accumulation for the benefit of US hegemony.¶ As Karl Marx explained, "The profound hypocrisy and inherent barbarism of bourgeois civilization lies unveiled before our eyes, turning from its home, where it assumes respectable forms, to the colonies, where it goes naked."¶ The US has long considered Latin America its own backyard and has tried to keep a stranglehold on the region. But through its own policies, a beacon of light has appeared: Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution. Hugo Chavez and above all the Venezuelan grass roots movement have shown the masses of Latin America a way out. Revolutionary waves are sweeping the region, and working people are engaged in a war with the exploiters on a mass scale. The masses have shown an unquenchable fighting spirit: there is not one stable pro-US regime from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego, and Washington is terrified of the implications.¶ From 1798 to 1993, the US used its armed forces to intervene in other countries 234 times. Since then we seen the bombings of Yugoslavia and Sudan, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US intervention in Haiti which was aimed also at Venezuela and Cuba.¶ In Venezuela the US has been waging a protracted covert struggle, fighting what the US Army manuals call "fourth generational warfare" by using the National Endowment for Democracy, AID, the AFL-CIO’s Solidarity House, some NGOs, corporations and others.
The history and present trajectory of the US is wrought with “destabilization” attempts toward Venezuela and the supposed “cooperation” of the plan is just another form of economy sabotage or mobilization within the country

Robinson ’10 [Interview with William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara By Chronis Polychroniou Editor, Greek daily newspaper Eleftherotypia, *italics are Polychroniou*, “The Challenges of 21st Century Socialism in Venezuela:” published 1/31/10, accessed 7/16/13, < http://www.zcommunications.org/the-challenges-of-21st-century-socialism-in-venezuela-by-william-i-robinson>] //pheft
There are scare stories coming from Venezuela. The border is heating up, infiltration is taking place, a new Colombian military base near the border, US access to several new bases on Colombia and constant subversion. Is the regime concerned about a possible invasion? If yes, who is going to intervene?¶ The Venezuelan government is concerned about a possible US invasion and certainly an outright invasion cannot be ruled out. However I think the US is pursuing a more sophisticated strategy of intervention that we could call a war of attrition. We have seen this strategy in other countries, such as in Nicaragua in the 1980s, or even Chile under Allende. It is what in CIA lexicon is known as destabilization, and in the Pentagon's language is called political warfare - which does not mean there is not a military component. This is a counterrevolutionary strategy that combines military threats and hostilities with psychological operations, disinformation campaigns, black propaganda, economic sabotage, diplomatic pressures, the mobilization of political opposition forces inside the country, carrying out provocations and sparking violent confrontations in the cities, manipulation of disaffected sectors and the exploitation of legitimate grievances among the population. The strategy is deft at taking advantage of the revolution's own mistakes and limitations, such as corruption, clientalism, and opportunism, which we must acknowledge are serious problems in Venezuela. It is also deft at aggravating and manipulating material problems, such as shortages, price inflation, and so forth.¶ The goal is to destroy the revolution by making it unworkable, by exhausting the population's will to continue to struggle to forge a new society, and in this way to undermine the revolution's mass social base. According to the US strategy the revolution must be destroyed by having it collapse it in on itself, by undermining the remarkable hegemony that Chavismo and Bolivarianismo has been able to achieve within Venezuelan civil society over the past decade. US strategists hope to provoke Chavez into a crackdown that transforms the democratic socialist process into an authoritarian one. In the view of these strategists, Chavez will eventually be removed from power through any number of scenarios brought about by constant war of attribution - whether through elections, a military putsch from within, an uprising, mass defections from the revolutionary camp, or a combination of factors that can not be foretold.¶ In this context the military bases in Colombia provide a crucial platform for intelligence and reconnaissance operations against Venezuela and also for the infiltration of counterrevolutionary military, economic sabotage, and terrorist groups. These infiltrating groups are meant to harass, but more specifically, to provoke reactions from the revolutionary government and to synchronize armed provocation with the whole gamut of political, diplomatic, psychological, economic, and ideological aggressions that are part of the war of attrition.¶ Moreover, the mere threat of US military aggression that the bases represent in itself constitutes a powerful US psychological operation intended to heighten tensions inside Venezuela, force the government into extremist positions or into "crying wolf," and to embolden internal anti-Chavista and counterrevolutionary forces.¶ However, it is important to see that the military bases are part of the larger U.S. strategy towards all of Latin America. The US and the Right in Latin America have launched a counteroffensive to reverse the turn to the Left or the so-called "Pink Tide." Venezuela is the epicenter of an emergent counter-hegemonic bloc in Latin America. But Bolivia and Ecuador, and more generally, the region's burgeoning social movements and left political forces are as much targets of this counteroffensive as is Venezuela. The coup in Honduras has provided impetus to this counteroffensive and emboldened the Right and counterrevolutionary forces. Colombia has become the epicenter regional counterrevolution - really a bastion of 21st century fascism.