Notes
A few quick notes before looking at this file. Many of the arguments to answer the 1AC advantages are in other files produced at this camp. Specific CPs and answers to the US-Mexico relations advantage is in the US-Mexico relations core. Common impact defense to warming can be found in the impact defense file or the Cuba oil neg.
Many of these things are NOT included in the file to prevent redundancy.
In terms of strategy, the Neolib K is the best against this aff. Other viable options are: Mexico politics DA, politics
DA, and the oil DA.

A2: Relations Adv – Alt Causes
Multiple alt cause – gun control and corruption
Bonner and Rozental 9 (Robert C., Former Commissioner – U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Former
Administrator – Drug Enforcement Administration, and Andrѐs, Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Mexico;
Former President and Founder – Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, “Managing the United States-Mexico
Border: Cooperative Solutions to Common Problems,” Pacific Council on International Policy, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/admin/document.doc?id=31)
Current laws and regulations in each country sometimes impede cooperation . U.S. gun laws allow individuals to purchase a range of firearms whose possession would be severely punished in Mexico ; some states have much laxer restrictions, and in the case of gun shows, sales are entirely unregulated. The end of the assault weapons ban in the United States has meant that much more dangerous weaponry can now be purchased easily in the United States, and differences in state laws drive controls to the low common denominator for smugglers. That said, U.S. officials currently possess considerable legal authority to prevent and disrupt arms trafficking, both by preventing straw purchases and interdicting southbound traffic. A far more serious obstacle to cooperation is institutional weakness on the Mexican side , which shows up in lack of resources, poor professionalism, and corruption . At present,
Mexican customs officials inspect only 8% of traffic crossing the frontier; these inspections are conducted at random, and they are often cursory.
Mexican Customs also lacks the technology that would allow them to interdict vehicles suspected of carrying contraband (e.g., license plate scanners), much less scan large numbers of vehicles in a short period of time. As a result, it is basically impossible for Mexican officials to deter smuggling of firearms, ammunition, and bulk cash into the country. Low levels of professional training mean that that law enforcement agencies in Mexico cannot perform several functions essential to closer binational cooperation . Both the police and the military do a poor job of collecting and synthesizing intelligence, conducting undercover operations, and investigating unprofessional conduct by their own personnel. More frequent shifts of personnel also make it more difficult for individual officers on different sides of the border (or even with Mexico itself) to establish long-term working relationships, especially at the Mexican ports of entry . The most striking manifestation of institutional weakness on the Mexican side is corruption . In some cases, U.S. officials with information on major criminal figures have been reluctant to pass it on to their Mexican counterparts ; Mexican officials also often mistrust each other. The problem of corruption requires deep structural change within the Mexican justice system and cannot be resolved simply through the infusion of new equipment or personnel . Recent steps by the Mexican government to professionalize law enforcement agencies, arrest corrupt officials, reform the judicial system, and convert Mexican Customs into a full-fledged enforcement agency, however, all speak volumes about the government’s commitment to address this problem.
Alt causes – Regulations and trade disputes
Bonner and Rozental 9 (Robert C., Former Commissioner – U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Former
Administrator – Drug Enforcement Administration, and Andrѐs, Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Mexico;
Former President and Founder – Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, “Managing the United States-Mexico
Border: Cooperative Solutions to Common Problems,” Pacific Council on International Policy, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/admin/document.doc?id=31)
One final impediment to facilitation is the persistence of regulations and trade restrictions that impose unnecessary transactions costs on businesses operating across the border. The most obvious manifestation is the refusal of the United States to honor its obligations under NAFTA regarding cross-border trucking of goods where the Mexican trucks meet U.S. safety standards. This denial of the authorization for the transport of goods by
Mexican trucks between the border and another point inside the United States has given rise to a costly process, in which goods must be unloaded and reloaded just to move across the border. It also reduces security whenever cargo is stacked before being reloaded, by introducing yet another point at which contraband can be introduced into containers.

A2: Relations Adv – Coop Now
Cooperation high now – it’s structurally resilient, includes investment and is strengthening Mexican renewables
Wood 10 – PhD in Political Studies @ Queen’s, Professor @ ITAM in Mexico City
(Duncan, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, http://www.statealliancepartnership.org/resources_files/USMexico_Cooperation_Renewable_Energies.pdf)
The history of cooperation between Mexico and the United States in renewable energy is surprisingly longand multi-faceted and it has been a vital, albeit unheralded, dimension to bilateral relations and a significant boost to rural and later national development for over 18 years . Cooperation in some areas goes back even further than that, with geothermal energy collaboration extending back to the 1970s. Although it is now seen as crucial in the context of efforts to mitigate climate change, renewable energy in Mexico has and always has been seen as a development tool, helping to bring energy and employment to marginalized areas that are not connected to the national electricity grid.
¶ Beginning in the 1990s, USAID has invested in long term programs seeking to increase opportunities for renewable energy in Mexico, focusing mainly on small projects in rural areas but also increasingly on projects that a having a far-reaching impact on Mexico's energy profile. The investments made by the US government in mapping Mexico's wind energy resources in Oaxaca and other parts of the country have helped to develop a new source of energy for the national grid and for private consumption, and a new source of employment, investment, technical expertise and economic growth.
Energy coop high now
GNEB 11 – Good Neighbor Environmental Board, The Good Neighbor Environmental Board was created in 1992 by the Enterprise for the Americas ¶ Initiative Act, Public Law 102-532.The purpose of the Board is to “advise the
President and the ¶ Congress on the need for implementation of environmental and infrastructure projects (including
¶ projects that affect agriculture, rural development, and human nutrition) within the States of the ¶ United States contiguous to Mexico in order to improve the quality of life of persons residing on ¶ the United States side of the border.” ¶ The Board is charged with submitting an annual report to the President and the Congress. ¶ Management responsibilities for the Board were delegated to the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by
Executive Order 12916 on May 13, 1994
(“The Potential Environmental and Economic Benefits of Renewable Energy Development in the U.S.-Mexico
Border Region,” http://www.epa.gov/ofacmo/gneb/gneb14threport/English-GNEB-14th-Report.pdf)
Despite the challenges, the United States and Mexico are working together on a wide variety of renewable energy and energy efficiency projects. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) ¶ is working with Mexico to develop a national Low-Emission Development Strategy (LEDS) for Mexico ¶ and also is working with Mexican federal, state, and municipal governments on a range of programs, from ¶ encouraging the use of renewables to energy efficient mortgages and renewable standards. ¶ In 2010, the United States and
Mexico expanded their Methane to Markets Partnership with the ¶ launch of the Global Methane Initiative (GMI) to expand and accelerate global methane reductions.
¶
In addition, EPA cooperates with the Mexican Secretariat of Environment and Natural Resources ¶ (SEMARNAT) on reducing heavy vehicle emissions through Mexico’s
Transporte Limpio program, ¶ which is based on EPA’s SmartWay program, aimed at reducing transportationrelated emissions by ¶ creating incentives to improve supply chain fuel efficiency. DOE and SENER share information on ¶ smart grid, renewable energy, and energy efficiency technologies, and work with EPA and
SEMARNAT ¶ on a partnership to develop a program similar to ENERGY STAR to promote the use of more efficient ¶ building materials and appliances in Mexico. Mexico has taken the lead within the Energy and
Climate ¶ Partnership of the Americas on an Energy Efficiency Working Group for the region, and supports ¶ regional interconnections and energy access efforts. Mexico also is part of the Clean Energy Ministerial process, where it leads with other countries on energy efficiency, smart grid, and renewable energy ¶ initiatives. Finally, as part of a 1993 bilateral agreement to the North American Free Trade Agreement ¶ (NAFTA), the United
States and Mexico formed the North American Development Bank (NADB) ¶ and Border Environment
Cooperation Commission (BECC), which recently have begun assessing and ¶ financing some renewable energy projects in the border area.

A2: Relations Adv – No Bioterror Impact
No bioterror impact
Keller 3/7 -- Analyst at Stratfor, Post-Doctoral Fellow at University of Colorado at Boulder (Rebecca, 2013,
"Bioterrorism and the Pandemic Potential," http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/bioterrorism-and-pandemic-potential)
It is important to remember that the risk of biological attack is very low and that, partly because viruses can mutate easily, the potential for natural outbreaks is unpredictable. The key is having the right tools in case of an outbreak, epidemic or pandemic, and these include a plan for containment, open channels of communication, scientific research and knowledge sharing. In most cases involving a potential pathogen, the news can appear far worse than the actual threat.
Infectious Disease Propagation Since the beginning of February there have been occurrences of H5N1 (bird flu) in Cambodia, H1N1 (swine flu) in India and a new, or novel, coronavirus (a member of the same virus family as SARS) in the United Kingdom. In the past week, a man from Nepal traveled through several countries and eventually ended up in the United States, where it was discovered he had a drug-resistant form of tuberculosis, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report stating that antibiotic-resistant infections in hospitals are on the rise. In addition, the United States is experiencing a worse-than-normal flu season, bringing more attention to the influenza virus and other infectious diseases. The potential for a disease to spread is measured by its effective reproduction number, or R-value, a numerical score that indicates whether a disease will propagate or die out. When the disease first occurs and no preventive measures are in place, the reproductive potential of the disease is referred to as R0, the basic reproduction rate. The numerical value is the number of cases a single case can cause on average during its infectious period. An R0 above 1 means the disease will likely spread (many influenza viruses have an R0 between 2 and 3, while measles had an R0 value of between 12 and 18), while an R-value of less than 1 indicates a disease will likely die out. Factors contributing to the spread of the disease include the length of time people are contagious, how mobile they are when they are contagious, how the disease spreads (through the air or bodily fluids) and how susceptible the population is. The initial R0, which assumes no inherent immunity, can be decreased through control measures that bring the value either near or below 1, stopping the further spread of the disease. Both the coronavirus family and the influenza virus are RNA viruses, meaning they replicate using only RNA (which can be thought of as a single-stranded version of
DNA, the more commonly known double helix containing genetic makeup). The rapid RNA replication used by many viruses is very susceptible to mutations, which are simply errors in the replication process. Some mutations can alter the behavior of a virus, including the severity of infection and how the virus is transmitted. The combination of two different strains of a virus, through a process known as antigenic shift, can result in what is essentially a new virus. Influenza, because it infects multiple species, is the hallmark example of this kind of evolution. Mutations can make the virus unfamiliar to the body's immune system. The lack of established immunity within a population enables a disease to spread more rapidly because the population is less equipped to battle the disease. The trajectory of a mutated virus (or any other infectious disease) can reach three basic levels of magnitude. An outbreak is a small, localized occurrence of a pathogen. An epidemic indicates a more widespread infection that is still regional, while a pandemic indicates that the disease has spread to a global level. Virologists are able to track mutations by deciphering the genetic sequence of new infections. It is this technology that helped scientists to determine last year that a smattering of respiratory infections discovered in the Middle East was actually a novel coronavirus. And it is possible that through a series of mutations a virus like H5N1 could change in such a way to become easily transmitted between humans. Lessons Learned There have been several influenza pandemics throughout history. The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic is often cited as a worst-case scenario, since it infected between 20 and 40 percent of the world's population, killing roughly 2 percent of those infected. In more recent history, smaller incidents, including an epidemic of the SARS virus in 2003 and what was technically defined as a pandemic of the swine flu (H1N1) in 2009, caused fear of another pandemic like the 1918 occurrence. The spread of these two diseases was contained before reaching catastrophic levels, although the economic impact from fear of the diseases reached beyond the infected areas. Previous pandemics have underscored the importance of preparation, which is essential to effective disease management.
The World Health Organization lays out a set of guidelines for pandemic prevention and containment. The general principles of preparedness include stockpiling vaccines, which is done by both the United States and the European Union (although the possibility exists that the vaccines may not be effective against a new virus). In the event of an outbreak, the guidelines call for developed nations to share vaccines with developing nations. Containment strategies beyond vaccines include quarantine of exposed individuals, limited travel and additional screenings at places where the virus could easily spread, such as airports. Further measures include the closing of businesses, schools and borders. Individual measures can also be taken to guard against infection. These invol ve general hygienic measures -- avoiding mass gatherings, thoroughly washing hands and even wearing masks in specific, high-risk situations. However, airborne viruses such as influenza are still the most difficult to contain because of the method of transmission. Diseases like noroviruses, HIV or cholera are more serious but have to be transmitted by blood, other bodily fluids or fecal matter. The threat of a rapid pandemic is thereby slowed because it is easier to identify potential contaminates and either a void or sterilize them. Research is another important aspect of overall preparedness. Knowledge gained from studying the viruses and the ready availability of information can be instrumental in tracking diseases. For example, the genomic sequence of the novel coronavirus was made available, helping scientists and doctors in different countries to readily identify the infection in limited cases and implement quarantine procedures as necessary.
There have been only 13 documented cases of the novel coronavirus, so much is unknown regarding the disease. Recent cases in the United Kingdom indicate possible human-to-human transmission. Further sharing of information relating to the novel coronavirus can aid in both treatment and containment. Ongoing research into viruses can also help make future vaccines more efficient against possible mutations, though this type of research is not without controversy. A case in point is research on the H5N1 virus. H5N1 first appeared in humans in 1997. Of the more than 600 cases that have appeared since then, more than half have resulted in death. However, the virus is not easily transmitted because it must cross from bird to human. Human-to-human transmission of H5N1 is very rare, with only a few suspected incidents in the known history of the disease.
While there is an H5N1 vaccine, it is possible that a new variation of the vaccine would be needed were the virus to mutate into a form that was transmittable between humans. Vaccines can take months or even years to develop, but preliminary research on the virus, before an outbreak, can help speed up development. In December 2011, two separate research labs, one in the United States and one in the Netherlands, sought to publish their research on the H5N1 virus. Over the course of t heir research, these labs had created mutations in the virus that allowed for airborne transmission between ferrets. These mutations also caused other changes, including a decrease in the virus's lethality and robustness (the ability to survive outside the carrier). Publication of the research was delayed due to concerns that the results could increase the risk of accidental release of the virus by encouraging further research, or that the information could be used by terrorist organizations to conduct a biological attack. Eventually, publication of papers by both labs was allowed. However, the scientific community imposed a voluntary moratorium in order to allow the community and regulatory bodies to determine the best practices moving forward. This voluntary ban was lifted for much of the world on Jan. 24, 2013. On Feb. 21, the National Institutes of Health in the United States issued proposed guidelines for federally funded labs working with H5N1.
Once standards are set, decisions will likely be made on a case-by-case basis to allow research to continue. Fear of a pandemic resulting from research on H5N1 continues even after the moratorium was lifted. Opponents of the research cite the possibility that the virus will be accidentally released or intentionally used as a bioweapon, since information in scientific publications would be considered readily available. The Risk-Reward Equation The risk of an accidental release of H5N1 is similar to that of other infectious pathogens currently being studied. Proper safety standards are key, of course, and experts in the field have had a year to determine the best way to proceed, balancing safety and research benefits. Previous work with the virus was conducted at biosafety level three out of four, which requires researchers wearing respirators and disposable gowns to work in pairs in a negative pressure environment. While many of these labs are part of universities, access is controlled either through keyed entry or even palm scanners. There are roughly 40 labs that submitted to the voluntary ban. Those wishing to resume work after the ban was lifted must comply with guidelines requiring strict national oversight and close communication and collaboration with national authorities. The risk of release either through accident or theft cannot be completely eliminated, but given the established parameters the risk is minimal.
The use of the pathogen as a biological weapon requires an assessment of whether a non-state actor would have the capabilities to isolate the
virulent strain, then weaponize and distribute it
. Stratfor has long held the position that while terrorist organizations may have rudimentary capabilities
regarding biological weapons, the likelihood of a successful attack is very low.
Given that the laboratory version of H5N1 -- or any influenza virus, for that matter -- is a contagious pathogen, there would be two possible modes that a nonstate actor would have to instigate an attack. The virus could be refined and then aerosolized and released into a populated area, or an individual could be infected with the virus and sent to freely circulate within a population.
There are severe constraints that make success
using either of these methods unlikely
.
The technology needed to refine and aerosolize a pathogen for a biological attack is beyond
the capability
of most non-state actors. Even if they were able to develop a weapon, other factors such as wind patterns and humidity can render an attack ineffective
.
Using a human carrier
is a less expensive method, but it requires that the biological agent be a contagion
. Additionally, in order to infect the large number of people necessary to start an outbreak, the infected carrier must be mobile while contagious, something
that is doubtful with a serious disease
like small pox.
The carrier
also cannot be visibly ill
because that would limit the necessary human contact. As far as continued research is concerned, there is a risk-reward equation to consider.
The threat of a terrorist attack using biological weapons is very low
. And while it is impossible to predict viral outbreaks, it is important to be able to recognize a new strain of virus that could result in an epidemic or even a pandemic, enabling countries to respond more effectively. All of this hinges on the level of preparedness of developed nations and their ability to rapidly exchange information, conduct research and promote individual awareness of the threat.
-- No extinction – diseases favor limited lethality and medicine will check
Posner 4 (Richard, Judge – US Court of Appeals, Catastrophe: Risk and Response, p. 22-24)
Yet the fact that Homo sapiens has managed to surviveevery diseaseto assail it in the 200,000 years or so of its existence is a source of genuine comfort, at least if the focus is on extinction events. There have been enormously destructive plagues, such as the Black Death, smallpox, and now AIDS, but none has come closeto destroying the entire human race. There is a biological reason. Natural selection favors germs oflimited lethality; they are fitter in an evolutionary sense because their genes are more likely to be spread if the germs do not kill their hosts too quickly. The AIDS virus is an example of a lethal virus, wholly natural, that by lying dormant yet infectious in its host for years maximizes its spread. Yet there is no danger that AIDS will destroy the entire human race.
Thelikelihoodof a natural pandemic that would causethe extinction of the human race is probably even less todaythanin the past(except in prehistoric times, when people lived in small, scattered bands, which would have limited the spread of disease), despite wider human contacts that make it more difficult to localize an infectious disease. Thereason is improvements in medical science. But the comfort is a small one. Pandemics can still impose enormous losses and resist prevention and cure: the lesson of the AIDS pandemic. And there is always a lust time.

Ext – No Bioterror Impact
Bioterror is extremely unlikely – no weapons programs – and current biodefense solves
Orent 09 – Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan, leading freelance science writer, and author of
Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World's Most Dangerous Disease
(Wendy, 7/17. “America’s bioterror bugaboo.” Los Angeles Times. Lexis.)
After the anthrax letter attacks of October 2001, the Bush administration pledged $57 billion to keep the nation safe from bioterror. Since then, the government has created a vast network of laboratories and institutions to track down and block every remotely conceivable form of bioterror threat. The Obama administration seems committed to continuing the biodefense push, having just appointed a zealous bioterror researcher as undersecretary of science and technology in the Department of Homeland Security. But is the threat really as great as we've been led to believe? Last summer, the FBI concluded that the anthrax letters that killed five Americans came not from abroad but from an American laboratory, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
Meanwhile, the Russian bioweapons program was officially shut down in1992, and it's unlikely that anything remaining of it could pose much of a threat. Iraq, it has turned out, had no active program. And Al Qaeda's rudimentary explorations were interrupted, according to an Army War College report, by the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan.
Even if terrorists have bioweapons, there’s no way they can disperse them
Smithson 05 ( Amy E., PhD, project director for biological weapons at the Henry L. Stimson Center. “Likelihood of Terrorists Acquiring and
Using Chemical or Biological Weapons”. http://www.stimson.org/cbw/?SN=CB2001121259]
Terrorists cannot count on just filling the delivery system with agent, pointing the device, and flipping the switch to activate it.Facets that must be deciphered include the concentration of agent in the delivery system, the ways in which the delivery system degrades the potency of the agent, and the right dosage to incapacitate or kill human or animal targets. For open-air delivery, th e meteorological conditions must be taken into account. Biological agents have extreme sensitivity to sunlight, humidity, pollutants in the atmosphere, temperature, and even exposure to oxygen, all of which can kill the microbes. Biological agents can be dispersed in either dry or wet forms. Using a dry agent can boost effectiveness because drying and milling the agent can make the particles very fine, a key factor since particles must range between 1 to 10 ten microns, ideally to 1 to 5, to be breathed into the lungs.
Drying an agent, however, is done through a complex and challenging process that requires a sophistication of equipment and know-how that terrorist organizations are unlikely to possess. The alternative is to develop a wet slurry, which is much easier to produce but a great deal harder to disperse effectively . Wet slurries can clog sprayers and undergo mechanical stresses that can kill 95 percent or more of the microorganisms.

A2: Relations Adv – No Enviro Impact
No bio-d impact – the environment is super resilient
Kareiva et al 12 – Chief Scientist and Vice President, The Nature Conservancy(Peter, Michelle Marvier -professor and department chair of Environment Studies and Sciences at Santa Clara University, Robert Lalasz - director of science communications for The Nature Conservancy, Winter, “Conservation in the Anthropocene,” http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-2/conservation-in-the-anthropocene/)
2. As conservation became a global enterprise in the 1970s and 1980s, the movement's justification for saving nature shifted from spiritual and aesthetic values to focus on biodiversity . Nature was described as primeval, fragile, and at risk of collapse from too much human use and abuse . And indeed, there are consequenceswhenhumans convert landscapes for mining, logging, intensive agriculture, and urban development and when key species or ecosystems are lost.
¶ But ecologists and conservationists have grossly overstated the fragility ofnature, frequently arguing that once an ecosystem is altered, it is gone forever. Some ecologists suggest that if a single species is lost, a whole ecosystem will be in danger of collapse, and that if too much biodiversity is lost, spaceship Earth will start to come apart. Everything, from the expansion of agriculture to rainforest destruction to changing waterways, has been painted as a threat to the delicate inner-workings of our planetary ecosystem.
¶ The fragility trope dates back , at least, to Rachel Carson , who wrote plaintively in Silent Spring of the delicate web of life and warned that perturbing the intricate balance of nature could have disastrous consequences .22 Al Gore made a similar argument in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.23 And the 2005
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment warned darkly that, while the expansion of agriculture and other forms of development have been overwhelmingly positive for the world's poor, ecosystem degradation was simultaneously putting systems in jeopardy of collapse.24
¶ The trouble for conservation is that the data simply do not support the idea of a fragile nature at risk of collapse . Ecologists now know that the disappearance of one species does not necessarily lead to the extinction of any others, much less all others in the same ecosystem . In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function. The American chestnut , once a dominant tree in eastern North America, has been extinguished by a foreign disease, yet the forest ecosystem is surprisingly unaffected. The passenger pigeon , once so abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, went extinct, along with countless other species from the Steller's sea cow to the dodo , with no catastrophic or even measurable effects .
¶ These stories of resilience are not isolated examples -- a thorough review of the scientific literature identified 240 studies of ecosystems following major disturbancessuch as deforestation, mining, oil spills, and other types of pollution. The abundance of plant and animal species as well as other measures of ecosystem function recovered , at least partially, in 173 ( 72 percent) of these studies .25
¶ While global forest cover is continuing to decline, it is rising in the Northern Hemisphere, where "nature" is returning to former agricultural lands .26 Something similar is likely to occur in the Southern Hemisphere, after poor countries achieve a similar level of economic development.
A 2010 report concluded that rainforests that have grown back over abandoned agricultural land had 40 to 70 percent of the species of the original forests .27 Even Indonesian orangutans, which were widely thought to be able to survive only in pristine forests, have been found in surprising numbers in oil palm plantations and degraded lands.28
¶
Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances. Around the Chernobyl nuclear facility, which melted down in 1986, wildlife is thriving, despite the high levels of radiation .29 In the Bikini Atoll, the site of multiple nuclear bomb tests , including the 1954 hydrogen bomb test that boiled the water in the area, the number of coral species has actually increased relative to before the explosions .30 More recently, the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexicowas degraded and consumed by bacteria at a remarkably fast rate .31
¶ Today, coyotes roam downtown Chicago, and peregrine falcons astonish San Franciscans as they sweep down skyscraper canyons to pick off pigeons for their next meal . As we destroy habitats, we create new ones: in the southwestern U nited S tates a rare and federally listed salamander species seems specialized to live in cattle tanks -- to date, it has been found in no other habitat.32 Books have been written about the collapse of cod in the Georges Bank, yet recent trawl data show the biomass of cod has recovered to precollapse levels .33 It's doubtful that books will be written about this cod recovery since it does not play well to an audience somehow addicted to stories of collapse and environmental apocalypse.
¶ Even that classic symbol of fragility -- the polar bear , seemingly stranded on a melting ice block -- may have a good chance of surviving global warming if the changing environment continues to increase the populations and northern ranges of harbor seals and harp seals .
Polar bears evolved from brown bears 200,000 years ago during a cooling period in Earth's history , developing a highly specialized carnivorous diet focused on seals. Thus, the fate of polar bears depends on two opposing trends -- the decline of sea ice and the potential increase of energy-rich prey. The history of life on Earth is of species evolving to take advantage of new environments only to be at risk when the environment changes again.
¶ The wilderness ideal presupposes that there are parts of the world untouched by humankind, but today it is impossible to find a place on Earth that is unmarked

by human activity. The truth is humans have been impacting their natural environment for centuries. The wilderness so beloved by conservationists -- places "untrammeled by man"34 -- never existed, at least not in the last thousand years, and arguably even longer.
-- No extinction
Easterbrook 3 (Gregg, Senior Fellow – New Republic, “We’re All Gonna Die!”, Wired Magazine, July, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday.html?pg=1&topic=&topic_set=)
If we're talking aboutdoomsday - the end of human civilization - many scenariossimply don't measure up. A single nuclear bomb ignited by terrorists, for example, would be awful beyond words, but life would go on. People and machines might converge in ways that you and I would find ghastly, but from the standpoint of the future, they would probably represent an adaptation. Environmentalcollapsemightmake parts of the globe unpleasant, but considering that the biospherehas survived ice ages, itwouldn't be the final curtain. Depression, which has become
10 times more prevalent in Western nations in the postwar era, might grow so widespread that vast numbers of people would refuse to get out of bed, a possibility that Petranek suggested in a doomsday talk at the Technology
Entertainment Design conference in 2002. But Marcel Proust, as miserable as he was, wrote Remembrance of
Things Past while lying in bed.

A2: Relations Adv – Relations Hurt Enviro
-- Turn – relations causes massive environmental problems
Dominguez and de Castro 9 (Jorge I., Professor – International Affairs and Director – Center for International
Affairs – Harvard University, and Rafael Fernandez, Presidential Advisor – International Affairs and – Instituto
Tecnológico Autónomo de México, The United States and Mexico: Between Partnership and Conflict, p. 140-141)
The global ecosystem along the U.S.—Mexican border knows no political border . Events affecting the natural environment north of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo (the same river's respective names in the United States and Mexico) reverberate in the neighboring region south of the same river. The consequences may be positive or negative, but a causal connection is characteristically established. As William Orme noted, " what happens in one side of the border directly affects the other . In the ecology of the borderlands, national sovereignty is an illusion." 19 The intensification of economic transactions along the U.S.—Mexican border since the 1970s had some negative environmental consequences , while the NAFTA negotiating process raised the latter's political salience. Industrial pollution caused by the rapid and unregulated growth of maquiladoras, and the resulting environmental degradation , are among the most serious problems at the border. Maquiladoras long disposed of industrial waste in Mexico without adhering to prevalent international standards or obeying Mexican law; this behavior also imposed environmental costs on the
U.S. side of the border through transborder pollution. The lack of agreed upon binational standards, weak institutions, and weak regulatory enforcement exacerbated these problems.
As a consequence, border communities fought often over transborder water quality, which is threatened by the dumping of raw sewage, fertilizer, and pesticides from agricultural runoff, and the haphazard disposal of industrial waste.20 Border pollution is not just a serious concern but also an example of a long history of gradually deepening cooperation between the United States and Mexico on the most important specifics of this issue.22 In
1889, the two governments pioneered intergovernmental cooperation across the border by creating the International Boundary Commission. In
1944, they renamed and expanded its mandate, calling it the International Boundary and Water Commission. The immediate reason for this renewed mandate was the problem of access to common water sources from the Colorado and Rio Grande/Rio Bravo river basins. Since 1944, the commission focused on broader environmental concerns because of rising salinity in the Colorado River. In August 1983, the United States and
Mexico signed the Border Environmental Agreements known as the La Paz (Baja California) Agreements. These agreements improved transborder cooperation to control sewage flows from Tijuana to San Diego, transportation of hazardous wastes across the land border, hazardous waste spills, air pollution from copper smelters in northern Sonora and southern Arizona, and urban air pollution in twin border cities. In addition, the two governments decided to create respective federal offices for environmental cooperation at the border.22 The La Paz nongovernmental organizations on the U.S. side of the border and organizations in the border region. Before that time, there had been few 4 Agreements also helped to mobilize new environmentalist non-governmental practice. Nonetheless, the environmental problems remain ed severe . On the eve of NAFTA, 25 million tons of raw sewage sowed into the Rio Grande every day 4, Laredo. Water contamination levels were 1,650 times greater than those connected safe for recreational use. At San Elizarjo, Texas, where an aquifer shared Mexico had become contaminated, 90 percent of adults contracted hepatitis "A” Br the border, especially for water treatment.

A2: Relations Adv – Immigration Turns Case
Only immigration reform significantly changes Mexico relations – economics measure can’t hurt relations
– (Peter Hakim, member of the Advisor board and president emeritus of the Inter-American
Dialogue Andrés Rozental, member of the Advisor board, president of Rozental & Asociados in Mexico City and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and Laura Carlsen, director of the Americas program at the Center for
International Policy, Latin America Advisor, February 1, 2013 “Have Prospects for U.S.-Mexican Relations
Improved?” http://www.thedialogue.org/page.cfm?pageID=32&pubID=3222)
A: Andrés Rozental, member of the Advisor board, president of Rozental & Asociados in Mexico City and senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution: "
There will be a change of emphasis from the Mexican side as far as the security relationship goes, with Peña N
.
He has already moved away from the constant statements made by his predecessor extolling the number of criminals apprehended and
'successes' in the fight against organized crime.
two
, however,
gun control and
The latter seems to be headed toward a bipartisan agreement that
If
Congress passes a comprehensive reform that allows them to normalize their situation and have a path to legal residency and eventual citizenship,
As for gun control, Mexico would obviously favor a total ban on the sale and possession of assault weapons as the best way to prevent them from crossing the border, but even universal background checks and limits on the number and type of weapons an individual can purchase would be a welcome development. On trade ties, Mexico reached a quarter trillion dollars of total exports and imports in 2012--a hefty portion of that unprecedented amount was with the
United States. As Mexico becomes an increasingly important part of the global supply chain and U.S. companies continue to invest heavily south of the border,
And if Peña Nieto is able to fundamentally reform the country's energy sector, there promises to be even more investment."

A2: Energy Trading Adv – Trade Now
US-Mexico energy trade occurs REGULARLY
Ibarra-Yunez 12 (Dr. Alejandro, Professor of Economics and Public Policy – Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios
Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), “Economic and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities for US-Mexico
Electricity Trade and Cooperation,” Policy Research Project Report 174, May, http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/17560/prp_174-econ_reg_challenges_US_Mex_electricity-
2012.pdf?sequence=5)
Trade in electricity between Mexico and the United States already occurs regularly , although the quantity traded is significantly less than has historically occurred between the United States and Canada. In 2009, net purchases of electricity from Mexico accounted for less than 0.01% of total US supply (EIA 2011). Yet, the history of power flows between Mexico and the US reaches back to 1905 when US utilities began supplying small amounts of power to Mexican border towns isolated from transmission linkages . Power began flowing both ways in the 1950s, after which net transfer between the two countries tended to reverse every decade or so (Gandara 1995). From 1996 until 2003, Mexico was a net importer of electricity from the United
States (Table 4.1). This trend, however, reversed as new generation facilities in Baja California and other northern states came online, and in
2011 the United States imported 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) while exporting 0.6 million MWh (BEG 2006, EIA 2011).

A2: Energy Trading Adv – It’s Impossible
Electricity trading’s impossible without monopoly reform
Bonner and Rozental 9 (Robert C., Former Commissioner – U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Former
Administrator – Drug Enforcement Administration, and Andrѐs, Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Mexico;
Former President and Founder – Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, “Managing the United States-Mexico
Border: Cooperative Solutions to Common Problems,” Pacific Council on International Policy, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/admin/document.doc?id=31)
The sector with perhaps the greatest potential remains energy , especially power generation. Renewable energy mandates in U.S. border states –especially in California- create a vast demand for clean energy, and Mexico has enormous untapped potential; the La Rumorosa area in Baja California alone, for instance, could produce as much as 1,000 megawatts of wind power. Baja California also has substantial potential for solar power (though solar currently remains less commercially viable than wind). The border region of Mexico is also a logical site for nuclear power, given that it is virtually impossible for nuclear plants to obtain permits to construct in Southern California or Phoenix. Finally, there are opportunities for natural gas-fired electricity generation in Chihuahua and Mexicali to serve communities on both sides of the frontier.
At present , however, there is no such a thing as an energy agenda for the border region : no true market for electricity across the border , no binational plan for electricity generation or transmission , and no program to develop new technologies or energy reserves . One significant obstacle to cross-border cooperation on energy is that Mexican law places a state-owned monopoly , the Federal Electricity Commission, in charge of electricity generation and transmission .
Several reforms to this state-owned monopoly are necessary for a cross-border energy market to function, including a standardized investment regime for both countries and direct negotiations between subnational governments across the border .

A2: Energy Trading Adv – No Trading
Energy coop fails – structurally different energy markets
Peach 12 (Dr. Jim, Professor of Economics – New Mexico State University, “Energy Issues of the US-Mexico
Border Region,” Border X Roads, October, http://blog.bnsl.org/?p=329)
The international border creates additional complexity for energy issues in the border region . San Diego and Tijuana
(or El Paso and Juárez) are cities in two different nations but anyone living in the border region can explain that they have more in common than geographic proximity. Interactions across the border include workers who commute, trade flows, cross-border investments, families in which some members live on one side of the border while others live in el otro lado. Traffic flows and long lines at border crossings are almost daily reminders of cross-border interaction. Energy is also a trans-border phenomenon. City pairs in the interior of a nation such as Dallas-Fort Worth may have daunting energy issues, but they do not have an international border to contend with. Border region city pairs (they are not twins as they are sometimes called) are located where two very different national energy systems collide and where trans-border cooperation on energy issues is not exactly easy . Energy prices in Mexico and the US are rarely the same . Total energy consumption per capita in the US is about 4.5 times the comparable figure in Mexico. Electricity consumption per capita in the US is about 6.5 times as large as in Mexico –but Mexico’s per capita electricity consumption is growing at a faster rate than in the US. For each $1,000 of GDP, the US uses more energy than Mexico but the gap is narrowing because US industries have greatly increased their energy efficiency. (The data in this paragraph are from World Bank, Development Indicators as of 2009, the latest year available http://data.worldbank.org/topic/energy-and-mining). The US and Mexican national energy systems also differ in terms of market structure . US petroleum is produced almost exclusively by private firms while in Mexico the oil industry is dominated by a single state owned firm, PEMEX.
For more than fifty years the US has been a large importer of petroleum and for most of that time Mexico has been a large exporter of petroleum –mainly to the US. In the borderlands, consumers and suppliers face the same petroleum related problems as in the two nations. Prices of petroleum (and natural gas) are mainly determined in national and international markets even though there may be small regional price differentials. Figure 1 displays percent changes in inflation adjusted (real) West Texas
Intermediate prices per barrel. The WTI price is a commonly used benchmark price for oil. While many people assume that oil prices (and other energy prices) always increase, what is striking in Figure 1 is that oil prices are highly volatile. Other energy (natural gas, uranium, coal) prices are also highly volatile and confronting this price volatility is a major energy issue that affects consumers, producers, and the business community in the border region. In the US, most but not all electricity is produced and distributed by private (regulated) firms while that is not the case in Mexico . The Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) is the state owned electric company in Mexico. CFE is responsible for nearly all electricity generation, transmission, and distribution in Mexico including the six border-states. While states and municipalities on both sides of the border face challenges to ensure adequate supplies of electricity and a stable electricity grid for a growing population and expanding commerce and industry, they do so in very different regulatory and investment environments. Cross-border transmission of electricity (mainly from Mexico to the US) is already occurring and this phenomenon will probably increase in the future. Historically, the US first exported electricity to Mexico in 1905. NAFTA expanded the possibility of cross-border electricity sales and regulatory agencies in the US such as the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and state agencies responded with appropriate regulatory changes. The potential for cross border trade in electricity generated by renewables is also enhanced by individual state environmental standards, particularly
Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS). RPS standards are state regulations that require a specified percentage of electricity sales in the state to be generated by renewables. Imports of electricity generated by renewables can generally be counted against RPS standards. Increasingly, electricity generation projects on the borderlands (both sides) involve solar or wind generation (Photo 1). While cross-border energy projects can increase efficiency, such projects can also create additional difficulties . For example, in the early 2000s various environmental and citizen groups alleged that power plants being built in Mexicali to provide electricity to southern
California and Arizona did not meet US environmental standards . The debate over whether or not the plants were being built in Mexico to circumvent US law was bitter and intense (see, for example the report by the US Government
Accountability Office on the estimated emissions from the two plants: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-823 ).

A2: Energy Trading Adv – Connectivity Hurts Grid
Connectivity leads to grid instability – turns the case
Terry 12 - Master’s candidate at the University of Denver’s Josef Korbel School of International Studies
(Alison, “POLICY AND PRACTICE IN NORTH AMERICAN ENERGY SECURITY,” International Affairs
Review, 20.3)
As the North American energy networks continue to integrate, they will ¶ become more vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. One example ¶ of failed infrastructure is the August 2003 electrical blackout. The ¶ disturbance centered in Ohio, which is a high-density area of power ¶ transmission lines.96 Due to the integrated electrical grids between the ¶ United States and Canada, the disruption affected eight US states in the ¶ Midwest, and Northeast, as well as parts of Ontario. While it was not ¶ considered a terrorist attack, the incident shows that increased connectivity
¶ also increases vulnerabilities . Just as the electrical grid has areas of highdensity, the major hubs of US oil pipeline and refinery infrastructure are ¶ located near major reserve areas in California, Texas, and Louisiana.97
¶ The increased connectivity of the North American electrical grid ¶ necessitates continental defense strategies to protect critical infrastructure . ¶ One example of an attempt to minimize threats to such critical ¶ infrastructure is the Smart Border Declaration signed by
Canada and the ¶ United States in December 2001. This document includes measures to ¶ encourage information sharing and prioritizes the security of energy ¶ infrastructure from terrorist threats. Integrated energy networks are more ¶ vulnerable to cyber attacks because terrorists or enemies can use them as ¶ opportunities to exploit pieces of hardware with far-reaching connectivity. ¶ Consequently, the three North
American countries must weigh the ease of ¶ use gained by merging their networks with increased risks of physical and ¶ virtual attacks .

A2: Energy Trading Adv – No Grid Collapse
New developments sure up grid stability
Kemp 12 -- Reuters market analyst (John, 4/5/12, "COLUMN-Phasors and blackouts on the U.S. power grid: John
Kemp," http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/05/column-smart-grid-idUSL6E8F59W120120405)
The hoped-for solution to grid instability is something called the North American SynchroPhasor Initiative (NASPI), which sounds like something out of Star Trek but is in fact a collaboration between the federal government and industry to improve grid monitoring and control by using modern communications technology.
More than 500 phasor monitoring units have so far been installed across the transmission network to take precise measurements of frequency, voltage and other aspects of power quality on the grid up to 30 times per second (compared with once every four seconds using conventional technology). Units are synchronised using GPS to enable users to build up a comprehensive real-time picture of how power is flowing across the grid (www.naspi.org/Home.aspx and). It is a scaled-up version of the monitoring system developed by the University of Tennessee's Power Information Technology Laboratory using inexpensive frequency monitors that plug into ordinary wall sockets. Tennessee's FNET project provides highly aggregated data to the public via its website. The systems being developed under NASPI provide a much finer level of detail that will reveal congestion and disturbances on individual transmission lines and particular zones so that grid managers can act quickly to restore balance or isolate failures ()
-- Blackouts won’t hurt the economy
Gaylord 3 (Becky, “Blackout Blues Hit Local Industries”, The Plain Dealer, 8-16, http://www.cleveland.com/blackout/index.ssf?/blackout/more/1061038185297290.html)
The biggest blackout in U.S. history will pinch the nation’s economy onlymodestly , but for some Northeast Ohio manufacturers, the setbacks may linger for weeks. The $10 trillion U.S. economy is so resilient that the power outage’s impact shouldn’t shave significant growth from third-quarter output, economists predicted. Federal tax refunds and consumer spending have fueled recent growth, and much of the productivity disrupted by the brief blackout can be made up through overtime and other measures , said Stuart Hoffman, chief economist at PNC
Bank in Pittsburgh. But the outages walloped some industries crucial to this region, such as steel and automotive.
“For the individual companies that have problems, they are colossal,” said Ken Mayland, president of ClearView
Economics in Pepper Pike.
.

A2: Energy Trading Adv – No Meltdowns Impact
Meltdowns don’t cause extinction (empirics)
WNA 12 (World nuclear association members are responsible for 95% of the world's nuclear power outside of the
U.S., as well as the vast majority of world uranium, conversion and enrichment production, “Safety of Nuclear
Power Reactors”, March 2012, WNA, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf06.html)
In the 1950s attention turned to harnessing the power of the atom in a controlled way, as demonstrated at Chicago in 1942 and subsequently for military research, and applying the steady heat yield to generate electricity. This naturally gave rise to concerns about accidents and their possible effects. However, with nuclear power safety depends on much the same factors as in any comparable industry: intelligent planning, proper design with conservative margins and back-up systems, high-quality components and a well-developed safety culture in operations. A particular nuclear scenario was loss of cooling which resulted in melting of the nuclear reactor core, and this motivated studies on both the physical and chemical possibilities as well as the biological effects of any dispersed radioactivity. Those responsible for nuclear power technology in the
West devoted extraordinary effort to ensuring that a meltdown of the reactor core would not take place, since it was assumed that a meltdown of the core would create a major public hazard, and if uncontained, a tragic accident with likely multiple fatalities. In avoiding such accidents the industry has been very successful. In over 14,500 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation in 32 countries, there have been only three major accidents to nuclear power plants - Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima - the second being of little relevance to reactor design outside the old Soviet bloc. It was not until the late 1970s that detailed analyses and large-scale testing, followed by the 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor, began to make clear that even the worst possible accident in a conventional western nuclear power plant or its fuel would not be likely to cause dramatic public harm . The industry still works hard to minimize the probability of a meltdown accident, but it is now clear that no-one need fear a potential public health catastrophe simply because a fuel meltdown happens. Fukushima has made that clear, with a triple meltdown causing no fatalities or serious radiation doses to anyone, while over two hundred people continued working on the site to mitigate the accident's effects. The decades-long test and analysis program showed that less radioactivity escapes from molten fuel than initially assumed, and that most of this radioactive material is not readily mobilized beyond the immediate internal structure. Thus, even if the containment structure that surrounds all modern nuclear plants were ruptured, as it has been with at least one of the Fukushima reactors, it is still very effective in preventing escape of most radioactivity. It is the laws of physics and the properties of materials that mitigate disaster , more than the required actions by safety equipment or personnel. In fact, licensing approval for new plants now requires that the effects of any core-melt accident must be confined to the plant itself, without the need to evacuate nearby residents. The three significant accidents in the 50-year history of civil nuclear power generation are:
Three Mile Island (USA 1979) where the reactor was severely damaged but radiation was contained and there were no adverse health or environmental consequences Chernobyl (Ukraine 1986) where the destruction of the reactor by steam explosion and fire killed 31 people and had significant health and environmental consequences. The death toll has since increased to about 5 Fukushima (Japan 2011) where three old reactors (together with a fourth) were written off and the effects of loss of cooling due to a huge tsunami were inadequately contained. A table showing all reactor accidents, and a table listing some energy-related accidents with multiple fatalities are appended. These three significant accidents occurred during more than 14,000 reactor-years of civil operation . Of all the accidents and incidents, only the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents resulted in radiation doses to the public greater than those resulting from the exposure to natural sources. The Fukushima accident resulted in some radiation exposure of workers at the plant, but not such as to threaten their health, unlike
Chernobyl. Other incidents (and one 'accident') have been completely confined to the plant. Apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident. Most of the serious radiological injuries and deaths that occur each year (2-4 deaths and many more exposures above regulatory limits) are the result of large uncontrolled radiation sources, such as abandoned medical or industrial equipment. (There have also been a number of accidents in experimental reactors and in one military plutonium-producing pile - at Windscale, UK, in 1957, but none of these resulted in loss of life outside the actual plant, or long-term environmental contamination.) See also Table 2 in Appendix.
-- No risk of reactor meltdown
UIC 7 (Uranium Information Center, “Safety of Nuclear Power Reactors”, Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper, 14, http://www.uic.com.au/nip14.htm)
Those responsible for nuclear power technology in the west devoted extraordinary effort to ensuring that a meltdown of the reactor core would not take place, since it was assumed that a meltdown of the core would create a major public hazard, and if uncontained, a tragic accident with likely fatalities. In avoiding such accidents the industry has been outstandingly successful.
In 12,000 cumulative reactor-years of commercial operation in 32 countries, there have been only two major accidents to nuclear power plants - Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the latter being of little relevance outside the old Soviet bloc. It was not until the late 1970s that detailed analyses and large-scale testing, followed by the 1979 meltdown of the Three Mile Island reactor, began to make clear that even the worst possible accident in a conventional western nuclear power plant or its fuel could not cause dramatic public harm. The industry still works hard to minimize the probability of a meltdown accident, but it is now clear that noone need fear a potential public health catastrophe.The decades-long test and analysis program showed that less radioactivity escapes from molten fuel than initially assumed, and that this radioactive material is not readily mobilized beyond the immediate internal structure. Thus, even if the containment structure that surrounds all

modern nuclear plants were ruptured, it would still be highly effective in preventing escape of radioactivity. It is the laws of physics and the properties of materials that preclude disaster, not the required actions by safety equipment or personnel. In fact, licensing approval now requires that the effects of any core-melt accident must be confined to the plant itself, without the need to evacuate nearby residents. The two significant accidents in the 50-year history of civil nuclear power generation are: •Three Mile Island (USA 1979) where the reactor was severely damaged but radiation was contained and there were no adverse health or environmental consequences •Chernobyl (Ukraine 1986) where the destruction of the reactor by steam explosion and fire killed 31 people and had significant health and environmental consequences. The death toll has since increased to about 56. A table showing all reactor accidents, and a table listing some energy-related accidents with multiple fatalities are appended. These two significant accidents occurred during more than 12,000 reactor-years of civil operation. Of all the accidents and incidents, only the Chernobyl accident resulted in radiation doses to the public greater than those resulting from the exposure to natural sources. Other incidents (and one 'accident') have been completely confined to the plant. Apart from Chernobyl, no nuclear workers or members of the public have ever died as a result of exposure to radiation due to a commercial nuclear reactor incident. Most of the serious radiological injuries and deaths that occur each year (2-4 deaths and many more exposures above regulatory limits) are the result of large uncontrolled radiation sources, such as abandoned medical or industrial equipment.
(There have also been a number of accidents in experimental reactors and in one military plutonium-producing pile - at Windscale, UK, in 1957, but none of these resulted in loss of life outside the actual plant, or long-term environmental contamination.) It should be emphasised that a commercial-type power reactor simply cannot under any circumstances explode like a nuclear bomb.The
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was set up by the United Nations in 1957. One of its functions was to act as an auditor of world nuclear safety. It prescribes safety procedures and the reporting of even minor incidents.
Its role has been strengthened in the last decade. Every country which operates nuclear power plants has a nuclear safety inspectorate and all of these work closely with the IAEA.
-- Even the worst case scenario will be contained and cause no harm
McGregor 1 (Douglas S., Director of the Semiconductor Materials and Radiological Technologies Laboratory –
University of Michigan, Ph.D – Nuclear Engineering, Rethinking Nuclear Power, New American, 17(9), 4-23, http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2001/04-23-2001/vo17no09_nuclear.htm)
The most serious accident possible is the release of radioactive material into the environment.
It is not a nuclear explosion , for the simple reason that the uranium fuel used in a nuclear power plant does not contain a high enough concentration of U-235 to make a nuclear explosion even theoretically possible . To make such an explosion possible, the uranium fuel inside a reactor would have to be enriched to about 90 percent U-235, but it is only enriched to about 3.5 percent . The worst nuclear power plant disaster in history occurred when the Chernobyl reactor in the Ukraine experienced a heat (and gas) not nuclear explosion. If such an explosion were to have occurred in a Western nuclear power plant, the explosion would have been contained because all Western plants are required to have a containment building a solid structure of steel-reinforced concrete that completely encapsulates the nuclear reactor vessel. The Chernobyl plant did not have this fundamental safety structure, and so the explosion blew the top of the reactor building off, spewing radiation and reactor core pieces into the air. But the design of the Chernobyl plant was inferior in other waysas well. Unlike the Chernobyl reactor , Western power plant nuclear reactors are designed, under operating conditions, to have negative power coefficients of reactivity that makesuchrunaway accidents impossible .
The bottom line is that the flawed Chernobyl nuclear power plant would never have been licensed to operate in the U.S. or any other Western country, and the accident that occurred there simply would not occur in a Western nuclear power plant. The circumstances surrounding the Chernobyl accident were in many ways the worst possible, with an exposed reactor core and an open building. Thirty-one plant workers and firemen died directly from radiation exposure at Chernobyl. Also, it is projected that over 3,400 local residents will eventually acquire and die of cancer due to their exposure to the radioactive fallout. By comparison, within a matter of hours more than 2,300 were killed and as many as 200,000 others injured in a non-nuclear accident when a toxic gas cloud escaped from the Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. According to conventional wisdom , the worst nuclear power accident in this country occurred at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania.
Yet, in that incident, nobody was killed and nobody was injured . One exception, perhaps, could be Dr. Edward Teller, the distinguished pro-nuclear physicist who played a key role in the development of nuclear advancements during and after World War II. In a two-page ad appearing in the Wall Street Journal for July 31, 1979, Dr. Teller explained that, at 71 years of age and working 20 hours per day, the strain of refuting some of the anti-nuclear "propaganda that Ralph Nader, Jane Fonda and their ilk" were
"spewing to the news media" in the wake of Three Mile Island led to a heart attack. He continued: "You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous." The event at Three Mile Island occurred from faulty instrumentation that gave erroneous readings for the reactor vessel environment.
Due to a series of equipment failures and human errors, plus inadequate instrumentation, the reactor core was compromised and underwent a partial melt.
Yet radioactive water released from the core configuration was safely confined within the containment building structure, and very little radiation was released into the environment. The Three Mile Island incident actually underscores the relative safety of nuclear power plants since the safety devices worked as designed and prevented any injury from occurring to humans, animals, or the environment. Moreover, the accident directly resulted in improved procedures, instrumentation, and safety systems, and now our nuclear reactor power plants are substantially safer. The Three Mile Island Unit 2 core has been cleaned up and the radioactive deposit properly stored; Three Mile Island Unit 1 is still operating with an impeccable record.

A2: Warming Adv – No Mexico Renewables
Doublebind – either Mexican renewable energy is cheap and doesn’t qualify for state funding, or it’s expensive and never gets adopted
Lokey 11
(Elizabeth Lokey, Environmental Studies, University of Colorado, “Barriers to clean development mechanism renewable energy projects in Mexico”, Renewable Energy Vol. 34 Issue 3, 504-508, Science Direct)
The most significant hurdle to renewable energy development is that CFE, which controls most of the country's generation, currently cannot build renewable energy projects because the levelized cost of all types of renewable energy in the country is more expensive than conventional energy. According to federal law, CFE must develop new capacity additions that will provide the cheapest electricity for citizens . Currently, there are no regulatory mandates like domestic renewable energy targets or financial incentives like feed-in tariffs, which offer generators a fixed price for renewable energy based on installed capacity or energy produced, or production tax credits, which provide extra revenue per kWh of renewable energy produced, to make this type of generation competitive with fossil-fuel based generation. Also, in the planning process for new capacity additions, there is no incorporation of a future carbon tax, which would make renewables more competitive with conventional energy . The revenue that can be derived from the CDM for renewable energy projects is also not a part of the economic analysis made when considering new capacity additions [16].
If a project does not pass the financial analysis and get selected as the least-cost technology, then it is not published in the long-term planning process book that is presented before Congress and passed yearly. Capacity additions that are not in this book will not be considered for CFE development. However, if renewable energy is found to be the least-cost option and published in the long-term planning book, then this renewable energy would most likely not qualify for CDM revenues because it would fail both financial and regulatory additionality tests, which require that the project cause emission reductions beyond what would have occurred in a business-as-usual scenario [16].

A2: Warming Adv – No Latin America Renewables
Latin America will never adopt renewables – fossil fuels are too economically viable and oil lobby.
Meisen and Krumpel 09 – President of the Global Energy Network Institute / Research-Associate at GENI (Peter and Sebastian, “Renewable Energy Potential of Latin America”, December 2009; < http://www.geni.org/globalenergy/research/renewable-energy-potential-of-latinamerica/Potential%20of%20Renewables%20in%20Latin%20America-edited-12-16%20_Letter_.pdf>)
In reality the situation of renewable energies in Latin America is not as positive or optimistic as we might want to think, or as certain statistical data lead us to believe. There are many problems associated with the implementation of renewables as well as their impact on the environment and society. In this context, the main problem for renewable energies in Latin America is in the way energy and development policies have been construct ed. In most cases, energy policies and strategies in Latin America have excluded renewables and other alternatives as being too costly and technologically unfeasible, or by arguing that the country does not have the capabilities to implement them. The easiest explanation for this, and one which is usually mentioned, is the lack of incentive and foresight.
Since the region has an abundance of resources such as oil, gas, and hydro, it is in general easier, cheaper and more technically feasible to keep exploiting conventional energy resources than to in vest in renewable energies or create appropriate renewable energy policies . Another common explanation is that the development of renewable energies clash wi th the interest of powerful players, particularly large energy companies, and, therefore, there are few incentives to promote them.

A2: Warming Adv – Renewables Don’t Solve Warming
Renewables can’t solve warming – they supplement, not replace, dirty energy. (Good turn on the cap K – see: last few lines)
Angus 12
– ecosocialist advocate, citing an extensive study by Richard York, professor at the University of Oregon with an MS in Environmental Studies from Bemidji State University (Iran, “Green energy won’t save the earth without social change”, 3/21/12; < http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/03/21/green-energy-alone-wont-save-theearth)
The most popular techno-fix for global warming is green energy. If energy companies would only deploy wind, hydro, solar, geothermal or nuclear, then emission-intensive fossil fuels will eventually disappear . But will that actually work? A new study by Richard York of the University of Oregon shows that it isn’t that simple. Rather than displacing fossil fuels, green energy sources have proven to be mostly additive. “Do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels?” published this month in Nature Climate Change, discusses what happened when alternative energy sources were introduced in countries around the world, over the past fifty years. Contrary to the accepted wisdom that new green energy replaces fossil-fuel use, York found that on average each unit of energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than a quarter of a unit of energy use from fossil-fuel sources. The picture is worse with electricity, where each new unit generated from green sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.
York writes: “Based on all of the results presented above, the answer to the question presented in the title of this paper – do alternative energy sources displace fossil fuels? – is yes, but only very modestly.
The common assumption that the expansion of production of alternative energy will suppress fossil-fuel energy production in equal proportion is clearly wrong .” Why don’t the new sources replace the old? York identifies two key reasons: the inertia of a huge existing fossilfuel infrastructure, and the power and influence of the coal and oil corporations. “The failure of non-fossil energy sources to displace fossil ones is probably in part attributable to the established energy system where there is a lock-in to using fossil fuels as the base energy source because of their long-standing prevalence and existing infrastructure and to the political and economic power of the fossil-fuel industry .
” In other words, eliminating fossil-fuel as an energy source is at least as much a social and political problem as a technical one. “Of course all societies need energy. So, obviously, if societies are to stop using fossil fuels they must have other energy sources. However, the results from the analyses presented here indicate that the shift away from fossil fuel does not happen inevitably with the expansion of non-fossil-fuel sources, or at least in the political and economic contexts that have been dominant over the past fifty years around the world…. “The most effective strategy for curbing carbon emissions is likely to be one that aims to not only develop non-fossil energy sources, but also to find ways to alter political and economic contexts so that fossil-fuel energy is more easily displaced and to curtail the growth in energy consumption as much as possible. “A general implication of these findings is that polices aimed at addressing global climate change should not focus principally on developing technological fixes , but should also take into account human behaviour in the context of political, economic and social systems.” The evidence shows that simply introducing green energy isn’t enough: the introduction must be accompanied by “explicit policies aimed at reducing carbon emissions.” The article is published in a scientific journal, where political and social conclusions can only be expressed in muted form. But Richard York’s research and conclusions reinforce the argument that he and his co-authors (John Bellamy Foster and Brett
Clark) made more explicitly in their recent book, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Planet. “We are confronting the question of a terminal crisis, threatening most life on the planet, civilization, and the very existence of future generations. … attempts to solve this through technological fixes, market magic, and the idea of a ‘sustainable capitalism’ are mere forms of ecological denial, since they ignore the inherent destructiveness of the current system of unsustainable development – capitalism.”

A2: Warming Adv – Mexico Renewables Now
Mexican renewables high now
Miller and DeLeon 9 - *Stephanie, consultant on U.S.-Latin America relations and was formerly the Research
Associate for the Americas Project on the National Security Team. Born in Venezuela with family from Colombia,
Miller earned her degree from Duke University in International Comparative Studies with a focus on Latin America.
She currently lives in Bogotá, Colombia, **Rudy, Senior Vice President of National Security and International
Policy at American Progress
(“Transcending the Rio Grande,” http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/04/pdf/mexico.pdf)
Mexico’s energy consumption is growing more rapidly than more developed countries,
¶ and conventional energy sources are unable to meet a considerable portion of this growing demand.48 As a result, renewable energy sources are uniquely suited to meet
Mexico’s
¶ growing energy demand as well as fulfill Mexico’s renewed commitment to diversifying its ¶ energy matrix to include more sustainable sources of energy.Along with the highly noted ¶ energy reform legislation passed by the Mexican Congress in October of 2008, two laws ¶ were passed that focus exclusively on developing Mexican alternative energy and on the ¶ creation of a national program to expand Mexico’s renewable energy matrix.
49 In addition, ¶ a Fund for the Energy Transition and Sustainable Use of Energy was established with ¶ resources of 3 billion pesos annually to support projects for energy efficiency, renewable ¶ energy, and diversification of sustainable energy sources .
Mexican renewables are inevitable
Ptashnik 11 – MS in History @ CCNY, Antioch NE, former Vermont Senator
(Ben, “Renewable Energy in Mexico,” http://www.solarsanmiguel.com.mx/english/2011/03/10/renewable-energyin-mexico/)
Mexico is on the verge of a solar and wind energy revolution, similar to the growth of these technologies in
Europe, China, Japan and North America, where state-sponsored subsidies and favourable regulations have advanced the solar and wind energy industries to significant levels . Renewable energies have become major players in the advanced industrial states, carving a strong niche out of the multi-trillion dollar energy-sector: European countries such as Germany,
Denmark and Spain are well on their way to eliminating dependence on gas and other fossil fuels for producing electricity, while creating
“green jobs”. Denmark has not only become self-sufficient in electricity, but this small country of six million is now the world’s largest producer of wind turbines thanks to government policies aimed at energy-sustainability, and to carbon reduction policies born from public concerns regarding global climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
¶ It is expected that newly emerging industrial nations such as
Mexico, Brazil, India and China, will also inevitably shed their dependence on fossil fuels, and will embrace the fountains of free and limitless sun and wind energies. This transition will take time. Many emerging industrial nations feel that they must first grow their economies and catch up with the developed industrial states, and later worry about their “carbon footprint”. In fact China is commissioning a new coal-burning plant every week. In Mexico, the energy ministers were always chosen from PEMEX, the national petroleum monopoly, and so naturally much of the energy policy momentum for decades has focused on petroleum and natural gas plants to produce electricity.
President Calderon was the first exception when he was appointed Energy minister during the Fox administration. There are still those within the CFE bureaucracy and governmental agencies who are promoting nuclear and coal to replace oil and gas.
¶ Mexico is particularly well endowed with immense sun and wind resources . Mexico is rated the third best country on Earth for potential solar production, and there are great wind resources throughout the Republic. Mexico now has wind farms in Oaxaca and Baja California, and one solar park in Aguascalientes. Thousands of solar photovoltaic systems that produce electricity have been installed all over Mexico in homes and businesses, and many tens of thousands of solar hot water boilers are now in operation here. It should be recognized that a paradigm shift to renewable energy is a slow process, and will require great effort and promotion from the private sector and from the environmentalist community.
¶ It is worth noting that in the USA a thirty-year struggle between alternative energy advocates and private oil, gas and coal energy companies has markedly slowed down progress towards energy sustainability. Mexico now has net metering throughout the Republic, while ten States in the USA still do not have regulations allowing home power producers to connect their solar or wind system to the electric grid. In 2010 lobbyists from the fossil-fuel industries managed to torpedo efforts in Congress at legislation promoting renewable energy and carbon reduction.
¶ So Mexico is making relatively great progress in a short time , and has begun the climb out of its dependence on fossil fuels with government energy-sector policies and goals aimed at promoting renewable energy. Mexico’s accelerated commitment to solar and wind made a leap forward with the signing of a new
Energy Law in 2008, permitting consumers and businesses to sell power to the grid for credit .
¶ This coincided with the announcement that Mexico’s largest oil reserve, the Cantarel oil field in Campeche, had depleted by over 35%. Mexico’s electric power grid is dependent for 74% of its electricity production on gas and oil, and recently Mexico has become a net importer of gas (40% is now imported from the USA). As fossil-fuel resources diminish it is inevitable that Mexico will be compelled to move inexorably to renewable energy .

A2: Energy Shortages Add-on – No Crisis
No crisis coming – their author
Ibarra-Yunez 12 (Dr. Alejandro, Professor of Economics and Public Policy – Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios
Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), “Economic and Regulatory Challenges and Opportunities for US-Mexico
Electricity Trade and Cooperation,” Policy Research Project Report 174, May, http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/17560/prp_174-econ_reg_challenges_US_Mex_electricity-
2012.pdf?sequence=5)
The border region continues to serve as the principal base for industrial output in each country . In both Mexico and the
United States, the combined border state GDPs in 2006 were equivalent to approximately one-fourth of total national GDP (25% in Mexico,
23.7% in the United States), and combined border-state GDPs in 2006 were approximately US$3.3 trillion. It is expected that border state
GDPs in both countries will double every 17 years, whereas Mexican GDP will require 23 years and US GDP 20 years . In part, border-state GDP has grown more rapidly because population has grown, leading to more workers and more output . The total actual value of merchandise trade (both exports and imports to and from the US and Mexico) in 2008 was
$367 billion —a 266% increase since 1994. A combination of favorable tax policies and access to export markets will likely serve to maintain this trend in the future . Additionally, deep production chains by industrial sectors and “just-in-time” production dynamics, call for border state growth in economic activity and demand for all critical inputs. This fact in combination with higher rates of immigration and population growth, have resulted in forecasts of electricity growth that maintain stable , continued growth in electricity demand well above the national average .

A2: Energy Shortages – No Mexico Collapse
Mexico will not collapse or become a failed state – political will solves
Bay 09 [ Austin, 1/20. “Machiavelli, Joint Forces Command and Mexico” http://www.strategypage.com/on_point/2009012023470.aspx]
. "
,"
Foreign Minister Patricia
Espinosa said
this week, responding to sensationalized headlines that suggested the "The Joint Operating Environment (JOE)" study (published in November 2008) by U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM) was predicting Mexico's collapse .
... "
But fear sells. Sensationalists latched onto the comments in the document that cited
Pakistan and Mexico worst-case "rapid collapse" scenarios, which -- if they occurred -- would damage U.S. interests.
( or ignored)
.
.
" This intellectual preparation may or may not have organizational and technological consequences, but the intellectual exploration has value. Classicists understand. In
Chapter 14 of "The Prince," Machiavelli writes of "Philopoemen, the leader of the Achaeans" who was "praised by the historians for ... having in peacetime never thought of anything else except military strategy." As he traveled he would "invite discussion" from his friends -- likely the men who would be his subordinate commanders in wartime. They would speculate on how they might defend a hill they were passing, maneuver in the terrain for advantage or even retreat. Machiavelli writes: "Because of these continuous speculations," Philopoemen "knew how to cope with all and every emergency." Philopoemen, however, didn't have to deal with instantaneous, global selective quotation and hype. No doubt a Mexican collapse would have huge effects on the U.S.; so would a collapse of Canada, which has also been war-gamed. In the latest edition of "A Quick and Dirty Guide to
War" (fourth edition, Paladin Press), James F. Dunnigan and I revisit a "Canadian collapse" scenario first war-gamed in 1990. It is an analytic exercise speculating on the consequences of Quebec separating from the rest of Canada. Any direct
, and it isn't clear that the central government has the power or political will to address fundamental ethnic, economic, demographic and ideological challenges .
President Felipe
.
Even accounting for Chiapas (Maya land) and numerous wannabe separatists,
.
. ( retired) Barry
to the West Point social sciences department on Mexico
(memo dated Dec. 29, 2008 )
and provides sound advice to U.S. policymakers: "Now is the time during the opening months of a new U.S. administration to jointly commit to a fully resourced major partnership as political equals of the Mexican government … Specifically, we must support the government of Mexico's efforts to confront the ultra violent drug cartels. We must do so in ways that are acceptable to the Mexican polity and that take into account Mexican sensitivities to sovereignty. The U.S. government cannot impose a solution .
.
" McCaffrey's report also noted: "
the "Limpiemos Mexico"
." This is not rhetoric.
."
- it is a long war, but it is a war
.

A2: Energy Shortages Add-on – No Mexico Econ Impact
-- Empirically denied – the 1994 Peso Crisis should have caused the impact – it didn’t
-- Mexican economy is resilient
FA 8 (Financial Advisor, “Take It Juan Day At A Time”, 6-12, Lexis)
In Mexico, the government is also planning to spend a vast amount of money, some $230bn, on motorways, railways, airports, electricity, oil refineries and oil production between now and 2010, with $50bn being invested this year alone. Despite the high exposure to the US economy, Mexico's resilience has surprised analysts that were expecting a significant slowdown . During the last US recession of 2000, Mexico was badly hit because its economy lacked drivers other than exports to the US. Today, the Mexican economy is much more balanced, banks have started to lend and solid finances are allowing the government to have countercyclical fiscal in place , using the windfall from oil revenues for social spending and infrastructure investing. At present we are finding compelling investment opportunities on the Mexican wireless, infrastructure and housing sectors.
-- DA turns the case – U.S. key to Mexican growth
Mozee 8 (Carla, Reporter – MarketWatch, “Investors to Confront Higher Inflation”, Market Watch, 7-4, Lexis)
A front-burner concern for many strategists is economic growth, as about 80% of the country's exports are sent to the U.S. "The country has been resilient, despite the U.S. slowdown," said Saadi, who recalled the deep impact that the U.S. recession in the early 1990s had on Mexico.
However, "there is a lag of two semesters, such that if the slowdown continues, Mexico may be affected." Mexico's GDP growth slowed to 2.6% in the first quarter and recent second-quarter data "suggest the Mexican and U.S. economies have re-coupled ," said Nick Chamie at RBC Capital Markets in a recent report. That could leave Mexico's real GDP growth rate "no higher than 2%-2.5% with downside risks," he said.
-- No collapse – the U.S. will bail out Mexico to prevent a depression – empirically proven
Economist 8 (“Mexico’s Resilient Banks”, 5-3, Lexis)
AFTER the 1994 peso crash, the risk of Mexico's difficulties spilling over into Americawas considered so great that the Clinton administration helped bail out its southern neighbour. In the first quarter of 2008, the boot was on the other foot, though the scale was entirely different. Now it was the turn of Banamex, one of Mexico's two largest banks, to help out Citigroup, its crisisstricken parent. Banamex provided $453m of the $1.1 billion Citi earned in net income from its overseas operations between January and
March (Citi lost $5.1 billion overall). You could almost hear Vikram Pandit, Citi 's new chief, mutter "Gracias, compadre."
-- Alt cause – Pemex collapse inevitable – destroys Mexican growth
Smith 4 (Geri, “Pemex: From Gusher to Black Hole?”, Business Week, 12-13, Lexis)
World oil prices are at near-record highs, and Mexico is pumping and exporting more crude than ever before. The country is the world's seventhlargest oil producer and one of the top three suppliers to the U.S., up there with Canada and Saudi Arabia. Yet state oil monopoly Petroleos
Mexicanos ( Pemex) , a giant with $55.9 billion in revenue, is hardly thriving. Indeed, in recent years the company has only been able to make ends meet through massive borrowing, so that it now owes a staggering $42.5 billion, including $24 billion in off-balance-sheet debt. Why? Because Pemex is the Mexican government's cash cow.
The state-run company pays out over 60% of its revenue in royalties and taxes, and those funds pay for a third of the federal government's budget. If oil prices drop or there are no major new discoveries of crude, that could spell big trouble for Pemex -- and Mexico's finances . Pemex' mounting debt has international rating agencies worried. They don't believe the company will default on its obligations, which are considered quasi-sovereign debt and are implicitly guaranteed by the Mexican government. But Pemex' debt could begin to hamper its access to international capital markets unless the government finds other sources of tax revenue to meet its budget. ``Fitch remains concerned about Pemex' significant debt level and its ability to reduce borrowing absent material fiscal reform,'' Fitch Ratings said in a Nov. 24 report. Officials from Pemex and from the
Finance Ministry were unavailable to comment for this story. The question for Pemex, and for Mexico, is what will happen if oil prices head south -- as many analysts predict they will next year. After all, Mexico's foreign-debt crisis in the early 1980s was sparked, in part, by a drop in crude prices. And Pemex' total debt load is four times that of Exxon Mobil Corp.'s -- a company many times its size -- and one of the highest for any oil producer worldwide. To compound the problem, production from Mexico's biggest oil field has peaked. The shallow-water Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico still provides 62% of Mexico's overall crude output, but by 2006 production will begin falling by as much as 14% a year,
Pe- mex says. Mexico is preparing to tap some new, smaller fields, but they will not fill the expected gap in production. `` If we continue accumulating debt and crippling Pemex' ability to function as a normal oil company, we're looking at a time bomb that could have serious financial consequences for the country in less than two years,'' warns Francisco Rojas, a congressman who ran Pemex from 1987 to 1994.

Neolib K – 1NC
The plan is the worst form of neolib – the impact is low wages and decreased international cooperation – vote neg to endorse solidarity against neoliberal imposition
Bacon 11 (David, Author and Writer, “BUILDING A CULTURE OF CROSS BORDER SOLIDARITY,” 9-27, http://talkingunion.wordpress.com/2011/09/27/cross-border-union-solidarity/)
In the period since the North American Free Trade Agreement has come into effect, the economies of the United States and Mexico have become more integrated than ever
. Through Plan Puebla-Panama and partnerships on security, the military and the drug war, the political and economic policies pursued by the U.S. and Mexican governments are also more coordinated than they’ve ever been.
Working people on both sides of the border are not only affected by this integration
.
Workers and their unions in many ways are its object
.
These policies seek to maximize profits and push wages and benefits to the bottom
, manage the flow of people displaced as a result, roll back the rights and social benefits achieved over decades, and weaken working class movements in both countries
. All this makes cooperation and solidarity across the U.S./Mexico border more important than ever. And after a quarter century in which the development of solidarity relationships was interrupted, unions and workers are once again searching out their counterparts and finding effective and appropriate ways to support each other
in this new period. The working class movements of the U.S. and Mexico both began in the decades after the seizure of Mexican territory in the War of 1848, its incorporation into the territory of the U.S., and the unequal relationship cemented by the Treaty of Guadalupe
Hidalgo.
The roots of the cross-border solidarity movement are very deep
, and go back more than a century. They are part of the labor culture of workers and unions on both sides, and have been almost since the beginning of our two labor movements. During the period of the labor upsurge of the
1930s and 40s, most solidarity activity was organized by Mexican workers and unions in support of workers in the U.S. In part, this was due to a point of view among those unions that saw Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, especially along the border, and part of their own constituency. Bert Corona, a leftist born in Juarez, became president of ILWU Local 26 in Los Angeles, and later Humberto Camacho, a Mexican organizer for the United Electrical Workers, helped establish UE Local 1421.
Both Corona and Camacho became the two most influential leaders of the immigrant rights movement through the 1970s, and their militant program called for defending the rights of undocumented workers. Corona, Camacho, and their generation of solidarity and labor activists saw that unions in both countries had a common interest. Labor, they believed, should try to raise the standard of living in both countries, and stop the use of immigrants as a vulnerable labor supply for employers. A deportation wave marked the rise of cold war hysteria. In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, the combination of enforcement and bracero contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year. As a political weapon, deportations were part of a general wave of repression that included firings, and even prison for leftwing and labor activists.
The movement for solidarity among workers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico didn’t begin just with NAFTA
.
Solidarity is an integral and indispensable part of the history
of the labor movement in both countries, and has always been a two-way street.
Mexican unions especially played a key role in the organization of US unions
, some of which would not exist today without that early support. Those early efforts met success through by concentrating on the key role of Mexican workers in the U.S. Today’s circumstances are different, but the migration of people is just as important to solidarity today as it was eighty years ago.
Solidarity has always been a project of the left in each country
.
A strong left produced a base for developing common action, and popularized political ideas that helped workers understand why internationalism was necessary to confront transnational corporations, and the governments and their policies that supported them
. Conversely, the cold war, nationalism, and anti-immigrant hysteria in the U.S., and repression on both sides of the border, were tools used to break those bonds and proscribe those ideas
.
Today those threats are growing again
.
Ties between workers and union in the U.S. and Mexico must grow stronger and become an effective weapon to defeat them
. The growth of cross-border solidarity today is taking place at a time when U.S. penetration of Mexico is growing – economically, politically, and even militarily. While the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico has it’s own special characteristics, it is also part of the creation of a global system of production, distribution and consumption. It is not just a bilateral relationship. Jobs go from the U.S. and Canada to Mexico in order to cut labor costs. But from Mexico those same jobs go China or Bangladesh or dozens of other countries, where labor costs are even lower. As important, the threat to move those jobs, experienced by workers in the U.S. from the 1970s onwards, are now common in Mexico as well. Those threats force concessions on wages, and in
Sony’s huge Nuevo Laredo factory, for instance, were used to make workers agree to an indefinite temporary employment status, even though Mexican law prohibited it. M ultiple production locations undermine unions’ bargaining leverage, since action by workers in a single workplace can’t shut down production for the entire corporation
. The UAW, for instance, was beaten by Caterpillar in large part because even though the union could stop production in the U.S., production in Mexico continued. Companies like Grupo Mexico can use profits gained in mining operations in Peru to subsidize the costs of a strike in Cananea.
The privatization of electricity in Mexico will not just affect Mexicans
.
Already plants built by Sempra Energy and Enron in Mexico are like maquiladoras, selling electricity into the grid across the border
.
If privatization grows, that will have an impact on US unions and jobs, giving even utility unions in the U.S. a reason to help Mexican workers resist it
.
This requires more than just solidarity between unions facing the same employer
.
It requires solidarity in resisting the imposition of neoliberal reforms like privatization and labor law reform as well. At the same time, the concentration of wealth has created a new political situation in both countries. In Mexico, the old governing party, the PRI, functioned as a mediator between organized workers and business. PRI governments used repression to stop the growth of social movements outside the system it controlled. But the government also used negotiations in interest of long-term stability. The interests of the wealthy were protected, but some sections of the population also received social benefits and unions had recognized rights. In 1994, for instance, the government put leaders of Mexico City’s bus union SUTAUR in prison. But then it proceeded to negotiate with them while they were in jail. The victory of Vicente Fox and the PAN in 2000 created a new situation, in which the corporate class, grown rich and powerful because of earlier reforms, no longer desired the same kind of social pact or its political intermediaries. The old corporatist social construct, in which unions had a role, was no longer necessary. Meanwhile employers and the government have been more willing to use force. Unions like SME and miners face, not just repression, but destruction. In the U.S. a similar process took place during the years after the Vietnam War, when corporations made similar decisions. After the PATCO strike was broken by the Federal government, the use of strikebreakers became widespread. Corporations increasingly saw even business unions as unnecessary for maintaining social peace and continued profits. Union organizing became a kind of labor warfare. A whole industry of union busters appeared, and the process set up by U.S. labor law in the 1930s became virtually unusable by workers seeking to organize. Labor law reform, national healthcare, and other basic pro-worker reforms became politically impossible in the post-Vietnam era, even under Democratic presidents whom unions helped elect. Public workers did succeed in organizing during this period, however, and eventually U.S. union strength became more and more concentrated in that sector. But much as the public sector in Mexico came under attack, the U.S. public sector became the target for the U.S. right, for much the same reasons. This too changed the landscape for solidarity, giving the most politically powerful section of the U.S. labor movement, at least potentially, a greater interest in solidarity with Mexican labor. In both countries, the main union battles are now ones to preserve what workers have previously achieved, rather than to make new gains. Mexican unions are enmeshed in the state labor process, in which the government still certifies unions’ existence, and to a large degree controls their bargaining. In the U.S. labor is endangered by economic crisis, falling density, and an increasingly hostile political system. This leads to a rise in nationalism and protectionism, creating new obstacles for solidarity. But as the attacks against unions are growing stronger, solidarity is becoming even more a question of survival. Unions face a basic question on both sides of the border — can they win the battles they face today, especially political ones, without joining their efforts together? Ddespite the flight of many jobs to China, a U.S. economic recession that has caused massive layoffs in border plants, and extreme levels of violence in many border communities, the maquiladora industry in north Mexico is still enormous, with
3000 plants employing over 1.3 million workers. They’ve been the laboratory for the rightwing shift in labor law and labor relations, now being applied to workers across Mexico. The states are a stronghold still of political

conservatism and corporate power, because of the disenfranchisement of the working population. A vibrant and strong labor movement on the border would change Mexico’s politics. The influence of the maquiladoras on U.S. employment and runaway production over the years is undeniable. The growth of labor solidarity in the last two decades between the U.S. and Mexico owes a lot to the border, where U.S. unions first acquired a clear vision of the importance of their relations with Mexican workers. The decline in activity in border factories over the last few years, and in the support from major unions and institutions in both countries for it, is an important weakness in the efforts to build a culture of labor solidarity. In Mexico, the NAFTA debate led to the organization of the Action Network Opposing Free Trade (RMALC), which in turn helped to spark the relationship between the U.E. and the
Authentic Labor Front (FAT). That relationship is a model for solidarity between two unions, based on equality and mutual interest, preserving each union’s ability to make its own decisions autonomously. Most importantly, it has been a relationship based on real campaigns on the ground – organizing drives, strikes, and resistance to proposals like the PRI labor law reform. Rank and file workers in both unions have played an important part in those efforts.
Frustrated with the slow pace of union organizing in Mexico, the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center assisted the formation of the Workers Support Center (CAT) in Puebla, which led to pitched battles in the state’s maquiladoras, and some important victories. The first came at Mex Mode (Kuk Dong), where the CAT helped set up an independent union, and United Students Against Sweatshops then successfully pressured Nike Corporation into forcing the sweatshop’s management to recognize it and bargain. Recently, the CAT helped workers at a Johnson Controls plant to organize. The UAW in the U.S., which had earlier organized plants of the same company, pressured it into recognizing the union in Puebla. The Mexican miners union, “los mineros”, have begun a process of merging with the United Steel Workers. The mineros are locked in an all-out conflict with the Mexican government and Grupo Mexico in a strike in
Cananea, which has gone on for four years. The decision by the mineros and USW to draw together rises from their joint struggles in the mines along the U.S./Mexico border. Workers in U.S. and Mexican mines have a long history of mutual support, even family relationships. While the cold war restrained such support activity for some years, the Cananea strike in 1998 restarted their relationship. After three years the government and Grupo Mexico finally used armed force to reopen the Cananea mine, but they had to do it in the face of numerous decisions declaring such action unconstitutional and illegal. Reopening the mine is one of the clearest examples of the unwillingness of the
Mexican government and large corporations to respect the rule of law. “We don’t want to live in a country that’s attracting jobs from other countries like the US and Canada, using the competitive advantage of low wages, the lack of enforcement of labor laws, and even ecological damage,” says telephone union leader Francisco Hernandez Juarez. “These jobs are bound to be temporary anyway, they don’t give us any permanent benefit, and eventually when there’s some unfavorable event, they move to countries where the labor is even cheaper. The majority of Mexicans are being plunged into poverty. It will get worse if we continue depending exclusively on producing for foreign markets, especially the United States, and if we ignore our domestic market. We won’t accept turning into a maquiladora country that’s attractive simply because of its cheap labor. Through our unions, we want to establish more complex and complete labor relations, that permit us to be competitive in making more sophisticated products.” The fight over that political direction is at the heart of the Mexican government’s attack on the Mexican Electrical
Workers (SME). Here solidarity efforts from the U.S. are not based on a fight against a common employer, but instead challenge the free trade and free market reforms behind the attack on the Mexican union. President Calderon declared Mexico’s oldest and most progressive major union “non-existent” in October of 2009. He dissolved the state-owned Power and Light Company for central Mexico, and fired all of the SME’s 44,000 members who worked there. Most Mexicans believe this is a prelude to privatizing the electrical industry. Already, despite the Constitutional prohibition, almost half of the electricity generated in the country comes from private producers. Despite the attacks, the union has been able to win back its legal recognition, and is fighting for the rights and jobs of the 16,000 members who have refused to accept their termination. US unions stayed out of previous fights over privatization, especially around electrical generation, in part because the SME is still affiliated to the World Federation of Trade Unions. The WFTU was organized when the UN was founded, originally with CIO participation. But almost all US unions later abandoned it at the beginning of the cold war. The WFTU became the rival of the AFL-dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions. In Mexico, however, that cold war barrier began to soften after the leadership of the AFL-CIO changed, and John Sweeney became president. As the Mexico/U.S. labor solidarity movement grew, so did the number of U.S. activists who saw the important role the SME plays in Mexican politics. They respected its democratic structure and strong contract. In earlier confrontations with Mexican administrations, unions like the U.E., whose relationship with the SME goes back decades, mobilized U.S. support Delegations of SME leaders came to the U.S., hosted by the San Francisco chapter of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement and local labor councils. Their efforts led eventually to press conferences and meetings between SME and AFL-
CIO leaders in Washington DC, and complaints at the ILO and under NAFTA’s labor side agreement. In February five international union bodies, the International Metalworkers’ Federation (IMF), International Federation of
Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF), UNI Global Union, and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), cooperated in organizing actions in 40 countries. Over 50,000 workers, students and human rights activists demonstrated at Mexican consulates or otherwise showed their public opposition to the reform. Twenty-seven actions took place in Mexico itself. When many U.S. workers think about Mexico, they envision it as the place their jobs have gone. If they lost those jobs, then Mexican workers must have gotten them. Ross Perot captured their imagination by referring to Mexico as “the giant sucking sound.” The message is that Mexican workers are the enemy, the ones who “stole your job.” In the U.S., most workers don’t understand the enormous impact NAFTA and neoliberal policies have had on Mexicans. When Mexicans, as a result, cross the border looking for work, many U.S. workers often don’t understand who they are or why they’ve come. One indispensable part of their education is greater contact between Mexican union organizers and their U.S. counterparts. The base for that contact already exists, in the massive movement of people between the two countries. Miners fired in Cananea, or electrical workers fired in Mexico City, become workers in Phoenix, Los Angeles and
New York. Twelve million Mexican workers in the U.S. are a natural base of support for Mexican unions. They bring with them the experience of the battles waged by those unions. The displacement and potential activity of these displaced union members is just one small part of the link between solidarity and the migration of people. The economic crisis in Mexico is getting much worse, with no upturn in sight. Six million Mexicans left for the U.S. in the
NAFTA period, a flow of people that now affects almost every family, even in the most remote parts of country. Migration is becoming a much more important safety valve for the Mexican economy, relieving pressure on its government. It uses the tens of billions of dollars in remittances to take the place of social investment it has cut under pressure from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Teachers’ strikes, like the one in Oaxaca in 2006, mushroom into insurrections, when there is no alternative to migration and an economic system increasingly dependent on remittances.
Economic reforms and displacement create unemployed workers – for border factories, or for U.S. agriculture and meatpacking plants. Displacement creates a reserve army of workers available to corporations as low wage labor. If demand rises, employers don’t have to raise wages. In a time of economic crisis, unemployed people are used to pressure employed workers, making them less demanding, and more fearful of losing their jobs
.

Neolib K – 2NC/A2: Energy Benefits Mexico
US-led renewable energy development is neoliberal and aims to exploit indigenous Mexican cultures which causes deadly skirmishes and turns the case – local control of energy solves all your offense
Vance 12 (Erik, Correspondent – CSM, “The 'wind rush': Green energy blows trouble into Mexico,” Christian
Science Monitor, 1-26, http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2012/0126/The-wind-rush-Green-energy-blowstrouble-into-Mexico)
The Isthmus of Tehuantapec
,
Mexico's narrowest point, is a powerful wind tunnel of air currents whipping through the mountains
that separate the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Here, on the Pacific side, the wind shapes everything
from the miles-long sandspits of Laguna Superior to the landscapes of the indigenous people's hearts
. Howling constantly through thatched roofs, the wind is powerful enough at times to support a grown man leaning back as if in a chair. Gales average 19 miles per hour, slapping waves over the bows of fishing skiffs and sandblasting anyone standing on the beach.
The wind is "sacred" in this village
, says indigenous Huave fisherman Donaciano Victoria
. "We believe that the wind from the north is like a man and the wind from the south is like a woman. And so you must not disrespect the wind." North, in the town of La Venta, one woman says that when she leaves the isthmus, she's struck by how still the rest of the world is.
Others have noticed, too: There are few places like this on earth
.
This isolated region of the state of Oaxaca is one of the world's most continuously windy spots
.
And because wind is a valuable commodity in a world seeking alternative energy, a "wind rush" – reminiscent of the gold and oil rushes of other eras – has swept into the isthmus
.
Wind energy companies have swarmed to the area with big plans for wind farms to power the likes of Coca-Cola plants and Wal-Marts and a push to acquire huge tracts of land to do so
.
The "rush" for land farmed by locals since ancient times has divided the impoverished indigenous population over money, land rights, and changing values
.
Villagers' distrust of outsiders has led to increasing unrest throughout the Pacific edge of the isthmus for several years
. Most recently, around the Laguna Superior, it has included a paralyzing blockade of one village by another and
, in October, a deadly shooting at a demonstration
. "Oaxaca is the center of communal landownership.
There is probably no worse place to make a land deal in Mexico ," says Ben Cokelet, founder of the Project on Organizing, Devel­op­ment, Education, and Research. And yet, with such an overwhelming wind resource, it was bound to attract development
.
The rush for Tehuantapec's wind energy is a green-tinged twist in the age-old story of resource extraction
:
The quest for "clean" energy isn't always so clean
. Farmers shocked at size of turbines Mexico's potential wind energy capacity is enormous: 71 gigawatts, which is 40 percent more than the nation's entire installed electricity-generating capacity, including coal, gas, and hydropower. That potential was behind Mexican President Felipe Calderón's promise at the 2010 United Nations Climate Change
Convention in Cancún to double solar and wind energy production from 3.3 percent of the nation's energy production to 7.6 percent in just two years (a goal Mex­ico is on track to hit later this year). "And," Mr. Calderón noted then, "the Isthmus of Tehuantapec is the area of greatest wind energy potential in the world." Wind developers have known this since the mid-1990s, when they first targeted land here for wind farms. Today, the region's wind production is about 2,500 megawatts (enough to power, given the nearly constant wind, about 870,000 US homes). The first town to see turbines was La Venta (pop. 2,000), north of Laguna Superior. Today, rows of turbines surround the town.
The howl of the wind is now punctuated with the rhythmic sound of windmills
. "Whenever I am working there is this never-ending sound – thrum, thrum, thrum," says Alejo Giron Carraso, a La Venta farmer who works in the shadow of monstrous turbines. For those without land, the development has been a boon. "It's helped us a lot. Our parents are old and we didn't have much. For a lot of the people in this community it's meant a lot of work," says a woman identifying herself as part of the Betanzos family that runs a small La Venta restaurant.
For those with land, who have depended on farming, the economics are more complex
:
Most of the land here is communal
– analogous to native American reservations – held by Zapotecs, the dominant indigenous group in southern Mexico.
Decisions to lease land to devel-opers are made by local leaders, but the prices paid for individual land parcels are a patchwork of values that have led many farmers to feel cheated where turbines are already up and running
.
Many locals who have given up land are illiterate and not savvy about the process
.
They recall meetings with developers in which model windmills the size of dinner platters were shown, leading them to believe they could continue farming around them. But they were shocked to see
15-to-20-story turbines rise across acres of their land
. Some claim their land was permanently damaged by construction or that they are no longer allowed on it
.
Others
say they were pressured to sell land rights for a fraction of their worth and that community leaders got better deals for their land. "The first guy or two that bites gets [$8] per square meter. That's a hundred times better contract than the other people," says Mr.
Cokelet. "But the
98 percent of farmers who sign afterwards sign on for rock-bottom prices
. Those one or two people who bite – they don't bite because they're lucky. They bite because they know someone. And their job ... is to sell it to all their neighbors." While wind developers involved in the La Venta wind farms declined comment on specific contracts, other wind developers in the region admitted in Monitor interviews that the only way to acquire land in this communal setting is to deal with community leaders who may enjoy more benefit from signing first. Indeed, some were flown by the developers to Spain to see working wind farms.
The isthmus has a difficult history with outside investors
. In the late 1800s the United States eyed it as a potential passage to Asia, and later as an alternative to the Panama Canal. In the 1990s, community groups fought off a Japanese attempt to build a shrimp farm in the shallow lagoon. More recently the state-run oil company Pemex has crisscrossed the region with pipelines that have leaked. So the region's notoriously prickly view of outsiders has made the isthmus a difficult place to develop
. "People kept telling me,
'You know we've been experiencing globalization for a really long time,' " says Wendy Call, who has written about the isthmus and notes that the Aztecs invaded first. "But I think there is a sense of fatigue, [that] 'all the other times this has happened it hasn't gone well for us
.' " Most of Tehuantapec's communal land cannot be sold, so companies lease. A standard contract lasts 30 years, with automatic renewal. Wind farm developers in La Venta pay a third to a sixth of what energy developers do in, for example, southeast Wyoming (the only comparably windy place in North America). But comparisons are deceptive. Wind farms pay – either as profit sharing or flat fee – based on how the land is used: for turbines, roads, or power lines. In Wyoming, a landowner may lease hundreds or thousands of acres to a developer for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the isthmus, most farmers control only two to 20 acres: If a turbine doesn't land on one's plot, payout may be as little as $300 to $400 per year.
Profit sharing in developed countries falls close to 5 percent
.
But in Oaxaca the market rate was determined to be 1 percent , says Jorge Me­gías Carrión, director general of Pre­neal, a
Spanish company developing a wind farm here. "So we negotiated with the people, and we saw that we could enlarge that amount of money."
Preneal now pays landowners

1.4 percent of electricity profits . Ac­ciona, another Spanish wind company working here, pays the equivalent of as little as 0.5 percent, according to landowners who signed contracts. In Wyoming, landowners maintain access to their land, but here locals can lose the ability to work their small plots – either by being denied access or because turbine construction destroyed irrigation channels
.
Anti-wind power graffiti now mars the walls of La Venta
, and even some people who got a fair deal say their children are deserting the region because there is no future on the land. Wind farm advocates say benefits go beyond just direct payments; wind farms bring much-needed jobs. Certainly wind farms demand a great deal of labor to build, but once running they are maintained by a few dozen highly skilled people, generally from the outside. However, many jobs are created to service those workers. Still, in recent months people have started taking to the street to express dissatisfaction with La Venta's wind deals
. In October, unrest turned deadly:
A group of wind turbine contractors coming home from a project ran into anti-wind power protesters blocking a highway
. Arguments led to scuffles, and one contractor was shot dead, say witnesses and relatives of the victim. Wind companies say that a majority of locals support wind farms and suggest that unrest arises from old rivalries and misinformation. But one Oaxaca State official disagrees, blaming foul public sentiment on previous administrations being too eager to encourage outside investment. "They didn't have experience in renewable energy. They didn't have experience in wind power. Of course they would have many errors," says Alejandro E. Velasco Hernandez, director of Renewable Energy for the state of Oaxaca, whose National Action Party won state control in 2010 from the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which had held it for 80 years. "But," he adds, "now we have many opportunities to improve."
Wind is sacred – and lucrative
South from La Venta the shores of Laguna Superior are dotted with fishing villages of the Huave people. Here since ancient times, they've dwindled to a population of less than 20,000. The lifestyle in this area is markedly different from that of the north: Pavement gives way to dirt roads; thatched buildings are common, with high walls to counter the wind; women wear traditional clothing; and illiteracy is high. And here, where the wind is embraced personally as a spiritual force, there is a distinct unfriendliness toward outsiders
. Local belief says the "male" wind shaped the land while the "female" wind brings shrimp – the main livelihood. In 2004, Preneal proposed a 300-megawatt wind farm on 4,000 acres in the town of San Dionisio. The company had previously approached the Mexican government to set up offshore turbines in the lagoon, but the government demanded 7 percent of the energy profits. So Preneal approached the town – which is composed of two villages, Pueblo
Nuevo (New Town) on the mainland and the smaller Pueblo Viejo (Old Town) on an "island" attached to land by a thin sandspit. Pueblo Viejo is perfect for turbines, offering offshore conditions in constant wind without having to build in water. Preneal offered the town 1.4 percent of profits, plus $500,000 per year for the right to use Pueblo Viejo land, says Mr. Megías.
The company played informational videos and assured
the Huave governing assembly that turbines are harmless, recall local leaders
.
But when the town appeared ready to vote it down
, says one Pueblo Nuevo community member close to the negotiation who asked not to be named,
Preneal warned that the crucial shrimping industry might be hurt if the company was forced back to plans to build in the lagoon . Preneal's Megías denies that was intended as a threat. The town assembly then unanimously voted to allow a wind farm on town land
.
Money began flowing
to the assembly, but none reached the people who will host the turbines
, says Teodulo Gallegos
Pablo, a fisherman and Pueblo Viejo village authority who votes in the town assembly. "
There have been no payments [to the isolated community].
"
Megías says Preneal paid the assembly but is not responsible for distribution of the money. Mexican law requires "free and informed" consent for the land. But Mr. Gallegos contends that the people of Pueblo Viejo still don't know what they agreed to. Preneal promised that the turbines would only go on an isolated sandspit alongside fishing grounds – yet the contract clearly covers the whole island, and locals report that the company has taken soil samples in their fishing grounds. "At first the people did agree," Gallegos says of his constituents. But not long after the contract was signed "some lawyers explained it to us and that's when the [Viejo] people stood up and said 'no.' " The project is moving forward. "
The playing field is often very unequal
," observes James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
He likens land acquisitions in indigenous areas to colonial-era models of land grabs
. Looking at the Preneal deal in Pueblo Nuevo and Pueblo Viejo, he observes: "No Spanish or any other company would go to the bargaining table on a technical issue without their [own] technicians. And [yet] they expect indigenous people to." Village vs. village In other cases, the wind farms have exacerbated old rivalries
. Perhaps the most divisive and complex fallout from the wind farms is in Santa Maria and San Mateo del Mar – two Huave towns sharing a Manhattansize peninsula. For generations, the towns have feuded over a strip of land that Santa Maria owns but that the more traditional San Mateo con-siders sacred. The village of San Mateo del Mar is renowned among archaeologists for the purest existing form of Huave culture: Women still weave and wear bright huipil (blouses), and men fish from land with nets connected to kites. Roman
Catholic priests are expected to partner with the shamans, who worship natural forces, such as the wind. When Santa Maria sold the rights to the contested land to build devices that harness wind,
San Mateo snapped. Following a series of violent confrontations, San Mateo blockaded the only road to the mainland. "They said they were going to starve us to death," says one Santa Maria farmer. It's not starving, but Santa Maria has certainly withered because getting in and out of the town now is only possible via a fearsome skiff-trip across heavy swells. To visit San Mateo, five miles away, Santa Marians must travel 70 miles by boat, taxi, and bus around the lagoon. The Santa Maria village council says it needs wind turbines now more than ever. "The situation here is destitute," says Tarcio Jimenez José, a village leader. "There's nothing here.... The need forces us." When asked about the local schism, Megías at Preneal blames it on the "violent leaders" in San
Mateo. He said he was not aware of any religious role of wind, though his company published a book celebrating Huave culture and history. Beatriz Gutierrez Luis, a San Mateo teacher and activist, says: "I understand this is supposed to be a form of clean energy. [But] if they gave us all the money in the world, we'd say 'no.' Our children and our grandchildren will depend on the fish, the shrimp, the love of the land, respect for nature, and all of our cosmology we have as an indigenous community." Even so, the wind farm construction in Santa Maria is slated to go ahead, with turbines delivered by boat. Preneal will not do the work: It sold, for $89 million, the rights to the land in San Dionisio and Santa Maria to an Australian investment company and Coca-Cola bottling franchise. The partnership says the disputed land won't be developed.
Locals want control Mexican wind energy capacity has grown fourfold in the past two years
, to 500 megawatts.
It has helped push Mexico's total renewable energy production to 26 percent of total electric output
. Most renewable energy here is provided by foreign companies. But a few locals are now trying to get into the game
. Vincente Vasquez Garcia represents Ixtapec, a community just east of La Venta, which is attempting to create, manage, and profit from its own wind energy in partnership with a wind company
. "We cannot pass up this opportunity for our community," says Mr. Vasquez, who settled as an adult in
Ixtapec and has energy sector experience. "
But ... [w]e want a different kind of wind development
."
The idea
, he says, is for the wind farm to fund benefits such as better schools
. Such models are emerging elsewhere, but without access to expertise, this is nearly impossible for largely illiterate communities. Regardless of who builds them, wind farms are now a permanent fixture on the isthmus skyline. "Before, no one knew who we were," says the La Venta restaurant worker. "Now, when I say, 'I'm from Oaxaca – you know, where the windmills are,' they know where I am from."

Neolib K – 2NC Unsustainable/New Alt
Neoliberalism is unsustainable – promoting new modes of economic thought are the only way to create foundational change
Peters 7-21 (Michael A., Professor of Education – University of Waikato (New Zealand), Professor Emeritus –
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, “The Crisis of Finance Capitalism and the Exhaustion of
Neoliberalism,” Truth Out, 2013, http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17536-the-crisis-of-finance-capitalism-andthe-exhaustion-of-neoliberalism)
In the five years since the Global Financial Crisis , no policies have been developed to effectively ensure against another systemic failure of banking and insurance systems. It has now been five years since the beginnings of the Global Financial Crisis
(GFC). What has been learned - if anything - by international agencies about the nature of the crisis and how to manage macroeconomic policy? In the wake of the crisis, ongoing problems of the Eurozone, slow and fragile growth in the United States and a slowdown of emerging economies, governments around the world have been reviewing the risks to insure economies against the systematic failure of banking and insurance systems . The GFC drew attention to market volatility, to knock-on effects of "too big to fail" entities, the dangers of high levels of public debt and the risks associated with the massive growth and expansiveness of the finance sector vis-a-vis the real productive economy. Suddenly the role of the state and other extra-state agencies is back on the policy agenda as governments explore the scope of new regulatory tools designed to restructure banks, introduce new capital reserve levels and monitor professional standards. Greater thought has been given to the threats that the finance sector pose to the economy as a whole, and
European governments in particular have sought to deal with these problems by pursuing austerity measures designed to cut levels of unsustainable public debt. To read more articles by Michael Peters and other authors in the Public Intellectual Project, click here. The systematic collapse of global financial institutions is in part a result of a number of interrelated problems that indicate the many dimensions of the crisis of finance capitalism and the exhaustion of the neoliberal model of development : The failure, and subsequent recapitalization, nationalization or bailout of major banks leading to an era of "austerity politics" in
Europe; The massive growth of the world derivatives market and consequent over-expansion of national banking systems in relation to the
"productive economy"; The growth of unsustainable sovereign and national debt levels resulting in sequestration and quantitative easing policies in the United States; The attempted regulation of tax evasion strategies by multinational companies ; The tax evasion by wealthy individuals in a system of international tax-havens and trusts; The excessive bonuses and preferential shares given to
CEOs even in the face of poor performance; The way that the EU (acting with the CEB and IMF) has exercised considerable fiscal and economic pressure on democratically elected governments to change policies; The rapid growth of new information technologies that produces a new global complexity of high-frequency trading (HFT) at a speed that eludes national and regional agencies to effective ly track or regulate ; The decline of trust and misalignment of incentives at the very heart of the financial culture of equity markets;
The fraudulent and criminal culture at the highest levels of the finance industry including the deliberate manipulation of the Libor exchange rate, with few criminal convictions except for ponzi-schemers and insider-traders. The heart of Anglophone finance capitalism is built on the twin pillars of Wall Street and the City of London, and the globalization of finance markets has increased this connectivity. In both these poles, the culture of the finance sector has come under increasing scrutiny. The final report of the "Kay Review of Equity Markets and Long-Term
Decision-Making" (July 2012) concluded that "short-termism is a problem in UK equity markets and that the principal causes are the decline of trust and the misalignment of incentives throughout the equity investment chain" (p. 9). The Kay Review identifies "the systematic nature of the problems" and aims to restore trust and confidence in the investment chain through a variety of measures including "the application of fiduciary standards of care" and "diminish[ing] the current role of trading and transactional cultures." Overall, the review focuses on defeating the shorttermism of equity market traders and to reintroduce a concept of good stewardship of financial resources based on transparent and trustworthy financial intermediation. The review is damning of the change in culture that has occurred since the 1970s that has benefitted traders at the expense of users. The financial system has been transformed since the 1970s by globalisation, deregulation, and reregulation. These developments changed the culture of UK financial institutions and the identity and behaviour of the leading participants. A culture which had emphasised trust relationships was replaced by one which gave primacy to trading. The trading culture has influenced the behaviour of market users - companies and savers - as well as market intermediaries. In the long run, the outcome has benefitted market participants more than market users (p. 88). John Kay has been a longtime critic of investment banking, which has been ruthless in dumping risk on hapless consumers. He suggests - as one commentator summarizes it in an interview with Kay - " there is an endemic culture in financial services that makes it incapable of learning from other disciplines ," particularly from the study of complex systems that provides sophisticated analysis and understanding of how systems work and the damage that monocultures can inflict on the whole ecosystem . Kay is an advocate of what he calls "narrow banking,"the purpose of which is to protect the nonfinancial economy from financial instability: A much needed restructuring of the financial services industry would establish a retail sector focused on the needs of consumers, rather than on the promotion of products and the remuneration of producers. We could look forward to an industry in which new technologies are used, not just to reduce costs, but to deliver better services. We should establish a market in which customer satisfaction is the measure of success. That would be an outcome very different from our recent experience. But it is an outcome we can - and must - achieve (p.
5). Perhaps even more significant is Kay's (2009) comment, quoting Simon Johnson's (2009) The Quiet Coup. "The financial services industry is now the most powerful political force in Britain and the US." He goes on to say: If anyone doubted that, the last two years have demonstrated it.
The industry has extracted subsidies and guarantees of extraordinary magnitude from the taxpayer without substantial conditions or significant reform. But the central problems that give rise to the crisis have not been addressed, far less resolved. It is therefore inevitable that crisis will recur (p. 94). Johnson's (2009) critique is even more devastating and plain. He begins his article with the following paragraph: The crash has

laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States . One of the most alarming , says a former chief economist of the
International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government - a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets and is at the center of many emerging-market crises . If the IMF's staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we're running out of time. Sir Mervyn King, the outgoing governor of the Bank of England, in his last public appearance before the Parliament's treasury select committee complained that top banking officials were interfering with regulatory authority to make banks safer by putting pressure on politicians and government officials to water down new rules to
"force lenders to comply with a higher leverage ratio of 3 percent of capital as a proportion of total assets, years ahead of the Basel III global requirements." The culture of banking is endemically fraudulent , and it has bought off all political opposition . The fact is that fraudulent activity has been at the heart of international banking activities as demonstrated by the systematic manipulation of the Libor rate controlled by a small group of banks. The Libor also underpins world derivatives markets worth hundreds of trillions. The Libor scandal involved the manipulation of interest rates based on submissions by selected major banks in London. Banks either inflated or deflated submissions - profiting hugely from such manipulation. The Libor rate is used as the major standard reference for a range of financial products including many derivatives, mortgages and student loans. Some reports indicate that this fraudulent practice has been ongoing since the early 1990s. Given the huge trades of trillions of dollars, manipulated adjusted submissions of less than 1 percent offered easy and sometimes huge returns - up to over a trillion dollars. Despite coverup reviews by major banking authorities, including the IMF and the Bank of International Settlements, the story broke in 2008 and was covered by The Wall Street Journal regulatory investigations in 2011, implicating some of the world's largest banks including Barclays, Citibank, JP Morgan, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), HSBC, Deutsche Bank and nine others spread over three continents, some of which were later fined for their fraudulent behavior. The accusation of knowledge of the rate-fixing has been leveled at the highest authorities including Treasury Secretary Tim Geitner. It is becoming apparent that the practice has existed for quite some time, that it was pervasive, involving the world's major banks, and that Libor fixing operated as a cartel. This interest rate fixing fraud is being pursued currently by the US Department of Justice, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the UK Financial Service Authority among other national regulatory and prosecuting agencies. Part of the story can be judged by the CFTC (2013) case against the Royal Bank of Scotland: The
London Interbank Offered Rate ("Libor") is a leading global benchmark interest rate, critical to international financial markets. Libor is determined each day based on rates submitted by a select panel of banks. The rates contributed by the panel banks are supposed to reflect each bank's honest assessment of the costs of borrowing unsecured funds in the London interbank market, not the profit motives of traders. Over a period of more than four years, RBS violated this fundamental precept and undermined the integrity of Libor for Yen and Swiss Franc (p. 2). It is alleged that beginning in 2006 the RBS made hundreds of manipulations "to manipulate Yen and Swiss Franc Libor and, on numerous occasions, made false Libor submissions to benefit its derivatives and money market trading positions. At times, RBS also aided and abetted other panel banks' attempts to manipulate those same rates" (ibid.). The true gravity of the situation can be gauged by the following paragraph: Libor is the most widely used benchmark interest rate in the world. Approximately $350 trillion of notional swaps and $10 trillion of loans are indexed to
Libor. It is the basis for settlement of interest rate futures and options contracts on many of the world's major futures and options exchanges and is used as a barometer to measure strain in money markets and is often a gauge of the market's expectation of future central bank interest rates. To be sure, Libor is fundamentally critical to financial markets and has an enormously widespread impact on global markets and consumers (p. 4).
The RBS was ordered to desist from the Libor manipulation practices and to pay a fine of $350 million. Other measures were introduced to ensure the integrity of the benchmarking process. The Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards was set up in July 2012 in the wake of the Libor scandal to investigate the culture of UK banking and its professional standards. The final report was released in June 2013. The chairman, Andrew Tyrie, confirmed that banking malpractice was widespread and that both taxpayers and customers had lost out and the economy had suffered. The report "Changing Banking for Good" attempts to make bankers personally responsible, to reform bank governance and strengthen the powers of regulators. Some think that if the report's recommendations are implemented, it will destroy London as a global financial center. Others believe that the report does not go far enough and are skeptical whether the recommendations can or will be implemented.
While proposing new rules and legislation and practical changes to the way in which banks are regulated in the UK is designed to enhance individual accountability and standards of governance, the report, rather than taking the opportunity to fully nationalize the RBS, makes practical recommendations of how to return partly state-owned banks to private ownership, naively believing that its recommendations can change banking culture and regulate it, despite banking's global and increasingly technological nature. This problem-set concerns an essentially fraudulent culture that is a symptom only of a larger transformation that some commentators call "financialization," where the finance sector overshadows the real productive economy and takes control of it .
It is naïve in the extreme to think that a new set of prudential standards can change the finance culture when politicians themselves created it , starting with deregulation policies in the Reagan years, and when financiers hold the highest public office. In one sense, the real power and influence is anchored in a set of beliefs about markets and finance , especially given its demonstrated immense profits in the
2000s with the invention of new financial products and the new information technologies exploiting the speed of transactions. Under these circumstances the financial moguls hardly needed to buy favors or to exercise pressure: It was done for them by politicians and policy-makers.
Banks use the latest mathematical modeling to demonstrate risk profiles that popularized the belief that unregulated markets are virtually foolproof. These attitudes still persist today , despite the crisis and the dangers of further crashes , constituting the greatest single stumbling block to genuine reform . In the five years since the outbreak of the GFC, what progress has been made
- especially in rethinking economic policy? This was the theme of the IMF conference "Rethinking Macro Policy II: First Steps and Early
Lessons" held April 16–17, 2013. The results are not encouraging. In the panel discussion following the conference, Joseph Stiglitz addressed the issue directly: The approximately 100 crises that have occurred during the last 30 years - as liberalization policies became dominant - have given us a wealth of experience and mountains of data . . . The big lesson that this crisis forcibly brought home - one we should have long known - is that economies are not necessarily efficient, stable or self-correcting. Stiglitz draws attention to the need for structural transformation suggesting we may not return to high levels of employment and that reforms have been largely tinkering at the edges. Much of his consideration is devoted to the need for stronger regulation of the global finance industry. The other panel experts were equally pessimistic. George A. Ackerloff reflecting on the two-day conference proceedings used the image of a cat up a tree: "My view of the cat is the poor thing is there in the tree; it's going to fall, and we don't know what to do." Olivier Blanchard, IMF chief economist, suggested that there is no consensus on the future global financial architecture: Rethinking and reforms are both taking place . But we still do not know the final destination , be it for the redefinition of monetary policy, or the contours of financial regulation or the role of macroprudential tools .

We have a general sense of direction, but we are largely navigating by sight. David Romer's remarks are perhaps the most sobering. He asks,
"Where do we stand in terms of averting another financial and macroeconomic disaster?" and provides the answer: My reading of the evidence is that the events of the past few years are not an aberration, but just the most extreme manifestation of a broader pattern. And the relatively modest changes of the type discussed at the conference, and that in some cases policymakers are putting into place, are helpful but unlikely to be enough to prevent future financial shocks from inflicting large economic harms. He concludes: After five years of catastrophic macroeconomic performance, "first steps and early lessons" - to quote the conference title - is not what we should be aiming for. Rather, we should be looking for solutions to the ongoing current crisis and strong measures to minimize the chances of anything similar happening again.
I worry that the reforms we are focusing on are too small to do that and that what is needed is a more fundamental rethinking of the design of our financial system and of our frameworks for macroeconomic policy (bold in original).
The consensus is that what is required is fundamental transformation of finance capitalism and that the current neoliberal model is exhausted but there is no new thinking being generated about what alternatives we might pursue or how countries can regain control of their own destinies . The sophisticated analytics of massive data-sets , latest mathematical tools and rigorous modeling may provide an increasing measure of understanding of what went wrong or what the present dangers are, but these methods and tools of measurement do not provide either imagination or values : the imagination of a new system, a more stable architecture; the values of a system truly redistributive and less damaging to culture, environment and people . For this possibility to occur, I suspect we will need either another crash deeper than the previous one or global revolution: The former seems a lot more likely.

Neolib K – 2NC Grid Link/Movements DA*
Mexican anti-neoliberal movements are succeeding now – the plan’s promotion of private investment in the grid reverses global gains
PW 9 (People’s World, “Mexican Union Fights Privatizing Electrical Grid,” 10-11, http://www.peoplesworld.org/mexican-union-fights-privatizing-electrical-grid/)
In recent years , the Mexican Electricians Union ( SME , Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas) has been a key force in progressive politics in Mexico . It has been able to defend the interests of its members when many other sectors of the
Mexican working class have been beaten down by the combination of the world financial crisis and the anti-labor policies of right wing
Presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. And the union has been at the center of coalition building efforts to fight against imperialism, neoliberalism and corporate globalization, at home and abroad . In other words, the SME has been a thorn in the side of President Calderon and his right wing political party , the PAN (National Action Party). Particularly annoying is that the SME is an obstacle to the government's plan to defund and eventually privatize the central electrical generation and transmission systems based in Mexico City and neighboring central states, controlled now by a public entity ,
Central Light and Power (Luz y Fuerza del Centro). Calderon knows that as long as SME members are in operational control of the electrical grid, privatization moves are likely to run up against militant opposition , the more so since one of the SME's historic achievement has been the organizing of the broadly based National Front Against the Privatization of the Electrical Industry (Frente Nacional en
Contra de la Privatizacion de la Industria Electrica). The SME is also a very active component of the main coalition in Mexico which is opposed to corporate globalization and neoliberalism , and which has made advanced demands including the renegotiation of
NAFTA.

Security K – Link – Mexico*
#SecurityKCantLose
Discourse matters – attempts to secure Mexico causes serial policy failure and turns cooperation
Bonner and Rozental 9 (Robert C., Former Commissioner – U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Former
Administrator – Drug Enforcement Administration, and Andrѐs, Former Deputy Foreign Minister of Mexico;
Former President and Founder – Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, “Managing the United States-Mexico
Border: Cooperative Solutions to Common Problems,” Pacific Council on International Policy, http://www.pacificcouncil.org/admin/document.doc?id=31)
Most people
who do not live along the border or cross it regularly are unaware of
the situation there, the challenges of border management
, or the ways in which both countries are attempting to confront those challenges. For instance, they may not realize that there is no institutional framework for managing aquifers that span the frontier, or (conversely) that collaborative management
of surface waterways is as well established as anyplace on the globe. With regard to security, they may not know that Mexico has no equivalent of the U.S. Border Patrol (which polices the areas between the ports of entry on the U.S. side), nor appreciate what that fact means for border enforcement.
Detailed knowledge of transboundary issues is sometimes scanty
even in the capitals of some border states, from Sacramento to
Monterrey – that is, among those people who might be in the best position to inform their constituencies
. Indeed, although many of us live near the border
, our conversations with experts , officials, representatives of civic groups, ordinary citizens in the border region, and each other gave all of us a much fuller appreciation of the situation along the frontier
. Many challenges at the border are merely visible manifestations of phenomena that extend far beyond the frontier, into the interior of both countries. The trade in illegal drugs, for instance, connects transshipment points in southern Mexico to distributions centers in the north of the U.S. Trafficking is thus not a “border problem”, but rather a binational and international problem that governments try to address in part through enforcement and interdiction at the border. The same is true for undocumented migration. Policies in the interior of both countries also influence natural resource management: the division of shared waterways would be far less problematic if water use policies were more prudent.
Myths about the border abound and cloud wise policy decision-making
.
For example
, coverage of the border region today often focuses on contraband trafficking
, overlooking the fact that contraband is a tiny fraction of merchandise trade
.
Increased attention to the recent surge in violence
in a number of Mexican border towns has only reinforced the view of the border as a lawless, dangerous area
. At the extreme, images of criminality have led to American depictions of Mexico as a “failing state”, whose problems might at any moment spill over into the U.S
.
There is precious little evidence , however, to support either claim
.
Another common myth in both countries is that the other side is the principal source of problems at the border
.
American audiences often view Mexico as primarily responsible for a flood of drugs and undocumented migrants
, overlooking the fact that U.S.
demand and desultory interior enforcement drive both of these phenomena
. Some Mexicans likewise blame the U.S. for contraband flows of guns and money used by traffickers to prosecute their campaigns against each other and the government, neglecting to mention that Mexico’s Customs authority (Aduanas) remains too poorly staffed and funded to engage in any serious effort at interdiction. Even when critics acknowledge “co-responsibility” for problems along the border, they often insist that the other side is not doing enough to address the situation
. Differences in levels of economic development between the United States and Mexico feed these misimpressions. Despite manifest disparities between the two countries, there remain key opportunities for synergy. Law enforcement efforts that lead to the fragmentation and debilitation of criminal organizations and the apprehension of criminals are one case in point; investment in power generation is another. The challenge confronting Mexico and the United States is to mitigate the conflicts that inevitably arise from these pronounced differences between the two countries, while seizing the opportunities they generate. Cooperation Indeed, there is already a great deal of meaningful, mutually beneficial cooperation along the border between the two countries
.
Few Americans are aware that last second transfers of electricity from Mexico prevented a massive blackout in the San Diego area or that inspectors from Baja California were brought north to assist in containing the outbreak of a disease that threatened poultry stocks in California – to pick just two recent examples of assistance from Mexico. Few Mexicans realize that agents from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regularly travel to Mexico to assist in tracing illegal weapons confiscated by Mexican authorities, or appreciate the extent to which American authorities are helping to train and equip Mexican law enforcement authorities. By world standards, collaboration on water is truly striking. Since the conclusion of the 1944 Water
Treaty, only one issue regarding shared riverways (the lining of the AllAmerican Canal) has not been resolved cooperatively. The principal institution charged with administering these rivers, the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), has continued to evolve in the direction of comprehensive watershed management. Binational collaboration on wastewater treatment and the supply of clean drinking water to border communities has also been a success, thanks in large measure to the North American Development Bank and the Border Environmental Cooperation
Commission. Whereas 25% of the population in the border region lacked access to sewage and clean drinking water in 2003, today that figure is down to 14%. The territory along the border is diverse, comprising bustling metropolises, small towns, and large expanses of uninhabited deserts.
The arrangements that state, local, tribal, and federal authorities have reached with their opposite numbers are equally variegated. They range from smaller-scale initiatives that normally fly under the national media’s radar screen (e.g., the bilateral Scrap Tire Integrated Management
Initiative) to venerable institutions that can trace their origins back more than a century (as does the IBWC). Taken as a whole, however, cooperation along the border remains spotty and imperfect. Many of these efforts remain unsystematic and ad hoc; they are not guided by any broader vision of how the shared boundary between Mexico and the United States should be managed. The most effective institutions that operate along the border share certain features. First, they are binational in character. Second, they can act with power in their domains or (as a second-best alternative) include delegates from government bodies that can act with power. Third, they have permanent, skilled staffs that can devise long-terms plans; base their decisions on expert, technical assessments; and ensure follow-up on decisions reached by policy-makers. Fourth, they are open to input from a range of concerned parties, especially state and local governments, regional business associations, and civic groups. Organizations like the IBWC, the NADBank, and the Arizona-Mexico Commission approach this formula, providing models for truly comprehensive and authoritative binational institutions. III. Public safety and security The context Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, border security has become an increasing priority of the United States. Meanwhile, in Mexico, violence related to the drug trade has claimed more than 13,000 lives over the last two and a half years. On both sides, crime and contraband trafficking remain very real concerns; Mexicanbased trafficking organizations now dominate first-level wholesale distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine in the United States. In addition to its direct effects on public safety, crime has potent economic consequences, stifling tourism and threatening legitimate businesses in areas where trafficking organizations have grown powerful. The United States and Mexico share responsibility for preventing smuggling and trafficking and for breaking the power of the major Mexican drug trafficking organizations. The United States is the principal destination for drugs coming from Latin America and the principal source of guns and cash flowing south. Mexico is the principal source of drugs and the principal destination for guns purchased and shipped illegally. Both countries suffer as a result of this symbiotic contraband trade, and both have an obligation to help control it. Dismantling the powerful trafficking organizations that operate on both sides of the border can only be accomplished by stren gthening law enforcement authorities in both countries (including along Mexico’s frontier with Central America) and by better coordinating efforts at the border. A shared vision, a joint strategy, and coordinated operations are critical to success. The last decade has seen a steady, substantial rise in spending on border enforcement in the U.S., including a 100% increase in the number of Border Patrol agents, greater reliance on physical barriers, and the widespread deployment of new interdiction technologies. U.S. authorities now report “operational control” over approximately half of the frontier. Further investment of resources on the U.S. side alone could further improve border security. However enhanced cooperation between U. S. and Mexican authorities at and near the border would yield substantially greater returns than additional unilateral efforts. Collaboration has increased since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and, more recently, the Mexican government’s campaign against organized crime. Indeed, the cooperation on law enforcement and criminal justice matters, including exchange of information, has never been more robust than it is right now. Some of the more recent examples include efforts to combat the flow of arms into Mexico and collaboration between the Border Patrol and the Mexican Attorney General’s Office (with Border Patrol agents apprehending and identifying criminals who are then handed over to Mexico for prosecution there). Nevertheless, cooperation can be improved. There is little exchange of tactical intelligence between the Border Patrol and Mexican law enforcement officials. U.S. Border Patrol agents have no one to call on the Mexican side when they are pelted with rocks by spotters acting on behalf of trafficking organizations; they receive no tip offs from Mexican officers about imminent attempts to break through the border and cannot pass any on when the suspects they are chasing flee back across the border into Mexico. Cooperation is also exceedingly limited between Mexica n
Customs officials and U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers at the ports of entry, both because Mexican Customs officials lack the resources to act on information that American law enforcement agencies might provide and because of historic problems with corruption and intimidation. That situation is changing as a result of bold steps recently taken by the Mexican government to transform Mexican Customs into a full-fledged law enforcement agency and the establishment of regular working meetings between authorities at the ports of entry. However, the two nations remain a long way from the sort of cooperation that occurs between the heads of U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Canadian Border Services Agency. They are farther still from a binationally coordinated approach to security across all enforcement agencies on both sides of the border. The challenges There are several salient obstacles to enhanced cooperation in law enforcement. These include: (a) domestic political considerations (b) differences in priorities; (c) existing laws; (d) institutional weakness on Mexican side; and (e) lack of parallel structures.
When addressing the issue of “security” along the border
,
Mexican officials have traditionally focused on public safety
(seguridad pública), whereas U.S. authorities
, since 9/11 have stressed “national security” (the threat of terrorism and the need to apprehend all who cross the border illegally) and drug trafficking.
Increasingly, however, Mexico now perceives its own border security as essential to the security of the nation, its battle against the major drug trafficking organizations and to a healthy trade relationship. For its part, the U.S. acknowledges the importance of ordinary law enforcement issues (e.g., stolen cars) and the value of efforts to interdict southbound flows of arms and bulk cash.

Politics – 1NC
Plan costs capital – intense environment fights
Peach 12 (Dr. Jim, Professor of Economics – New Mexico State University, “Energy Issues of the US-Mexico
Border Region,” Border X Roads, October, http://blog.bnsl.org/?p=329)
While cross-border energy projects can increase efficiency , such projects can also create additional difficulties . For example, in the early 2000s various environmental and citizen groups alleged that power plants being built in Mexicali to provide electricity to southern California and Arizona did not meet US environmental standards . The debate over whether or not the plants were being built in Mexico to circumvent US law was bitter and intense (see, for example the report by the
US Government Accountability Office on the estimated emissions from the two plants: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-05-823).

Politics – 2NC
Costs capital – spending and regulatory battles
Ibarra-Yunez 12 (Dr. Alejandro, Professor of Economics and Public Policy – Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios
Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), “Chapter 7. Energy Integration in North America: Politics and Policymaking,”
Policy Research Project Report 174, May, http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/17560/prp_174econ_reg_challenges_US_Mex_electricity-2012.pdf?sequence=5)
Greater integration of the electrical grid, both within the US and across its borders , is no simple task : despite enhanced reliability, economic efficiency, and other potential benefits, regulatory and political challenges remain . Even as utilities, regulators, and regional networks acknowledge the urgency of expanding the transmission network, they do not agree on who should pay for it or what level of cooperation —much less integration—will be necessary. Discussions over interconnections with Mexico reflect the dimensions of this argument while taking on further complications due both to shifting political agendas and differences in regulatory frameworks . This chapter explores these tensions in order to outline the major regulatory and political challenges to greater integration of the North American electricity grid from the United States point of view. The exploration begins with a review of global trade governance, followed by an examination of the current US regulatory and market environment, rooted in the evolution of deregulation since the 1978 passage of Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act. The chapter then examines the relative advantages and disadvantages of greater integration from the varying perspectives of major stakeholders on both sides of the USMexico border, again, with the
US point of view, and analyzes ERCOT in depth as a unique participant.
Huge fights between stakeholders trump support for the plan
Ibarra-Yunez 12 (Dr. Alejandro, Professor of Economics and Public Policy – Instituto Tecnologico de Estudios
Superiores de Monterrey (Mexico), “Chapter 7. Energy Integration in North America: Politics and Policymaking,”
Policy Research Project Report 174, May, http://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/bitstream/handle/2152/17560/prp_174econ_reg_challenges_US_Mex_electricity-2012.pdf?sequence=5)
Greater integration of the electrical grid across the US-Mexico border poses a unique solution to grid reliability challenges faced in both countries; nonetheless, there is little evidence that policymakers on either side are giving this approach serious consideration . Why there is not a higher level of commitment? In exploring this question, the following analysis first looks to the relationship between the US and Mexico, one in which shifting political agendas on both sides of the border create a shaky foundation for ongoing cooperation on electricity policy . Second, this section analyzes the regulatory environment north of the border. Despite little focus on the issue binationally, the opposite is true domestically: in the US, greater regional coordination of transmission planning is the focus of heated debate among stakeholders . Underlying all the explanations gathered here, it seems apparent that the high priority afforded domestic control of infrastructure guides decisions on both sides of the border, despite abundant evidence of the benefits of ceding some control in favor of greater cooperation. (See Chapter 1 for a more detailed explanation of how the US and
Mexico constitute an outlier in this regard.)

1NC
Nieto’s energy reform will pass now- political capital key
Hernandez 13
Maria Jose, analyst in Eurasia Group's Latin America practice, holds a master's degree in public administration and economic policy analysis from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University,
“Politics and Oil: Mexico's Road to Reform,” 2013, http://eurasia.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/06/20/politics_and_oil_mexicos_road_to_reform
Is Mexico finally on the verge of a historic reform push? Expectations are on the rise, and for good reason . In office just over six months, President Enrique Peña Nieto has taken steps that suggest he is serious about pushing through policy changes meant to, among other things, improve the quality of an education system that produces students who score lower than their counterparts in all other OECD countries in reading, math, and science, and to open the country's lucrative telecommunications sector, which could lower prices for millions of
Mexican consumers. The government is also pushing for a state and local fiscal responsibility law intended to prevent governors and local authorities from taking on too much debt. Peña Nieto's financial reform could also help promote public access to credit. According to data from the World Bank, credit as a percentage of GDP remains at about 26 percent (in 2011), much lower than in Latin American peers like Brazil (61 percent) and Chile (71 percent). But the highest hurdle, energy reform, has not yet been cleared . In the past decade, Mexico's energy sector has suffered from deteriorating operational, financial, and technological capabilities, sharply lowering production for a vital source of state revenue. Production has fallen from a record 3.4 million barrels per day in 2004 to about 2.5 million today. Faced with rising pensions and health-care bills, the government's high dependency on oil revenues (around 30 percent of total revenues) is becoming increasingly worrisome. Given the opportunities it might create and its impact on the broader economy, substantive reform of
Mexico's energy sector has also captured the attention of foreign investors . In particular, Mexico may have the world's fourthlargest shale deposits, exciting intense investor interest in opportunities for private participation in both offshore and shale plays through profitsharing agreements (possibly a variant of production-sharing agreements).
Energy reform would also offer Peña Nieto an important political victory , since he will have succeeded where so many of his predecessors have failed. Past attempts have been defeated by a populist commitment to nationalized energy that is written into the Mexican Constitution, limits on investments by state-owned oil company Pemex, the ability of state governments to grab a large share of the industry's resources, Pemex's labyrinthine bureaucracy, assertive labor unions, and politicians who were unwilling to accept the costs and risks that come with change. The Mexican public has historically opposed the constitutional changes needed for real reform, and it's not clear that this has changed. Recent polling data suggest that 65 percent of Mexicans are aware of the so-called Pact for Mexico, the president's broader reform plan, but there is no public survey on popular attitudes toward the opening of the energy sector to private investment. Yet, this time around, Mexico's president has the demonstrated political will to bring about change, and there are enough lawmakers within his own party and the major opposition party , the National
Action Party (PAN), to negotiate a substantive agreement by the end of 2013 . That said, there are a few obstacles Peña Nieto must overcome. The most underappreciated of these is the need to reform Mexico's electoral politics. In early May, the Pact for Mexico survived a challenge from opposition parties when Peña Nieto agreed to allow discussion of electoral reform before September, forcing lawmakers to debate a hotly contested issue just before they take up a crucial energy reform plan that demands goodwill and compromise. The Mexican Congress is currently in recess, but legislators have announced that they will hold at least two extraordinary sessions in July and August to debate some bills left on the table, helping to clear the legislative calendar. But electoral reform was not included in the schedule; lawmakers are still in the process of designing it and are probably waiting until after local elections on July 7 to finish drafting their proposal. The fight over electoral reform will sharpen the battle lines among the three major parties just as energy reform will require open negotiation among political rivals . Some opposition factions want a reform that not only increases transparency in the use of campaign funds, but that also includes major changes to the electoral and political systems. Senators from opposition parties -- the PAN and the Democratic Revolutionary
Party (PRD) -- want to introduce a second round in presidential elections and reelection of legislators and mayors, as well as introduce coalition government and chief of cabinet, probably as a way of extracting concessions in exchange for support. A large segment of the ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI) has long opposed these proposals for fear that a second round would enable the PAN and PRD to organize resistance to a PRI candidate and that an end to term limits for lawmakers and mayors would make it more difficult for the party to enforce discipline among its members. In addition, a system that provides more power for parliament could heighten the risk of gridlock at a crucial moment for reform. As a result, the government is unlikely to accept all these demands. In the end, if the government is as serious as it appears on energy reform, it will have to compromise on electoral reform.
Peña Nieto remains committed
to keeping things on track, and he will probably cede some ground on the electoral front. That's why odds of success on energy reform remain good, but the next few months will test the new president's political skills .

Will Pass
Strong PAN and PRI Congressional influence mean Pemex reform will pass – but PRD opposes
Cattan, 7/9
Nacha Cattan, Bloomberg News, 7/9/13, “Mexico Largest Opposition Party Seeks Constitution Change on Oil”, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-09/mexico-largest-opposition-party-seeks-constitution-change-onoil.html
Mexico’s largest opposition party said it will propose changes to the constitution to end an oil monopoly by stateowned Petroleos Mexicanos, raising optimism of reform in the energy industry.
The National Action Party, or PAN, will push for an amendment to allow private companies to share risk in oil output, party spokesman Juan Molinar Horcasitas said in a telephone interview yesterday. The proposal is almost ready, though the PAN hasn’t decided whether to present it as part of a multi-party accord, known as the Pact for
Mexico, or to push the bill on its own, Molinar said.
President Enrique Pena Nietosaid in a June 17 interview his administration will send an energy bill to Congress in
September and is confident the Pact for Mexico will ensure lawmakers end the state oil monopoly this year.The
PAN appears to be proposing a “much more market friendly” bill than what the ruling Institutional Revolutionary
Party, or PRI, may present, Benito Berber, a New York-based strategist at Nomura Holdings Inc., wrote in an emailed message.
“What is interesting about the PAN’s energy bill proposal is that together with the PRI, these two parties will have enough votes in congress to pass any reform they want , even if it is constitutional,” Berber wrote. “It does not matter what the PRD left-leaning party says or does. Also it does not matter if the Pact for Mexico survives or not.”
The PAN proposal should be positive for the peso once the bill is discussed in September, Berber said.
Mexico City’s former mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, has said his opposition PRD party should “strongly” oppose Pena
Nieto’s oil plan.
The PAN, on the other hand, “is in favor of a real reform,” Molinar said. Without risk sharing “there won’t be investment.”
Pemex reform will pass – political momentum and support from key investors
Cattan and Espinosa 7/10
Nacha Cattan & Veronica Navarro Espinosa, Bloomberg News, 7/10/13, “Mexico Poised to End State Energy
Monopoly, Pemex Official Says”, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/mexico-poised-to-end-stateenergy-monopoly-pemex-official-says.html
Mexico is on the cusp of opening its energy industry to outside investment as a wide consensus has developed that the constitution must be changed to end the government’s monopoly on production, according to a board member of state-controlled oil producer Petroleos Mexicanos.
The country needs “very deep” reforms to lure investment to its natural gas and crude fields, and proposed changes could be ready by the end of this summer, Hector Moreira, who also is a former official in the country’s Energy
Ministry, said today at the Bloomberg Mexico Conference in New York.
Mexico is “on the eve” of much-needed changes that will open the way for faster growth and a stronger currency in the region’s second-largest economy, Gray Newman, Morgan Stanley’s chief Latin American economist, said today at the event. Officials from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Grupo Financiero Banorte said they were optimistic that
President Enrique Pena Nieto will lead a successful effort at reforms this year.
“This administration doesn’t only have the willingness, but the political power and political capital” to enact the changes, Gabriel Casillas, Banorte’s chief Mexico economist, said at the event. Casillas said he was “very bullish” on the peso, the best-performing major currency against the dollar this year, and that investors hadn’t yet priced in the reforms.
A slowdown in economic expansion is putting pressure on Pena Nietoto gain approval to open the energy industry and change laws to boost tax collection, reforms he says may lift growth to 6 percent.The ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party has the ability to pass the key bills, which will attract investment and bolster Mexican markets, according to Eduardo Cepeda, the senior country officer for JPMorgan in Mexico.
There will be “appetite” for Mexican securities in the second half of the year, Cepeda said.

PAN leadership in Baja California means Pemex reform passes – bipartisan support
Graham and Gutierrez 7/8
Dave Graham and Miguel Gutierrez, Reuters, 7/8/13, “UPDATE 4-Mexico opposition wins key state vote, boosting reform outlook”, http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/08/mexico-elections-idUSL1N0FE06320130708
* PAN victory to defuse tensions over cross-party accord
* Conservatives still willing to push for reforms
* Pena Nieto seeks overhaul of Pemex, changes in tax system
MEXICO CITY, July 8 (Reuters) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's economic agenda looked to be on surer footing after local elections on Sunday yielded results that favor a cross-party pact he forged to push reforms through Congress.
In the most closely watched race, theconservative National Action Party (PAN) won a tight contest for governor in its stronghold of Baja California,an outcome that should help defuse tensions between the opposition and Pena
Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Baja California was the only governor's office up for grabs as nearly half of Mexico's 31 states voted for a mix of local parliaments and city halls, producing results that allowed both the PRI and the PAN to claim success at the ballot box.
In Baja California, the PAN had accused the PRI of trying to steal the election, so a change of power could have destabilized the "Pact for Mexico" the president made with the opposition to help strengthen his hand in Congress, where he lacks a majority.
But a preliminary vote count on Monday showed the PAN won the race, about 3 percentage points ahead of the centrist PRI.
The PAN's triumph is probably more useful to Pena Nietothan a win for his own party would have been because it should foster consensus-building on the key planks of his legislative program: opening up state oil monopoly Pemex to more private investment and a reform to bolster tax revenues.
News of the PAN victory helped push up the peso more than 1 percent against the dollar in early trading.
PRI chairman Cesar Camacho hinted that his party might challenge the vote count in Baja California. But Pena
Nieto later urged all sides to accept the results, underlining the need to keep things friendly in Congress.
"I reiterate that the government is ready to continue the dialogue and deal-making with the political forces to agree the reforms need to consolidate our democracy and speed up Mexico's development and progress," Pena Nieto said in Mexico City.
The electoral process had deteriorated into mud-slinging and mutual recriminations between the PRI and PAN by the time Mexicans cast their votes on Sunday, with each side accusing the other of resorting to dirty tricks to gain advantage.
Violence also blighted the campaign, with several activists from the main parties murdered in a reminder of the government's struggle to curb blood-letting by drug gangs that has claimed more than 70,000 lives since the start of
2007.
PAN BLUES
Outside of Baja California, the PRI did not go empty-handed, notching up some notable victories in mayoral elections.
Jorge Buendia, head of polling firm Buendia & Laredo, said that the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD),
Mexico's main leftist group and co-signatory of the pact, had fared less well.
However, the PRD, which ran on a joint platform with the PAN in several electoral battlegrounds, including Baja
California, said that it too had made important advances in some states.
With 97 percent of the polling booths reporting in Baja California, the PAN gubernatorial ticket had won 47.2 percent of the vote against 44.2 percent for the PRI candidate, preliminary results from the local electoral authority showed.
Since it lost the Mexican presidency last year, the PAN has been bogged down in infighting that has rattled the stability of the political accord Pena Nieto unveiled in December.
PAN chairman Gustavo Madero, whose leadership has been under attack, said the party would still have to evaluate its commitment to the Pact for Mexico after an election campaign he said was marred by attempts by the PRI to steal and buy votes.
But he said the results had vindicated the PAN.
"We are still convinced that Mexico needs reforms," Madero told Mexican radio, referring to the energy and tax plans.

Those ambitious reforms are due to be presented to Congress by early September. Pena Nieto is likely to face strong opposition from the left, especially to the Pemex shake-up.
Tax reform and the Pemex overhaul are vital to Pena Nieto's hopes to raise economic growth to 6 percent a year from an average of barely 2 percent since the millennium began.
Pollster Buendia said setbacks for the left on Sunday were likely to push the PRI closer to the PAN's position on how to approach Pemex reform, implying a stronger push to open up the state oil giant to foreign capital.
The PRD lost control of the local government in the tourist resort of Cancun, where the PRI candidate won by a clear margin.
Buendia said that with no major round of elections due in Mexico until 2015, the pendulum was swinging towards a more business-friendly political platform for economic reform.
"For a couple of years what we're going to see is that there will be fewer approaches between the PAN and the PRD and more between the PRI and the PAN," he said.
Will pass -- Education and telecommunication reforms give Nieto momentum
Martin, Rodriguez, Marinho, 6/17
Eric Martin, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez and Helder Marinho, Bloomberg News, 6/17/13, “Mexico’s Pena Nieto plans end to 75-year Pemex monopoly in oil production”, http://business.financialpost.com/2013/06/17/pena-nieto-plansend-to-75-year-pemex-monopoly-in-oil-production/?__lsa=f0c9-54c4
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nietosaid he’s negotiating support to break the state monopoly over oil and gas exploration and production this year to accelerate economic growth.
In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos would develop certain fields, with others being tapped by foreign and private companies. He declined to discuss details of the proposal, or whether it would require a change in the constitution.
Seven decades after his party seized fields from the predecessors to Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc,
Pena Nieto is preparing for the return of international oil companies to arrest eight years of decline in crude output.
An opening would probably be broad, from offshore drilling to shale fields similar to those that have revived the
U.S. petroleum industry, Pena Nieto said.
“It’s obvious that Pemex doesn’t have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation,” the
46-year-old president said in an interview in London on Monday, beforetravelingtoNorthern Ireland for meetings with Group of Eight leaders. “Shale is one of the areas where there’s room for private companies, but not the only one.”
Pena Nieto said his administration will send the energy bill to congress by September, when regular sessions resume, followed by a tax proposal. He said he’s confident the so-called Pact for Mexico of the country’s top three political parties will ensure the bill is approved by Congress by year end.
‘Key Deadlines’
“We’re approaching key deadlines,” Pena Nieto said. “I’m optimistic that this political climate of understanding and agreement will be maintained.”
Opening oil and gas exploration for private investment will help Mexico revive oil production that is heading for its ninth year of decline. Crude output averaged 2.52 million barrels a day this month through June 9, compared with
3.38 million barrels a day in 2004.
Pena Nieto said there’s political momentum to pass more reforms after the approval of sweeping education and telecommunications laws and the creation of the Pact for Mexico. His Institutional Revolutionary Party dropped opposition to an oil-law overhaul in March.
Pemex Reform will Pass in the Status Quo- But tight Schedule in end of year leaves little room for other plans to be on the agenda
Martin 13
ByEric Martin,Carlos Manuel Rodriguez&Helder Marinho, Jun 18, 2013, Pena Nieto Confident 75-Year Pemex Oil
Monopoly to End This Year, Bloomberg, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-18/pena-nieto-confident-75year-pemex-oil-monopoly-to-end-this-year.html, Accessed 7/7/13
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said he’s confident Congress will end the state oil monopoly this year, opening the way for companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) to tap the nation’s reserves
.In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-ownedPe troleos Mex icanos would develop some fields, while others are tapped by foreign

and private companies . He declined to discuss more details of the proposal, or whether it would require a change in the constitution. Enlarge image Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto said, “ It’s obvious that Pemex doesn’t have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation .” Photographer: Jason Alden/Bloomberg 3:05 June 17 (Bloomberg) -- Mexican President Enrique Pena
Nieto, talks about his proposal to break the state monopoly over oil and gas exploration and production this year to accelerate economic growth . In the model envisioned by Pena Nieto, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos would develop certain fields, with others being tapped by foreign and private companies. Pena Nieto, speaking with Bloomberg Businessweek in London today, declined to discuss details of the proposal, or whether it would require a change in the constitution. (This report is in Spanish. Source: Bloomberg) Seven decades after his party seized fields from the predecessors to Exxon and Shell, Pena Nieto is preparing for the return of international oil companies to arrest eight years of decline in crude output . An opening would probably be broad, from offshore drilling to shale fields similar to those that have revived the U.S. petroleum industry, Pena Nieto said. “It’s obvious that Pemex doesn’t have the financial capacity to be in every single front of energy generation,” the 46-year-old president said in an interview in London yesterday, before traveling to Northern Ireland for meetings with Group of Eight leaders. “ Shale is one of the areas where there’s room for private companies, but not the only one.”
Pena Nieto saidhis administration will send the energy bill to congress by
September , when regular sessions resume, along with a tax proposal. The support of the top three political parties in the Pact for
Mexico should ensure the bill is approved by Congress before year end, he said. Skeptical Investors Mexico is seeking to attract capital for deep-water and shale deposits found in the past decade as reserves dwindle in Cantarell, the 1976 oil discovery that ranked among the world’s largest . Investors became more skeptical about the depth of the energy reform after it wasn’t included in the schedule for special congressional sessions in July and August, leaving it for the final four months of the year along with a crowded agenda that includes the tax overhaul and next year’s budget . Mexico’s peso pared its drop yesterday after Pena Nieto’s comments, falling 1 percent to 12.8361 per U.S. dollar after losing as much as 1.3 percent. Yields on pesodenominated fixed-rate government bonds due in 2024 increased 11 basis points, or 0.11 percentage point, to 5.31 percent. Yields on $2 billion
Pemex bonds due in 2022 added one basis point to 3.98 percent. Pena Nieto’s comments boosted confidence he’ll make good on his pledge to open the state-controlled energy industry, said Ramon Cordova, a currency trader at Banco Base SA. ‘Good Path’ “ What the market wants is the reforms to pass, ” Cordova said by phone from San Pedro Garza Garcia, Mexico. The comments indicate “ the energy reform is on a good path and it gives some more information, because up until now it’s been very opaque.” Opening oil and gas exploration for private investment would help Mexico revive oil production that is heading for its ninth year of decline . Crude output averaged 2.52 million barrels a day this month through June 9, compared with 3.38 million barrels a day in 2004. When Pena Nieto took office in December, he inherited an economy that had started to grow faster than Brazil in the final two years of predecessor Felipe
Calderon’s administration amid record Mexican auto exports and waning Chinese demand for Brazilian commodities. Mexico’s gross domestic product will expand 3.2 percent this year, faster than 3 percent for Brazil, according to the median estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.
Government Spending While Mexican growth eased to 0.8 percent in the first quarter, the least since the 2009 recession, Finance Minister Luis
Videgaray said in an interview yesterday that the expansion will quicken as the government increases spending in the second half of the year.
“We expect much more accelerated spending in the second semester,” Videgaray said. “The budget is there and the revenue is there.” Pena
Nieto said there’s political momentum to pass more reforms after the approval of sweeping education and telecommunications laws and the creation of the Pact for Mexico. His Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, dropped its opposition to an oil-law overhaul in March.
“We’re approaching key deadlines,” Pena Nieto said. “I’m optimistic that this political climate of understanding and agreement will be maintained.
” The start of July will mark one year since Pena Nieto’s election returned the PRI to power after a 12-years hiatus. Opening the energy industry to more private investment would be the “signature issue” for judging his presidency, Pena Nieto said during the campaign . Pact for Mexico Pemex bondholders are losing confidence in his ability to achieve the needed changes after signs of fraying in the Pact for Mexico alliance that Pena Nieto engineered between his own PRI, the National Action Party, or PAN , of predecessor Felipe Calderon and the Democratic Revolution
Party, or PRD.
“The PRD cannot sign on for an ambitious energy reform, and they’ve been quite explicit about that,” Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said in an interview. “It’s going to be very difficult for the elite of the PRD to continue working with the government if the government and the PAN push through an energy reform that they’re opposed to.” Yields on $2 billion Pemex bonds due in 2022 jumped 72 basis points in the past month through last week to 3.97 percent. Yields on
Brazilian oil producer Petroleo Brasileiro SA’s 2021 notes rose 63 basis points over the same period. Changing Reputations Pena Nieto has been working to overturn the country’s reputation for violence, while strengthening the economy. His administration passed a balanced budget and an education overhaul that created an independent institute to evaluate schools and foster competition for teaching jobs and promotions based on performance , a move that sparked violent protests. The government also arrested the powerful head of the teachers’ union, Elba Esther Gordillo, on corruption charges, taking on a leader long considered to be untouchable. Some of his other goals, such as progress in the war against organized crime, have proved more elusive. While the
Milenio newspaper reported a 2.5 percent drop in drug violence in the first four months of the administration, communities in southern Mexico have armed themselves and kidnapped law-enforcement officials, saying police can’t protect them from cartels. ‘Excellent Job’ Pena Nieto’s energy and tax pledges, and his early legislative success, helped attract overseas asset managers including Pacific Investment Management Co., the world’s biggest bond fund, and lift foreign holdings of peso bonds to record levels. Yields on government peso debt due in 2024 dropped to a record low and the currency climbed to the strongest level in almost two years against the dollar last month. Yields have since climbed and the currency weakened on the prospect that the Federal Reserve will scale back its stimulus program. Pena Nieto’s energy initiative may be the industry’s biggest overhaul since then-President Lazaro Cardenas seized oil fields from British and U.S. companies in 1938, said James R. Jones, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico when the North American Free Trade Agreement, negotiated under U.S. President George H. W. Bush and
Mexico’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari, took effect in 1994. The expropriation is celebrated March 18. Pena Nieto has “done an excellent job in his

first six months in office,” Jones said in a telephone interview from Washington on June 14. “He has the best political sensitivity and touch I’ve seen since President Salinas was able to marshal various factions of Mexico to pass Nafta.”
Pemex reform will pass but there will be fights
Siskind 6/25
Cory Siskind, Research Analyst, Control Risk, Huffington Post, 6/25/13, “Mexico Plays the Waiting Game on Big
Reforms”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cory-siskind/mexico-plays-the-waiting-_b_3493542.html
Early 2013 saw one of the most productive one hundred days in Mexican political history and a burst of international press hype. Now, with Congress out of session, Mexico lies in wait. While the legislature has agreed to hold two special sessions in July and August to finalize details of previously agreed-upon reforms in education and telecommunications, new initiatives will be pushed off until the fall. The big ticket items to be addressed in several months are fiscal and energy reforms. In the meantime, Mexico's stock market reached its lowest point in a year in mid-June after disappointing growth figures. Fissures have appeared in Mexico's conservative National Action Party
(PAN), an integral part of the Pact for Mexico (Pacto por Mexico) that facilitated reforms in labor, education, telecommunications, and public security. Mexico is playing the waiting game.
The legacy of President Enrique Peña Nieto, as well as Mexico's economic growth, hinges on fiscal and energy reforms. Fiscal reforms aim to improve enforcement of existing and future regulations in order to boost the country's tax intake. They will also increase credit levels with lower interest rates to a broader swath of Mexico's population.
In his speech at the G8 summit in Lough Erne, Peña Nieto explained that fiscal reforms will "increase overall
Mexican financial system stability and, as a by-product, contribute to building a more solid, transparent, fair, and efficient international financial system." This is a welcome change for Mexico, which, World Bank data shows, has some of the lowest rates of domestic credit to the private sector in the Americas.
While fiscal reforms have broad-based support, energy reforms promise a much livelier debate.Duncan Wood, the director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, called energy reform the
"mother of all reforms" because of its enormous potential for job creation and economic growth. Partly because of its importance, the opening of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico's state owned hydrocarbons company, to private investment is a polarizing issue.
Centrist and conservative Mexicans welcome the move in hopes that it will spur business and investment and make the notorious under-performer PEMEX more efficient. Many would like to see more exploration and new technologies in order to boost discoveries and production.
Members of Mexico's left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)party are skeptical. Beyond the political complications of amending Mexico's constitution lies a historical distrust of foreign competition in the energy sector.US and Anglo-Dutch oil companies operating in Mexico were expropriated in 1938 by then President Lázaro
Cardenas, a source of national pride for most citizens. Some Mexicans believe that opening the oil giant will dramatically decrease government revenue, of which PEMEX currently provides approximately 35%. They fear that this, in turn, will reduce government spending on badly needed public services.
Another challenge to the speedy passing of energy reforms is the rupture of the political cohesion seen in early 2013.
The PAN, party of former presidents Felipe Calderón and Vicente Fox, ousted its senate party leader, Ernesto
Cordero, on May 20. The ousting, as well as July 7 local elections, has caused a shake-up in the party. Divisions are solidifying between two factions and tensions have come to a head in recent weeks. Yet, while the shake-up may delay the approval process, it is unlikely to entirely halt the passage of energy reforms.
As Mexico lies in wait, investors are anxious to know what the future will bring. The special congressional sessions in July and August will provide insight. In July, lawmakers will debate empowering Mexico's transparency agency and creating a new anti-corruption organization. They will also discuss state debt and appoint a new leader to
Mexico's elections institute. In August, they will return to shore up education and telecommunications reforms. The level of multi-party cooperation seen in the special sessions will be a good indicator of what is to come in the fall.
Passing fiscal and energy reforms will almost certainly happen, as most parties involved recognize their importance to Mexico's future. The markets are likely to boom in the wake of the new legislation, reinvigorating the hope and high expectations seen duringPeña Nieto's first one hundred days. But in Mexico the real challenge will begin after the reforms have passed. Implementation, particularly in opening PEMEX, will be complicated by an extensive bureaucracy with a traditionally lethargic approach to change. The challenges are numerous, but the payoff will be big. Mexico must endure the waiting game, revive political cooperation, pass meaningful fiscal and

energy reforms, and then actually implement both. If it succeeds, all the hype will have been deserved. It will truly be Mexico's moment.

Top of Docket
Pemex reform coming – before constitution amendment
Laconangelo 6-21-2013
David, “Peña Nieto, Mexico President, Says Pemex Will Not Be Privatized But Reformed,” http://www.latintimes.com/articles/5534/20130621/pe%C3%B1a-nieto-mexico-oil-pemex-privatizedconstitution.htm
Peña Nieto says his administration will send a "transformational" reform bill to Congress by September, and hopes to work out a deal with the other two main parties, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and
NationalAction Party (PAN). Lawmakers from those parties have rejected the idea of amending the constitution.
Jesús Zambrano, the former head of the PRD, said earlier this week that the Pact for Mexico -- an agenda of priorities and needs agreed upon by the three major parties -- says nothing about an amendment and asked the president to clarify his plans. Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leftist presidential candidate who lost to Peña
Nieto, has said he's against changing the constitution. So is Miguel Ángel Mancera, an ally of López Obrador and current mayor of Mexico City.
Peña Nieto has called it "absolutely false" that the constitution must be amended before private investment can come into the oil sector .

A2 Unq Overwhelms
Pemex on the brink – pc key
BMI 2013
Business Monitor International, “Mexico: Peña Nieto’s Reform Prospects On The Rise,” http://www.riskwatchdog.com/2013/03/13/mexico-pena-nietoreform-prospects-on-the-rise/
That said, while these changes encourage us to take an increasingly optimistic stance on the passage of a number of key economic reforms, not the least comprehensive fiscal reform, we remain more cautious on energy sector liberalisation.
At present, we anticipate a piecemeal reform process. President Peña Nieto’s own rhetoric has focused more on side issues, such as highlighting the need to reduce Pemex’s tax burden and even drawing the need for alternative energy sources in the debate. While these are useful points, they won’t reverse a decade of declining oil production.
Moreover, when the issue of increasing private capital into the energy sector is raised, it comes with the heavy caveat that the state will continue to control Mexico’s oil.
We are not ready to completely rule out energy sector liberalisation, and we acknowledge that the administration may be downplaying the controversial elements of its planned energy sector reform in an effort to tackle a number of other, less contentious reforms early on. Moreover, we note that recent events suggest Peña Nieto may have the political capital he needs to push through full-scale liberalisation . However, until the president indicates willingness to move forward with such a bill, we maintain a more tempered view.

PC Key
PEMEX reform will pass now – Nieto’s political capital is key
Archibold 13 (Randal C., Correspondent, “New Leader Taps Mexican Discontent to Press Agenda of Change,”
New York Times, 3-23, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/americas/new-leader-taps-mexican-discontentto-press-reform-agenda.html?_r=0)
But it seems clear that Mr. Peña Nieto has banked substantial political capital and bolstered his popularity , which may add momentum to thornier changes he plans , including opening up the state oil monopoly , long a source of national pride, to private investment . The teachers’ union, Mr. Slim, Televisa — the targets, in the minds of many Mexicans, are hard to cheer for.
“He is trying to gain credibility and popularity,” said Helena Varela Guinot , a political scientist at the Ibero-American University in
Mexico City. “ He is saying, ‘I am a president that gets results
, this is a government that is efficient, takes risks and goes after the big problems,’ although it is not clear in reality if his reforms will achieve the desired results .” Those who remember the autocratic ways of Mr. Peña Nieto’s party
, which governed Mexico for more than 70 years but was then ousted from power for 12, see a presidential power play that may yet deliver results , but with less space for those who disagree. “ His goal is to reshape the power of the presidency ,” said Sergio Aguayo, a political analyst at the Colegio de México. “Not to the level it used to be, because that is impossible. But he is a true believer that Mexico needs a ‘presidentialist’ system.” Some analysts see in his priorities a clear sign that he does not want his tenure defined by the country’s security problems , with thousands killed or missing in a war against drug and organized crime groups. Mr. Peña Nieto has argued that improving the economy and education in the long run will bring down the violence, and he has said little about the day-to-day mayhem that afflicts many parts of the country.
PEMEX reform requires political wrangling
Miroff and Booth 5-7 (Nick and William, “To power Mexico forward, Peña Nieto looks to energy reform,” 2013, http://www.actforclimatejustice.org/2013/05/to-power-mexico-forward-pena-nieto-looks-to-energy-reform/)
For those pushing for change , the challenge is as much political as it is technical. The Mexican constitution essentially blocks the country from forming joint-venture partnerships with outsiders, and analysts say such restrictions will need to be scrapped if the country wants to attract foreign drillers. Priority for Peña Nieto For Peña Nieto, who began his six-year term in December, opening up the energy industry is the most ambitious task on a hefty to-do list — which includes fixing the education system, telecommunications and tax collection, areas viewed as major hurdles to Mexico’s development into a more modern, democratic, middle-class society. Peña Nieto has placed a confidant,
Emilio Lozoya, at the head of Pemex, even though the 38-year-old former investment fund manager had never run an oil business. And the president insists that the goal is the “modernization” of the company, not its privatization, as opponents allege. “ This is about a practical reform that will allow for the introduction of new technology , which we lack, and accelerate the growth of our energy resources in order to lower electricity costs for Mexican families and businesses, and give us a more dynamic energy industry,” Peña Nieto said in a speech to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Expropriation Day. Lifting the restrictions on foreign oil companies through a constitutional amendment would require a two-thirds majority in Congress and more than half of the country’s state governors to sign off .
Peña Nieto is expected to face considerable political wrangling from the powerful oil workers union, left-leaning lawmakers and interests groups, which are content with their slice of the status quo, even as overall production has slipped.
PC key to Pemex reform – key to foreign investment
Cattan and Espinosa 2013
Nacha, Veronica Navarro, “Mexico Poised to End State Energy Monopoly, Pemex Official Says,” http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-10/mexico-poised-to-end-state-energy-monopoly-pemex-officialsays.html
Mexico is on the cusp of opening its energy industry to outside investment as a wide consensus has developed that the constitution must be changed to end the government’s monopoly on production, according to a board member of state-controlled oil producer Petroleos Mexicanos.
The country needs “very deep” reforms to lure investment to its natural gas and crude fields, and proposed changes could be ready by the end of this summer, Hector Moreira, who also is a former official in the country’s Energy
Ministry, said today at the Bloomberg Mexico Conference in New York.
Mexico is “on the eve” of much-needed changes that will open the way for faster growth and a stronger currency in the region’s second-largest economy, Gray Newman, Morgan Stanley’s chief Latin American economist, said today at the event. Officials from JPMorgan Chase & Co.and Grupo Financiero Banorte said they were optimistic that
President Enrique Pena Nieto will lead a successful effort at reforms this year.

“This administration doesn’t only have the willingness, but the political power and political capital” to enact the changes , Gabriel Casillas, Banorte’s chief Mexico economist, said at the event. Casillas said he was “very bullish” on the peso, the best-performing major currency against the dollar this year, and that investors hadn’t yet priced in the reforms.
A slowdown in economic expansion is putting pressure on Pena Nieto to gain approval to open the energy industry and change laws to boost tax collection, reforms he says may lift growth to 6 percent. The ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party has the ability to pass the key bills, which will attract investment and bolster Mexican markets, according to Eduardo Cepeda, the senior country officer for JPMorgan in Mexico.
There will be “appetite” for Mexican securities in the second half of the year, Cepeda said.
Nieto’s PC is key—he’s rallying support now
Estevez 6/26
(Dolia Estévez is a Senior Mexico Correspondent and foreign affairs analyst. She serves as a Senior Advisor for the U.S.-Mexico Journalism Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson Center and is an accredited correspondent with the Department of State, Capitol Hill and the Foreign Press Center, and is a member of Mexico’s
Council on Foreign Relations. “Most Mexicans Oppose President Peña Nieto's Plans To Open Up Pemex To
Private Investment,” Forbes, 6/26/13, http://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2013/06/26/most-mexicansoppose-president-pena-nietos-plans-to-open-up-pemex-to-private-investment/)
In London last week, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said he will push for a “transformational” reform of
Petroleos
Mexicanos ( Pemex) , Mexico’s state-owned monopoly in oil and gas exploration and production. “ There are different options on what the reform should be, but I am confident …  It will be transformational,” Peña Nieto told the Financial Times, adding that the reform would include “the constitutional changes needed to give private investors certainty .” ¶ Foreign oil companies were expropriated by Mexican President Lazaro Cárdenas in 1938, and ever since Mexico’s vast oil resources — 13.9 billion barrels of crude-oil and possibly the world’s fourth-largest shale-gas reserves– became forbidden to outsiders. The Wall Street Journal said the announcement highlights a “willingness to break with the past among young, reformist members” of the PRI, Peña Nieto’s party. Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell are reported to be ready to return to Mexico, if Congress passes the measure. Both were among the group of American and British companies expropriated 75 years ago.
¶ But Mexicans are less than ready to support Peña Nieto’s most ambitious and controversial reform to date. A new poll by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), a research institute, shows that 65 out of every
100 Mexicans are against opening up Pemex, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer with annual sales of more than $100 billion. “Energy, particularly oil, continues to be the stronghold of Mexican nationalism, ” said CIDE.
¶ Peña Nieto is counting on the Pact for
Mexico, an alliance of the country’s top three political parties, to try to get the reform passed. The proposal , which is expected to involve reforming the Constitution, will need two-thirds support from Mexico’s Congress; the PRI, his party, does not hold a simple majority in either house. Peña Nieto reported that he’s negotiating to get the political support he needs to break the state monopoly . However, some analysts believe that the Pacto, which succeeded in getting through a monopoly-busting telecom reform in May, will not hold up this time. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, warned that they will oppose Pemex’s reform. Marcelo Ebrard, a popular former mayor of Mexico City and likely PRD Presidential candidate in 2018, challenged Peña Nieto to a televised debate on the oil overhaul. Former PRD Presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Lazaro Cárdenas’ son, presented a counter proposal to “modernize” Pemex without changing Article 27 of the Constitution to undo the historical ban on privatizing the company. His proposal was endorsed Tuesday by top PRD politicians, including Ebrard and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, and the party’s congressional leaders.
¶ Pemex claims there is a need to boost annual investment by 46%, to $37 billion, to tap undeveloped shale-gas deposits and deep-water reserves. Peña Nieto says that while he wants investment to come from private capital, he insists that Mexico’s oil and gas reserves will remain under the state’s control, i.e. will not be sold to private firms or privatized.
( ) PEMEX reform requires political clout
O’Neil, ’12 – analyst for CFR
[Shannon O'Neil, analyzes developments in Latin America and U.S. relations in the region for CFR, Peña Nieto and
Energy Reform, 6/12/12, http://blogs.cfr.org/oneil/2012/07/12/pena-nieto-and-energy-reform/]
Can Enrique Peña Nieto open up the energy sector? Possibly. One consideration is the PRI ’s legislative heft. The party gained a plurality, but not majority, in both houses of Congress . Many commentators see this is worrisome for an ambitious reform agenda, predicting a weaker president, and continued gridlock . But energy reform was always going to require a coalition to create the necessary two-thirds constitutional majority.
The lack of a majority may make the PRI more willing to come to the bargaining table (and more willing to negotiate in other

areas, such as political reform). If they come, they may find a willing partner in the outgoing National Action Party, the PAN.
The PRI also has the advantage of counting on the PEMEX union as a political ally rather than an opponent. In fact, the union’s leader, Carlos Romero Deschamps, was just elected to the Senate on the PRI’s proportional representation list, as was the union’s treasurer, Ricardo Aldana. Their presence, rather than stymieing negotiations, may help smooth the process, enabling a Nixon in China moment for Mexico.
Another pressure for reform is the reality of Mexican oil exploration and production. Mexico has huge potential, but increasingly recognized limits on PEMEX’s ability to realize these riches . Since 2004 oil output has dropped by roughly a quarter (stabilizing in 2010). Under the status quo many expect further declines, which are worrisome not just for the economy; oil revenues account for a third of the government’s budget. Even if production remains stable Mexico will likely become a net oil importer during Peña Nieto’s tenure. For a party that aspires to remain in power, unleashing additional revenues is vital.
In 2008 Mexico passed a more moderate energy reform (many say that behind the scenes Peña Nieto himself blocked a more comprehensive bill). Though disappointing in terms of its reach, it did put energy reform on the table—bringing politicians from across the spectrum, interest groups, and society at large together to debate, discuss, and successfully revise a once sacred cow of Mexican politics. This precedent created the space for contemplating a comprehensive reform today.
The path to true change will require serious negotiations both within the PRI and with other parties—most likely with the PAN but perhaps also with members of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD (some of whom voted for the 2008 reform). In these few days since the election, both the president and his chief of staff, Luis
Videgaray, have repeatedly placed energy reform as top of the agenda. Both know the challenges ahead. But, as the president elect says, “I’m optimistic.”

Yes PC
Nieto has political capital – will spend it on economic reform
Bremmer No Date
Ian, president of Eurasia Group, the leading global political risk research and consulting firm, http://www.weforum.org/content/mexican-president-pena-nieto-has-oodles-political-capitaland-hes-willing-spendbig-mainly-ec mexican president pena nieto has oodles of political capital...and he's willing to spend big-- mainly on economic reform #LATAMgrowth @WEF

Link – Foreign Investment
Foreign investment in Mexico’s energy sectors sparks backlash
ETF Digest 7-5 (Exchanged Traded Funds for the Global Investor, “The Game-Changing Mexico Opportunity,”
2013, https://www.etfdigest.com/myblog/The-Game-Changing-Mexico-Opportunity.html)
Opening up the Mexican energy sector to private investment is one of President Enrique Peña
Nieto’s top priorities,
and we expect that reform to begin in 2013. This—coupled with the US House of Representatives’ recent ratification of the US-Mexico transboundary oil and gas agreement--means that production could begin soon along some very lucrative Gulf of Mexico acreage. Getting Rid of those
Institutional Icons Peña Nieto has already demonstrated his willingness to tackle institutional icons for the sake of better governance (i.e. the arrest of Elba Esther Gordillo, the notoriously corrupt head of the teachers’ union). And any political watcher would say that successful reform of the energy sector would be a historic victory and a tremendous legacy. The potential benefit is greater competitiveness and faster GDP growth. Analysis by Mexican firm Marcos y Asociados shows that by 2020, projected GDP growth would be 2.3% higher in a scenario where Pemex accepts partnerships with outside investors than in status quo maintenance. The downside will be political conflict ; left-wing politicians in Mexico are adamantly opposed to any change in Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution. And they are dead set against the privatization of Pemex.

Link – Renewables
Renewable energy sparks huge fights
Alcalá 7-16 (Pedro, Drilling and Completions Engineer at Remedy Energy Services Inc., “Opposition and alternatives to mainstream energy reform: A report from the “Privatizing Energy Reform Forum”,” Oil and Gas
Mexico, http://www.oilandgasmexico.com/2013/07/16/opposition-and-alternatives-to-mainstream-energy-reform-areport-from-the-privatizing-energy-reform-forum/)
Espriú argued for the unconstitutionality of the ISCs and MSCs, and compared several international cases of public oil companies opening themselves to private sector participation; he concluded that none of them, with the possible exception of Norway’s Statoil, benefited from said private involvement. Espriú was also the first to mention an “alternative national energy project” which would
not open up the national oil and gas industry to further private engagement and prioritize the development of renewable energy sources and the public downstream sector, with an emphasis on the construction of new refineries. These ideas were reiterated by subsequent speakers. privatizing energy reform forum Privatizing Energy Reform Forum A common thread throughout most of the lectures was the assertion that the only arguments in favor of mainstream energy reform were Pemex’s lack of funding and technology, which were both flatly and constantly denied by the speakers; Dr. Sheinbaum went as far as to call the idea that Pemex lacked technological potential “an insult to Mexican engineer, technicians and workers”. However, Encinas did concede that Pemex’s fiscal regime was “infamous”. It was also Dr.
Sheinbaum that referred to the inherent “schizophrenia” of current energy reform discourse, pointing out that the production target of the national energy plan was a lot higher than the production target of the national global warming plan, which calls for a decrease in crude oil production and consumption of hydrocarbon-derived products in accordance with international agreements and environmental concerns. The speakers acknowledged the criticisms that the political opposition to energy reform tends to receive; they responded to the alleged accusations of “dogmatic nationalism” with counter-accusations of “dogmatic neo-liberalism”
. Encinas underlined this point by claiming that the legislative debate that was coming in September was “ political and ideological , not technical ” . He then made fun of the common accusations of “nationalist nostalgia” by implying that the “real nostalgics” were those who voted for Enrique Peña Nieto expecting a return of the political stability and growing economy of the PRI’s heyday.

Link – Cooperation
Increasing cooperation with the US hurts Nieto
Long, 13 – American University international relations professor
[Tom, PhD in International Relations focusing on US-Latin America relations, American University Center for
Latin American and Latino Studies research fellow, "Will tensions over security spoil the Obama-Peña Nieto
Summit?," AULA Blog, American University Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, 4-16, 14, aulablog.net/2013/04/16/will-tensions-over-security-spoil-the-obama-pena-nieto-summit/]
Peña Nieto’s political incentives do not point to
the same, high-profile cooperation with the U nited S tates that occurred under
President Felipe Calderón, who had already begun shifting priorities last year. Despite the major turnaround signified by the PRI’s signing
NAFTA almost 20 years ago, Peña Nieto’s PRI
still contains elements more skeptical of U.S. “intervention”
than Calderón’s
PAN. Materially, moreover, most of the U.S. aid planned under the
Mérida
Initiative has been disbursed, and Congress exhibits little appetite for major new appropriations . (Even at its height, U.S. spending was a fraction of Mexico’s contribution to the drug war.) That reduction, coupled with growing awareness that the Calderón strategy actually fueled violence, diminishes the enthusiasm in and outside of government for continuing his policies. Frustration from the left in both countries regarding persisting human rights violations and the slow pace of judicial reform could also grow more serious.

Impact – Reform K2 Renewables
Mexico key to global renewables- reforms key
Huacuz, 7 -- Electrical Research Institute
[Jorge, "Renewable Energy in Mexico," Towards a Cleaner Planet, google books]
Mexico is at cross-roads regarding renewable energy . On the one hand, this country has all the necessary elements to become a major user and developer of the technology. Because of its geographic al position and foreign policy instruments in place, such as NAFTA and the Puebla-Panama Plan (between Mexico and the Central American countries),
Mexico could also become an important exporter of this technology to its neighbouring mar- kets. On the other hand, however, the big oil paradigm is too deeply imprinted in the minds of` many people, energy officials and industry leaders included. Hence, unless a quick and conscious effort is made to alter this situation, the opportunities ahead (economic, social, political, environ- mental and otherwise) can be lost, as the window of opportunity to close the gap is too narrow . The effort to be made includes the implementation of aggressive renewable energy policies and a variety of technical and non- technical changes in the energy market. Barriers that could inhibit progress need to be identified and strategies to remove them in the short to medium terms must be developed; new capabilities and infrastructure (human, technical and physical) to identify and tap niches of opportunity where green power is technically and economically viable must be created, so that enough experience is gained within the country in this new field of the energy business; finally, mechanisms to assure a level enough playing field for renewables to compete with other alternatives, under equitable and transparent rules of game, must be introduced. Consumer awareness has to be raised, new capacities of the public, private and social entities have to be built, technology intermediation centers have to be strengthened or cre- ated, and new financing services have to be established. Above all, a new energy culture must be created.

Impact – Mexico Econ
Econ on the brink – energy reform key
The Economist 6-29-2013
“Rolling with the punches,” http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21580165-fed-one-bogeymanhalf-hearted-energy-reform-another-rolling
Although other Latin American currencies have been weaker for longer, the peso took the Fed chairman’s punch on the nose (see chart). Since early May, when speculation that the Fed was likely to rein in its bond-buying programme increased, the currency has plummeted from below 12 per dollar to over 13. In the same period the yield on Mexico’s benchmark ten-year bonds has risen from an historic low of 4.4% to 6.2%, battering the Mexican pension funds that invest in them.
So far the feared mass exodus of foreign investors has not materialised. According to Banco de México, the central bank, there has been a $4.3 billion net outflow of foreign money from the stockmarket in the three months to the end of May. But the stock of foreign holdings remains historically high; several firms have raised money on the bourse in recent days. Foreign holdings of government bonds have been relatively stable. Much of the peso’s volatility has been driven by investors hedging the currency risk on their fixed-income exposure rather than dumping bonds.
Craig LeVeille of the Chicago-based CME Group, where peso futures are traded, says investors with Latin
American exposure may also have hedged in the Mexican peso market because it is deeper and more liquid than its peers in the region, exacerbating the currency’s slide.
One reason investors may be prepared to tread waterin Mexico is that economic growth, which has been weaker than forecast in the first four months of the year, is highly dependent on demand in America. If the economy north of the border accelerates that would benefit Mexico, even if it also encourages Mr Bernanke to “taper”.
The wild card, though, is whether the seven-month-old government of Enrique Peña Nieto can present a bill in
September that succeeds in meaningfully reforming the energy sector, which is considered vital for boosting
Mexico’s long-term growth potential . In London this month Mr Peña spoke of big proposed changes to increase the participation of private firms in the energy industry, but it was not clear how dramatically his reforms would alter the 1917 Constitution, which specifies that all natural resources belong to the state. Even such guarded comments sparked a backlash at home, suggesting Mr Peña would need to present a watered-down bill to keep the left in a three-way political pact he has forged to promote reform.
It is hard to measure the impact of such uncertainty on markets, but some senior officials think it is meaningful.
“Every fund manager that I speak to who knows Mexico well speaks about energy reform,” says one. “There have been so many mixed signals about energy that people are very sceptical.” Mr Bernanke’s writ runs far, but local politics still matter.
Mexican collapse goes global
DMN 95 (Dallas Morning News, 11-28, Lexis)
This time, the world is keeping a close eye on Mexico's unfolding financial crisis for one simple reason: Mexico is a major international player. If its economy were to collapse , it would drag down a few other countries and thousands of foreign investors. If recovery is prolonged, the world economy will feel the slowdown . "It took a peso devaluation so that other countries could notice the key role that
Mexico plays in today's global economy," said economist Victor Lpez Villafane of the Monterrey Institute of Technology. "I hate to say it, but if
Mexico were to default on its debts, that would trigger an international financial collapse " not seen since the Great Depression, said Dr. Lpez, who has conducted comparative studies of the Mexican economy and the economies of some Asian and Latin American countries.
"That's why it's in the best interests of the United States and the industrialized world to help Mexico weather its economic crisis," he said. The crisis began last December when the Mexican government devalued the currency. Last March, after weeks of debate, President Clinton, the
International Monetary Fund and a handful of other countries and international agencies put together a $ 53 billion rescue package for Mexico.
But despite the help - $ 20 billion in guarantee loans from the United States - Mexico's financial markets have been volatile for most of the year.
The peso is now trading at about 7.70 to the dollar, after falling to an all-time low of 8.30 to the dollar Nov. 9. The road has been bumpy, and that has made many - particularly U.S. investors - nervous. No country understands better the importance of Mexico to the global economy than the
United States, said Jorge Gonzlez Dvila, an economist at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Despite the rhetoric that you hear in Washington, I think that most people agree - even those who oppose any aid to Mexico - that when Mexico sneezes, everybody catches a cold ," Mr.
Gonzlez said.

Impact – Energy Competitiveness
PEMEX reform solves Mexican energy security
Morales 11
(Isidro Morales, Ph.D., is a professor at the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM),
Sante Fe Campus, in Mexico City. Morales’ main research areas are the geopolitics and geo-economics of energy, trade, and investment markets; the political economic of regional integration; Mexico-U.S. trade and security relations’ and U.S.-Latin American relations. “Energy Trade and Security Issues at the Mexico-U.S. Border,” James
A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, 4/29/11, http://www.bakerinstitute.org/publications/EFpub-MoralesTrade-04292011.pdf)
In other words, Mexico’s oil rent in the past five years has increased in spite of the decline in volume, thanks to the new cycle of high oil prices witnessed by international markets. However,
Mexico’s oil addiction —in both the energy mix and in the balance of payments— has become a major vulnerability .Mexico has become vulnerable to the behavior of oil markets because of two reasons:
1) the unpredictable price fluctuations that may occur in the mid- to long terms; 2) the secular decline in oil exports while imports of refined fuels—mainly gasoline—are growing . This probably explains why in Calderon’s 2010 National Energy Strategy, the concept of “energy security” was introduced for the first time in the country's official jargon.
¶ In principle, a strategy of energy security should target the reduction of vulnerabilities —social, economic, or political— vis-à-vis unexpected or critical changes impacting the energy system of a country. In fact, the governance of risk, uncertainty, and adaptation must be at the root of any security policy. In the case of energy, a risk is mainly defined in terms of unexpected shocks affecting the stability of energy supplies (in the case of Mexico, mainly oil and gas), which may be unleashed by national depletion (the current decline of conventional oil reserves), natural disasters, or geopolitical changes (Morales 2011). The supply shocks may at the same time unleash uncertainties in energy markets and undermine policy options, i.e., the evolution of new investments and drilling exploration, etc.
However, President Calderon’s National Energy Strategy has a limited view of energy security for the country, because one of the most important goals to be achieved in the present and forthcoming presidential administrations, i.e. 2024, is the restitution of Pemex oil production to its historical level —3.3 million barrels per day (b/d)— and the ratio of proved reserves replacement to 100%.
In 2009 the actual record of these two figures was 2.6 million b/d and 72% respectively (SENER 2010a, 63). That is, in Calderon’s view, the major security goal is to raise oil production to its historical levels and reduce the rate of depletion of nonrenewable resources, all under the aegis of a Pemex monopoly. Under his strategy, it is not clear how a transition to a more diversified energy mix will be accomplished or combined with right price signals for ensuring the participation of private firms (in the domains where this is permitted or in the exploitation of renewable resources ) in the order to adapt Mexico’s energy system to a scenario of growing energy demand while reducing carbon emissions.
That collapses Mexico’s economy
Garcia 8 (Arturo, chairman of the Latin American Petrochemical and Chemical Association, “Mexico's coming energy crisis all but overshadows the petrochemical industry's investment problems,” ICIS, 11-5, http://www.icis.com/Articles/2008/11/10/9169337/mexicos-impending-energy-crisis-has-severe-implications-forthe-economy-and-petrochemicals.html)
YOU WOULDN'T believe it, but petrochemicals are not a problem in Mexico any more. Mexico faces a fundamental problem that makes the petrochemical industry's challenges of little concern compared to the looming energy crisis and its economic impact . If
Mexico runs out of crude oil and gas in about five to eight years, then there will be no feedstock to supply any new petrochemical facility or refinery. The following data show the size of the problem - not only for petrochemicals and refined products, but for state-owned oil company
Pemex and for Mexico's entire economy. The decline in crude oil production is drastic, and continues to accelerate . In 2004, Pemex produced 3.4m bbls/day of oil. Today, that figure is down to just 2.8m bbls/day. This means that in just four years, Mexico lost 47% of its crude oil production. In particular, Cantarell, the main oil basin, experienced a more dramatic decline from 2.2m bbls/day to 1.1m bbls/day. Until July
2008, crude oil volume reduction was compensated through high crude oil prices - the value of oil exports in 2006 amounted to $21.9bn and in
2008 will jump to an estimated $30.4bn. But crude prices have collapsed and are below half their peak of $147/bbl, from July. In the meantime, imports of hydrocarbons and derivatives continue to grow. By the end of 2008, 50% of all gasoline consumed in Mexico will come from imports.
But the bigger problem is that by adding all other imports of derivatives to gasoline, th e country is now spending more than $15bn
(€12bn)/year - equivalent to 50% of total revenues from crude oil exports - to import the gasoline and other crude oil derivatives .
This situation will only get worse because consumption of derivatives continues to grow . And with crude collapsing, lowering Mexico's export revenues, the country will use all of its foreign currency to buy these derivatives. It is still important to be realistic and to anticipate the worst-case scenario. There are five fundamental factors that will lead to "the perfect storm" for Mexico . 1.
The decline in crude production will continue as efforts to increase production will not be enough to compensate for depletion. 2. Imports of gasoline and other oil derivatives soon will be equivalent to revenue from crude oil exports. 3. Prices of crude oil have collapsed, meaning much less export revenue 4. Mexico's so-called Energy Reform, which has been approved by Congress, will not make any difference to the problem. 5.

The financial crisis is global. No-one is safe, and Mexico's economy will face a big hit in consumption and GDP growth . This situation will put Mexico in a situation where it faces "cash flow restrictions" because the government depends on oil export revenues for meeting 40% of its annual budget.
That causes unrest and turns the US economy
Fox News 9 (“What Happens to the U.S. if Mexico Collapses?,” 2-17, http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/02/17/what-happens-to-us-if-mexico-collapses/#ixzz2Zw66rDY)
GLENN BECK, HOST: OK. There is California. Let's try this one.
Mexico is the 12th largest economy and second largest trading partner with the U.S
. And I don't know if you have noticed this. Grab a fire extinguisher. It's on fire. Close to 6,000 people were killed by rival drug gangs which is twice as many as in 2007. Texas is terrified that the violence is going to spill over the border
. In a minute, I will explain how the whole world is going to change if Mexico collapses
. The number one place for kidnappings is Mexico City. Who do you think number two is for kidnapping? You know, I was thinking Bogota, Columbia. Maybe some place in Somalia. Well, close. It is Phoenix, Arizona where there were almost 400 reported kidnappings last year and many more went unreported. Excuse me? John McCain was on the campaign trail for how many months, and we never heard about this and it's happening in his backyard? No one is talking about it, because it's not in anybody's best interest, you know, except yours and mine. I think it's in your best interest to know all of the facts and what it means to you. Texas officials are now planning for the worst-case scenario of, what do you do if Mexico just collapses? State
Senator Dan Patrick is joining me now. Hey, Dan, how are you? SEN. DAN PATRICK (R), TEXAS STATE SENATOR: Hi, Glenn. Thank you for your passion on everything. It comes through. BECK: Thank you. Thank you. PATRICK: Thank you, Glenn. BECK: I have been, and I know you have been, too - talking about the border, not because ... PATRICK: Yes. BECK: ... much to many people's chagrin here in America that I don't hate Mexicans. I don't hate people who are different than me. Almost everybody on the planet is different than me. I mean, look at me. PATRICK: Right. BECK: The problem is this is a dangerous situation
. People feel disenfranchised.
Mexico is on the verge of collapse
.
You've got massive murder problems and drug problems
. What are you are guys worried about? And how are you preparing in Texas for a possible push into America from people just fleeing a drug state?
PATRICK: Well, Glenn, we had hearings a couple of weeks ago. And I asked our Homeland Security Director Steve McCraw of Texas if he feared the collapse of
Mexico and did we have a plan. And he didn't deny the fact that it is a concern. And since that subcommittee meeting we had a few weeks ago, he has been working with Gov. Perry and I'm meeting with him in a few days, as a matter of fact, to see their progress on developing a plan. You will love this term, Glenn. The United
States has a plan called "mass migration" as opposed to the collapse of Mexico. And we need a plan here in Texas because there are two scenarios, Glenn. One is a slow collapse, an economic collapse of Mexico in which
hundreds of thousands would come here over a period of time. The second is what I call a
Colombian collapse of Mexico, an assassination of the president, the drug cartels taking over the country
, civil war breaking out on the streets
, people fleeing for their lives, not for a job. We have to be prepared in the United States for both and Texas must be prepared.

2AC
Pemex Reform won’t pass
Estevez 6-26-2013
Dolia, “Most Mexicans Oppose President Peña Nieto's Plans To Open Up Pemex To Private Investment,” http://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2013/06/26/most-mexicans-oppose-president-pena-nietos-plans-to-openup-pemex-to-private-investment/
But Mexicans are less than ready to support Peña Nieto’s most ambitious and controversial reform to date. A new poll by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), a research institute, shows that 65 out of every
100 Mexicans are against opening up Pemex, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer with annual sales of more than $100 billion. “Energy, particularly oil, continues to be the stronghold of Mexican nationalism,” said CIDE.
Peña Nieto is counting on the Pact for Mexico, an alliance of the country’s top three political parties, to try to get the reform passed. The proposal, which is expected to involve reforming the Constitution, will need two-thirds support from Mexico’s Congress; the PRI, his party, does not hold a simple majority in either house. Peña Nieto reported that he’s negotiating to get the political support he needs to break the state monopoly. However, some analysts believe that the Pacto, which succeeded in getting through a monopoly-busting telecom reform in May, will not hold up this time . The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, warned that they will oppose
Pemex’s reform. Marcelo Ebrard, a popular former mayor of Mexico City and likely PRD Presidential candidate in
2018, challenged Peña Nieto to a televised debate on the oil overhaul. Former PRD Presidential candidate
Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Lazaro Cárdenas’ son, presented a counter proposal to “modernize” Pemex without changing
Article 27 of the Constitution to undo the historical ban on privatizing the company. His proposal was endorsed
Tuesday by top PRD politicians, including Ebrard and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, and the party’s congressional leaders.
Nieto doesn’t have political capital and scandals thump it
Ackerman 2013
John M., professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a visiting scholar at American University, “The Mexico Bubble,” http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/05/01/the_mexico_bubble_enrique_pena_nieto?wpisrc=obnetwork
According to the hype, Peña Nieto has already transformed the political landscape in Mexico after only four months in office. Time magazine has named him one of its "100 Most Influential People in the World," claiming that he
"combines Reagan's charisma with Obama's intellect and Clinton's political skills." The Financial Times raves that with the death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, Peña Nieto may now take up the torch of Latin American leadership and revive the "Washington Consensus" that predominated in the region during the 1980s and called for drastic restrictions in social spending and the implementation of "trickle-down" neoliberal economic policies. The
Washington Post editorial board suggests that "Washington should be cheering Mexico's gridlock busting -- and taking it as an example." Meanwhile, Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, has called Mexico the "Comeback
Kid" and Shannon O´Neil argues in Foreign Affairs that Mexico has now "made it."
Such exaggerations have no basis in reality . Even after months of an expensive, high-profile media blitz, Peña
Nieto has begun his administration with the lowest public approval rating of any Mexican president over the last two decades. Only 50 percent of Mexicans approve of his presidency today, much less than the 70 percent who supported the first non-PRI president, Vicente Fox, at the beginning of his term, according to Reforma newspaper.
Peña Nieto's approval rating is even lower than that for presidents Ernesto Zedillo and Felipe Calderón at the disastrous crisis-ridden beginnings of their terms, according to the same source.
A recent poll also shows increased public skepticism in Peña Nieto's, "Pact for Mexico," Today, only 21 percent of the population believes that this pact will benefit them while 31 percent are convinced that it will harm them. This same independent poll reveals that the majority of the population perceives the agreement to be in the interests principally of the political parties and big business. Only 35 percent think that the country as a whole will benefit.
It is important to remember that Peña Nieto only received 38.2 percent of the vote in the 2012 presidential elections and that the voting base of his party (Party of the Institutional Revolution-PRI) is principally located in the poorest, least educated, and most isolated rural sectors of the population. All of the most "modern" and "middle class" sectors of the population voted overwhelmingly against bringing the PRI and its pretty-boy candidate back to power, according to independent exit polls and demographic surveys. For instance, the only time Peña Nieto dared to hold a campaign event with college students during last year's presidential race, he was aggressively run off the campus amid shouts that he was an "assassin" and a "thief."

Peña Nieto's strategyhas been to compensate for this weakness in public support by co-opting the old political opposition and turning his back on his critics in society. But this approach has recently come up against a brick wall .
For instance, in their haste to demonstrate quick legislative results, the politicians forgot to consult with civil society before pushing through a controversial education reform at lightning speed last December. As a result, today thousands of teachers are on strike throughout Mexico's poorest southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and
Michoacán in protest against a reform which they correctly claim threatens to drastically reduce job security, introduce excessive standardized testing, entrench inequality between schools in wealthy and poor areas, and privatize public education. In the state of Guerrero, local citizen militias, parents, and youth groups have even joined with the teachers in a broad-based coalition against Peña Nieto's broader neoliberal economic agenda.
Indeed, the Pact for Mexico itself may soon entirely break apart . A new scandal involving the use of Peña
Nieto's federal social programs to purchase votes has led the two leading opposition parties, PAN from the right and
PRD from the left, to threaten abandoning the pact altogether unless the president takes action against his own top officials. This will be an important test of political will for Peña Nieto to see whether he is able to prioritize accountability over political expediency.
US will aid Mexico in combatting the drug trade – Merida sets the mark
Felbab-Brown 13 (Vanda is a Brookings Institution expert on international and internal conflicts and nontraditional security threats, “Peña Nieto’s Piñata: The Promise and Pitfalls of Mexico’s New Security
Policy against Organized Crime”, Brookings Institution, February 2013, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/02/mexico%20new%20security%20policy%20felba bbrown/mexico%20new%20security%20policy%20felbabbrown.pdf) ~ew
Although Washington continues to be wary of the new security policy in Mexico, the United States government has indicated an important willingness to elevate the importance of reducing violence inMexico. There are precedents for such a shift in U.S. anti-crime priorities abroad. In Central America, for example, the U.S. government has come to give more attention to addressing violence suffered by ordinary people and reducing overall citizen insecurity. Its primary vehicle for combatting criminality in Central America, the Central America
Regional Security Initiative (CARSI), shifted by 2011 to focus not only on disrupting the movement of criminals and contraband and supporting the development of strong, capable, and accountable governments in Central
America, but also on creating safe streets for the citizens in Central America and fostering the rule of law.36 The
U.S. Mérida Initiative to support Mexico’s anti-crime efforts equally evolved from its original emphasis on technological transfers and heavy equipment toward greater support for institutional building in the law enforcement and justice sectors and an emphasis on building communities that are resilient to penetration, intimidation, and cooptation by criminal groups. The changed focus was captured in the new label the first Obama administration gave its Mexico assistance package—Beyond Mérida.37 Prioritizing violence reduction is a greater leap for U.S. anti-crime efforts abroad than the previous shifts and one that requires a more radical break with the history and tendencies of U.S. supply-side counternarcotics policy and outside-assistance anti-organized-crime policies—but it is the right strategy.
PAN-PRI election fights destroy the Pact for Mexico and block Pemex reform
Gardner 7/7
Simon Gardner, Reuters, 7/7/13, “Mexico reform drive at stake as regions vote”, http://www.trust.org/item/20130707151532-gpuc6/?source%20=%20hpbreaking
By Simon Gardner MEXICO CITY, July 7 (Reuters) - Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto's sweeping economic reform plans hang in the balance in local elections on Sunday with a strong opposition showing seen as crucial to preserve a cross-party pact. Nearly half of Mexico's 31 states are voting for a mix of local parliaments and municipal governments, but all eyes are on the race for governor in the state of Baja California, a stronghold of the conservative National Action party (PAN). The PAN lost control of Mexico in last year's presidential elections, being relegated to the third force in Congress, but Pena Nieto must keep them on board to help him push through planned overhauls of state oil giant Pemex and the tax system. Baja California is one of the PAN's few remaining bastions and if the party can hold the state it could be just what Pena Nieto needs to keep alive the so-called Pact for
Mexico he forged with opposition leaders upon taking office in December. PAN lawmakers already have accused

Pena Nieto's centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, of trying to steal the election by buying votes, and have warned that any sign of fraud could scupper the political accord. "If the elections don't go freely and democratically, it is clear the pact will come to no good," said Francisco Dominguez, a PAN senatoron congressional commissions debating the shape of energy and fiscal reforms. "It's very simple. If there are complaints, if there are irregularities, we will act." Baja California, which nestles along the U.S. border in northwest
Mexico, was the first state the PAN wrested from the PRI 24 years ago as it eroded the party's stranglehold on power before ending a 71-year ruling streak in 2000. Although a poll late last month gave the PAN an eight-point lead over the PRI in Baja California, therace is expected to be tight, with some voters in the state weary of more than two decades of rule by the same party.Moreover, the PAN has been locked in public, petty infighting since last year's drubbing, when voters castigated the party for failing to curb violence betweenwarring drug cartels that has claimed more than 70,000 lives since 2007. That bloodshed has continued, and the election campaign has been marred by the murder of a number of candidates. Jose Maria Martinez, a PAN senator presiding over a committee to observe the electoral process, said this week the elections would be the "most violent" in Mexican history. BETTER THE
STATUS QUO? PAN chairman Gustavo Madero will be under the spotlight, and if Baja California is lost, it risks plunging the party into a leadership crisis and endangering the pact - a fact not lost on Mexicans looking to Pena
Nieto to revive the economy. "The most convenient thing would be for the PAN to win, so it at least holds this governorship after last year's defeat and so the pact remains in place," said Pedro Feria, 32, an out-of-work lawyer who supports the PRI. "What I want is for them to focus on creating job opportunities. I've been looking for a year now. They should create policies to help people progress," he added, sitting in the blazing sun on a park bench in downtown Mexico City. The pact has already pushed a wide-reaching education reform and a major shake-up of competition in the telecoms sector through Congress, with a separate bill aimed at spurring bank lending expected to pass in coming weeks. But the central planks of Pena Nieto's hopes to raise economic growth to 6 percent a year from barely two percent since the millennium began are the reform to improve the tax take and the plan to open up
Pemex to more private investment. Those measures may be in doubt if the pact falls apart. The PAN's Madero has laid the ground for post-electoral fight, pinning accusations of vote buying, fraud and corruption against the PRI on a giant map of Mexico during the campaign.Adding fuel to the fire, a PAN candidate running in the eastern state of Veracruz said a few days before the elections that he had been kidnapped and questioned about party politics.
When asked about the incident, PRI chairman Cesar Camacho said he suspected the Veracruz case had been made up in an attempt to discredit the ruling party and that reports were surfacing to generate a "general sense of disorder and discontent." "It seems like an advance justification of defeat," he said.

1AR – Won’t Pass
Internal strife and political clash will prevent Pemex reform from passing
Economist 7/9
The Economist, 7/9/13, “Why might Mexico’s president want to lose an election?”, http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/07/economist-explains-5
MEXICANS went to the polls in almost half the country’s states on July 7th for a round of local elections. All eyes were on Baja California, the only state to be electing a new governor. In a close race, President Enrique Peña Nieto’s
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) looked to be in with a chance of snatching control of the state from the
National Action Party (PAN), which has held it for 24 years. Preliminary results suggest that in the end the PAN managed to cling on to power. So why might Mr Peña be breathing a sigh of relief that his PRI candidate lost the race?
When his presidency began on December 1st, Mr Peña unveiled the “Pacto por Mexico”, an agreement between the three main parties to pass a broad package of reforms for which the country had been crying out for years. The effect of the Pacto has been dramatic: in contrast to the legislative logjam seen during much of the past decade, Mr Peña’s government has pushed through a slew of important new laws. The past six months have seen an education reform, an anti-monopolies law to attack the fiefs of Carlos Slim and Televisa, and a legal reform to free up the courts.
Many more are planned.
Yet the Pacto is at risk. Some members of the two main opposition parties, the conservative PAN and the left-wing
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), are beginning to wonder if it’s such a good idea to vote for all the president’s initiatives. Though the Pacto contains policies that all parties broadly agree on, its success is making the president and the PRI rather popular. Meanwhile, internal rivalries are tearing the PAN apart, and the PRD is facing a crisis after Andrés Manuel López Obrador, its presidential candidate last year, announced that he would establish a new, rival left-wing party. As the July 7th elections approached, some members of the opposition began to argue that, if the results were bad, they should withdraw from the Pacto, and pursue a more obstructive line against the president.
Mr Peñamight therefore be relieved that preliminary results suggest that his party’s candidate lost the battle of Baja
California. Winning a single state, and in return risking the Pacto, could have been quite a Pyrrhic victory.That’s not to say that the Pacto is safe. For one thing, a recount under way in Baja California may yet change the result.Secondly, with the elections out of the way the government is about to pursue its most controversial reforms yet, to allow more private investment in the energy sector and to raise taxes. With Mr López Obradorpreparing street demonstrations against these initiatives, it will be more tempting than ever for the main leftist opposition party to bail out of the Pacto. Although the battle of Baja California appears to have been successfully fought and lost,
Mexico’s president faces a long, politically heated summer.
Public opposition makes Pemex reform fail
Estevez13 foreign correspondent, former bureau chief for El Financiero
[Dolia, “Most Mexicans Oppose President Peña Nieto's Plans To Open Up Pemex To Private Investment”
Forbes.com, 6-26-13 http://www.forbes.com/sites/doliaestevez/2013/06/26/most-mexicans-oppose-president-penanietos-plans-to-open-up-pemex-to-private-investment/]
But Mexicans are less than ready to support Peña Nieto’s most ambitious and controversial reform to date. A new poll by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), a research institute, shows that 65 out of every
100 Mexicans are against opening up Pemex, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer with annual sales of more than $100 billion. “Energy, particularly oil, continues to be the stronghold of Mexican nationalism,” said CIDE.
¶
Peña Nieto is counting on the Pact for Mexico, an alliance of the country’s top three political parties, to try to get the reform passed. The proposal, which is expected to involve reforming the Constitution, will need two-thirds support from Mexico’s Congress; the PRI, his party, does not hold a simple majority in either house. Peña Nieto reported that he’s negotiating to get the political support he needs to break the state monopoly. However, some analystsbelieve that the Pact, which succeeded in getting through a monopoly-busting telecom reform in May, will not hold up this time. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, warned that they will oppose
Pemex’s reform. Marcelo Ebrard, a popular former mayor of Mexico City and likely PRD Presidential candidate in
2018, challenged Peña Nieto to a televised debate on the oil overhaul. Former PRD Presidential candidate

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Lazaro Cárdenas’ son, presented a counter proposal to “modernize” Pemex without changing
Article 27 of the Constitution to undo the historical ban on privatizing the company. His proposal was endorsed
Tuesday by top PRD politicians, including Ebrard and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, and the party’s congressional leaders.
¶ Pemex claims there is a need to boost annual investment by 46%, to $37 billion, to tap undeveloped shale-gas deposits and deep-water reserves. Peña Nieto says that while he wants investment to come from private capital, he insists that Mexico’s oil and gas reserves will remain under the state’s control, i.e. will not be sold to private firms or privatized.
¶ But many Mexicans are skeptical. They believe that a better alternative would be for the government to stop taking such a high tax from Pemex —40% of total government revenues — to allow it to reinvest instead of leaving it struggling to fund investment. Then there is the ever present problem of high-level corruption in Pemex that accounts for billions in losses. The press has reported on government officials being paid millions of dollars by drug-connected contractors for juicy contracts with Pemex. The lavish lifestyle of the oil workers union leader, Carlos Romero Deschamps and his children, has also come out in the open. Newspapers published Facebook FB -0.65% images of Paulina Romero, Romero Deschamps’ daughter, boasting about her world travels aboard private jets accompanied by her three English bulldogs — Keiko, Boli and Morgancita, dining in first class restaurants with Vega Sicilia wines, and sporting Hermes luxury hand bags. His brother, José Carlos Romero
Durán, was also featured driving a $2 million limited edition red Enzo Ferrari sport car, a gift from his father, whose trade union monthly salary is $1,864. Opposition politicians are conditioning talks on the oil overhaul to the government cracking down first on high level corruption, starting with Romero Deschamps.
No pass – insiders know that it will fail to help Pemex attract sufficient investment
Mander 6/27
Benedict Mander, FinancialTimes, 6/27/13, “Energy: Focus on Pemex raises hopes of private investors”, http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6aeb8e5a-c79c-11e2-9c52-00144feab7de.html#axzz2YZCf3y7x
The development of these reserves is becoming increasingly urgent since Mexico’s oil production has fallen from
3.4m barrels a day in 2004 to about 2.5m b/d, in large part because of over-dependence on its massive Cantarell oilfield, which is running dry.
But the ability of foreign oil companies to help reverse this trend will depend on the success of constitutional reform. Mr Peña Nieto has made this a priority, since foreign companies have been prohibited from getting Mexican oil out of the ground since the 1938 nationalisation.
While many see this as Mexico’s best chance for energy reform in the past 75 years, it is far from being a done deal.
A reform package is expected to be submitted to Congress by September. It remains unclear what it will contain.
“We don’t know if it’s going to change enough for it to be attractive to invest,” says an executive at an international oil company.
Pemex’s capital investment in the past decade has quadrupled to almost $25bn, with most of it destined for exploration and production.
That may be a huge amount for one company, but it is not nearly enough for the development of the oil sector of a country the size of Mexico, comment analysts.
Just to start producing in deep waters would require investments of $10bn a year, according to Mr Mereles.
“It’s just not possible for Pemex to do this alone. We are going to need hundreds of companies coming in,” says one industry insider.
Pemex reform will be pushed back – state debt, education reform, and financial reform all come first
Reuters, 6/12
Reuters, 6/12/13, “Mexico Congress to hold special sessions, buttressing reforms”, http://news.yahoo.com/mexicocongress-hold-special-sessions-buttressing-reforms-025354932.html
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Congressional leaders of Mexico's main parties said on Wednesday they had agreed to hold two special sessions of Congress in July and August to tackle outstanding initiatives, paving the way for key energy and fiscal reforms to move forward in the autumn.

President Enrique Pena Nieto plans to send measures aimed at boosting Mexico's paltry tax take and overhauling ailing state-oil monopoly Pemex to Congress during the second regular session of Congress, which begins in
September.
But an overhang of outstanding initiatives from the first congressional session, which ended in April, threatened to push back the much anticipated reforms.
The two extraordinary sessions agreed to on Wednesday would be held in the second halves of July and August respectively, said Emilio Gamboa, who heads the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the Senate.
Representatives of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the conservative National Action Part
(PAN) also agreed to the plan.
In the July session, lawmakers will discuss measures that would give more power to the transparency institute, regulate state debt, appoint a new leader for the election authority and create a new anti-corruption body.
In August, the legislators plan to draw up secondary laws to implement recently approved measures aimed at improving education and boosting competition in the telecoms sector, which is dominated by billionaire Carlos
Slim.
Both special sessions are due to take place after charged regional elections in 14 states slated for July 7.
Opposition parties have accused the PRI of misusing state funds to win votes in states they govern, which has shaken the so-called "Pact for Mexico," signed by the government and major parties to push through reforms.
A financial reform aimed at boosting credit was also unveiled by the president in May but has not yet been approved.
The public hates Nieto and his Pemex reform proposal -- leaders are forced to oppose it too to not garner public support
BBC 7/2
BBC News, 7/2/13, “In pictures: Mexico's Pemex protests”, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-
23145802
Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto'spromise to overhaul state-owned oil firm Pemex has sparked angry protests in the capital, Mexico City. The demonstrators suspect the government is planning to privatise Pemex, which has long been a symbol of national pride for many Mexicans. The slogan "Pemex is not for sale" was emblazoned on hats and scrawled on walls during the march. The government says it wants to allow Pemex to raise more private capital to pay for much-needed infrastructure development and further exploration of Mexico's undersea reserves.
Some of the protesters donned the V for Vendetta mask that has become the ubiquitous symbol of protests from
Turkey to Brazil.Police were out in force to protect the city's landmarks, but the rally passed off peacefully. The issue remains one of the clearest dividing lines between Mr Pena Nieto and his left-wing opponents, and could be a deciding factor in local elections due this weekend.
Dolia Estevez 13’
In London last week, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto said he will push for a “transformational” reformof
Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), Mexico’s state-owned monopoly in oil and gas exploration and production. “There are different options on what the reform should be, but I am confident …  It will be transformational,” Peña Nieto told the Financial Times, adding that the reform would include “the constitutional changes needed to give private investors certainty.”
Foreign oil companies were expropriated by Mexican President Lazaro Cárdenas in 1938, and ever since Mexico’s vast oil resources — 13.9 billion barrels of crude-oil and possibly the world’s fourth-largest shale-gas reserves– became forbidden to outsiders. The Wall Street Journal said the announcement highlights a “willingness to break

with the past among young, reformist members” of the PRI, Peña Nieto’s party. Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch
Shell are reported to be ready to return to Mexico, if Congress passes the measure. Both were among the group of
American and British companies expropriated 75 years ago.
But Mexicans are less than ready to support Peña Nieto’s most ambitious and controversial reform to date. A new poll by the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), a research institute, shows that 65 out of every
100 Mexicans are against opening up Pemex, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer with annual sales of more than $100 billion. “Energy, particularly oil, continues to be the stronghold of Mexican nationalism,” said CIDE.
Peña Nieto is counting on the Pact for Mexico, an alliance of the country’s top three political parties, to try to get the reform passed. The proposal, which is expected to involve reforming the Constitution, will need two-thirds support from Mexico’s Congress; the PRI, his party, does not hold a simple majority in either house. Peña Nieto reported that he’s negotiating to get the political support he needs to break the state monopoly. However, some analysts believe that the Pacto, which succeeded in getting through a monopoly-busting telecom reform in May, will not hold up this time. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, warned that they will oppose Pemex’s reform. Marcelo Ebrard, a popular former mayor of Mexico City and likely PRD Presidential candidate in 2018, challenged Peña Nieto to a televised debate on the oil overhaul. Former PRD Presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc
Cárdenas, Lazaro Cárdenas’ son, presented a counter proposal to “modernize” Pemex without changing Article 27 of the Constitution to undo the historical ban on privatizing the company. His proposal was endorsed Tuesday by top
PRD politicians, including Ebrard and Mexico City Mayor Miguel Angel Mancera, and the party’s congressional leaders.
Pemex claims there is a need to boost annual investment by 46%, to $37 billion, to tap undeveloped shale-gas deposits and deep-water reserves. Peña Nieto says that while he wants investment to come from private capital, he insists that Mexico’s oil and gas reserves will remain under the state’s control, i.e. will not be sold to private firms or privatized.
Butmany Mexicans are skeptical. They believe that a better alternative would be for the government to stop taking such a high tax from Pemex —40% of total government revenues — to allow it to reinvest instead of leaving it struggling to fund investment. Then there is the ever present problem of high-level corruption in Pemex that accounts for billions in losses. The press has reported on government officials being paid millions of dollars by drug-connected contractors for juicy contracts with Pemex. The lavish lifestyle of the oil workers union leader,
Carlos Romero Deschamps and his children, has also come out in the open. Newspapers published Facebook FB
+1.4% images of Paulina Romero, Romero Deschamps’ daughter, boasting about her world travels aboard private jets accompanied by her three English bulldogs — Keiko, Boli and Morgancita, dining in first class restaurants with
Vega Sicilia wines, and sporting Hermes luxury hand bags. His brother, José Carlos Romero Durán, was also featured driving a $2 million limited edition red Enzo Ferrari sport car, a gift from his father, whose trade union monthly salary is $1,864. Opposition politicians are conditioning talks on the oil overhaul to the government cracking down first on high level corruption, starting with Romero Deschamps.

1AR – Union Thumper
Teachers union protests hurt political capital
Montes 2013
Juan, “Strikes by Mexican Teachers Challenge New President,” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323551004578438882863242710.html
Last week, tens of thousands of teachers, some armed with metal bars and Molotov cocktails, marched in Guerrero's capital, Chilpancingo. They again blocked for hours the highway that connects Mexico City with the Pacific port of
Acapulco, hurting a key economic and tourist hub. The demonstrations have been held sporadically since the overhaul bill was signed.
A protracted conflict could undermine Mr. Peña Nieto's political capital as he is seeking wide consensus for his ambitious agenda , which he put into action with the education-revamp bill just after taking office on Dec. 1. It would also raise doubts over whether the education overhaul will be fully implemented, analysts say. Government officials say the protests won't stop the changes from proceeding.

1AR – Drug Thumper
Obama plans to aid Nieto in drug policy
Brewer 7/8 (Jerry, “Mexico's Law Enforcement and Police Policies Questioned”, Mexidata.info, 8 July 2013, http://www.mexidata.info/id3656.html) ~ew
Peña Nieto has vacillated from enforcement postures against drug traffickers and drug kingpins, to pursuing violent criminals with more of a focus on so-called "traditional crime."His stated desires, to move priorities away from drug arrests and seizures and simply towards violence reduction, have created concern among US political leaders.
President Barack Obama speaks of close cooperation with Mexico, while moving "to a more humanistic counternarcotics policy, and plans to strengthen communities in the border region with resources to be dedicated to tackling substance abuse and violence through health and education programs." This described as policies focused almost entirely on security, which too include broader social issues that fuel organized crime and the drug trade.
And this appears to be much of Peña Nieto's message.

Climate Co-op Popular
McCain 12
(Christina McCain, Ph.D., heads EDF's climate change initiatives in Mexico. She is a formally trained tropical forest ecologist and works as a policy expert on tropical forests and climate change, with an emphasis on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+). “Mexico’s Congress looks to pass climate change law this spring,” Environment Defense Fund, 2/1/12, http://blogs.edf.org/climatetalks/2012/02/01/mexicos-congress-looks-to-pass-climate-change-law-this-spring/)
Particularly over the last several years, the country has shown political willingness to address climate change, with a pledge to halve its emissions by 2050 from 2000 levels, and a number of sweeping climate change bills brought up in the
Senate.Though the other climate bills never became law, the current bill’s overwhelming approval in the Senate by a broad coalition of sponsors (76-2 with 5 abstentions) shows a stronger momentum than we’ve seen .
¶ While the political composition of Mexico’s lower chamber may mean the bill will not have as broad support in the Chamber of Deputies as it had in the Senate, it may benefit from that momentum.
¶ Meanwhile, President Felipe Calderón has made clear climate change is a top priority in his administration, and in mid-January signed a formal agreement with the U.S. to “advance towards a green economy.” ¶
Mexico’s passing this bill to enshrine domestic action on climate change into law guarantees the country’s efforts to curbing climate change can extend far beyond the current president.
RTCC 13
(Responding to Climate Change (RTCC) is a Non-Governmental Organisation and an official observer to the
United Nations climate change negotiations dedicated to raising awareness about climate change issues.
“Mexico’s climate change laws,” Responding to Climate Change, 2/19/13, http://www.rtcc.org/in-focusmexicos-climate-change-laws/ )
Mexico was the standout country in 2012 on climate change.
¶ It passed a comprehensive climate change law – The General Law on
Climate Change – with the support of all major political parties , a real achievement in a usually partisan Congress .
¶ In parallel, Congress approved legislation to prepare for the implementation of so-called REDD (Reduced Emissions from
Deforestation and Forest Degradation).
¶ This progressive stance is indicative of Mexico’s positive approach to tackling climate change .
¶ In 2005,
Mexico successfully lobbied to become part of the “+5″ group of countries to participate in the UK’s G8 Summit outreach on climate change and subsequently hosted the 2006 meeting of the “Gleneagles
Dialogue”, an informal forum on climate change involving the G8 and major emerging economies.
¶ In the UN space, Mexico put forward proposals for a Green Fund , hosted the annual UN negotiations in Cancun in 2010 and, as a member of both the OECD and the developing country bloc, it has acted as a bridge between the rich and poor countries, helping to build trust.