Decolonial Thought Confronting the Neoliberal University and Epistemological Extractivism

In the majority of Latin American countries, authoritarian regimes and neoliberal strategies of extractivism and exploitation have their historical and contemporary roots in the persistence and deepening of the colonial system of domination. This colonialism persists despite the formal processes of independence in the 19th century and has created elites with excessively hierarchical power structures and governmental strategies of social control that further amplify poverty gaps, inequalities, and mechanisms of oppression and subordination.

Colonial ideology continues to emphasize in various ways the fundamental project of "mission and conversion" carried out in the 16th century: reducing the Other to the terms of European identity, dismantling and depoliticizing any form of alterity. To achieve this, neocolonialism today introduces more subtle and perhaps even more effective logics than in the past. The neoliberal approach to diversity, for example, is characterized by an almost theatrical display of it. Indeed, diversity here appears only as a multicultural decoration, as the object of conditional inclusion in a merely apparent democratic system. As denounced by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, colonial populism is manifested through a "paternalistic and pitying gesture towards what is indigenous, black, and feminine, deeply despising the indigenous who interprets and believes they know."

Therefore, in the Latin American context, an effective counter-strategy requires, above all, confronting the barriers of colonial ideology.