  I present a unified picture of center vortices and Abelian monopoles. Both
appear as local gauge ambiguities in the Laplacian Center Gauge. This gauge is
constructed for a general SU(N) theory. Numerical evidence is presented, for
SU(2) and SU(3), that the projected $Z_N$ theory confines with a string tension
similar to the non-Abelian one.
