FOUR Legal Maze

While in Paris in 1927, Guatemalan diplomat and writer Miguel Angel Asturias (1899–1974) discovered a colonial priest’s transcription of the pre-Columbian Maya creation story, the Popol Vuh. Asturias wove elements of this narrative into his 1949 literary masterpiece, Hombres de Maíz (Men of Maize). In the opening passage of this novel, the Earth calls upon the main character, maize farmer Gaspar Ilom, to lead an Indigenous guerrilla rebellion against the ladinos (mestizos) who have intruded upon Maya lands to grow corn for profit: “The [corn]grower sets fire to the brush and does for the timber in a matter of hours.… Smoke, flames, ashes. Different if it was just to eat. It’s to make money … The corn impoverishes the earth and makes no one rich. Neither the boss nor the men. Sown to be eaten it is the sacred sustenance of the men who were made of maize. Sown to make money it means famine for the men who were made of maize.”¹ Later in the story, Ilom observes: “Those who sow corn for profit leave the earth empty of bones, because it is the bones of the forefathers that give the maize, and then the earth demands bones, and the softest ones, those of children, pile up on top of her and beneath her black crust, to feed her.”² Another character comments, “The corngrower leaves the land in the end, because he’s beaten it to death, like killing a snake, with his planting and planting, over and over … It’s progress advancing with the tread of the conqueror.”³ In these juxtapositions between maize’s use value (subsistence) and corn’s exchange value (commodity), Asturias’s novel seems almost prophetic.

The word “maize” comes from the Taíno word that Columbus heard in the Caribbean: mahiz. Centuries later, Carl Linneaus used this same Indigenous word as a species label in his taxonomic system. The genus Zea comes from the Greek, meaning “life-giving.”⁴ Mesoamerican languages, of course, use other words as well. In Mayan tongues they are typically variations of ixim. The reason we tend to call Zea mays “corn” in English goes back to early colonial Brits, who described all cereals (including wheat) as corn. To differentiate maize, they called it “Indian corn.” Of course, commercial corn and maize are the same species, so pollen flows freely between them. Nevertheless, in writing about Zea mays I am making strategic use of the plant’s two synonymous English terms to differentiate between colonized, industrial, foreign, or genetically modified corn and sacred, embodied Indigenous native maize.

Colonizers and neo-colonizers have leveraged laws and trade policies to supplant maize with commodity corn across different historical periods (Spanish invasion, colonial period, liberal nationalism, and modern militarism and neoliberalism). Although trade agreements and farm bills make for dry reading material, more than any other factors, NAFTA in Mexico and the DR-CAFTA in Central America have made ashes of the Mesoamerican small farming sector by allowing the United States to dump cheap corn on their markets. As Asturias foretold, this has driven a migration exodus northward across borderland deserts that have claimed the bones of about ten thousand Maize People, including children, since 1994 when NAFTA went into effect. While hypocritically condemning the emigration induced by its own trade aggression, the US government continues to bully its southern neighbors to boost the profits of corporate agribusiness. Although small farmers tenaciously survived the Green Revolution, the technicalities and tricky treaties hidden within the “legal mazes” of verbose trade agreements have tragically ruined many of their livelihoods.

CORN AND CONQUEST

While Jared Diamond and other cultural historians credit germs, guns, and steel for European conquest, food was arguably more consequential. In their chronicles about occupying the capital of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish hijacked the preexisting tribute system of the Aztec Empire to support the continued occupation and invasion of the mainland Americas. In 1533 Cortes’s personal household received fifteen loads of maize, eighty baskets of tortillas, game meat, fruit, salt, chilies, and firewood every week.⁵ Although they initially depended on local foods, the Spaniards derided them as inferior—if not heathen (in the case of amaranth)—and aimed to supplant them with their Old World diet of wheat, olive oil, wine, dairy, and meat. As much as the quest for gold (el dorado), Spanish mercenaries’ expeditions moved southward in search of familiar Iberian agri-scapes, which they found in the South American pampas. As the colonizers settled across the continent, they began demanding tributes in cash rather than local foods.⁶ To hoard luxury items like capers, wine, and olives, they passed laws prohibiting Indigenous consumption of Spanish imports. Spanish officials even debated for five years whether Indigenous peoples were sufficiently human to eat European meats and later obsessively regulated butcheries and wheat mills.⁷

The litany and specificity of early municipal edicts (actos de cabildo) about food reflect the Spaniards’ preoccupation with sabotage and starvation. The specific details about how comestible tributes should not be contaminated with dust, insects, spit, or spiderwebs suggest that colonized subjects must have been adulterating food to obstruct their new overlords.⁸ Indigenous leaders meanwhile filed copious legal complaints to the Spanish Crown about how the colonizers’ cattle were decimating their maize fields. Like narcissistic abusers, the invaders made counteraccusations that Indigenous people were to blame by “maliciously planting their crops where they knew they would be destroyed by European livestock.”⁹ While outside historians tend to privilege political revolts, equally important to Indigenous survival was the resistance embedded in everyday life to maintain foodways. During times when direct political confrontation is not possible, resistance can manifest simply as cultural continuity.¹⁰

LIBERALISM TO MILITARIZED MODERNISM

Mexican and Central American independence from Spain, unfortunately, brought little relief for Indigenous maize growers, who continued to suffer apartheid rule by the white Spanish-descended (criollo) elite. Except during occasional famines, when profits could be made on sharecropped corn from colonial estates, colonial markets largely left subsistence maize untouched.¹¹ Conservative colonial elites (hacendados) valued ranch self-sufficiency and continued to share dietary elements with their indentured Indigenous labor force. However, after independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century, a new class of liberal elites broke this stasis and looked toward Europe for culinary status. For example, Porfirio Díaz’s liberal “scientific” advisors, los Científicos, touted wheat as culturally superior to Mexican maize.¹² These elites were liberal in an economic sense of embracing free markets and foreign trade, but not in the contemporary political sense of supporting social justice and welfare.

Conservative versus liberal dietary legacies remain palpable today. When I was conducting ethnographic field research on the cattle economy in northern Guatemala between 2003 and 2004, I enjoyed the hospitality of conservative ranchers with tortilla-centered meals. However, in the few instances I was invited to dinner at the home of the 1 percent urban liberal elite, they conspicuously offered rolls, Italian breadsticks, or some other soft white bread in lieu of tortillas.

After a half century of palace coups, swinging between liberal and conservative power brokers, by the late nineteenth century liberal dictators (caudillos) claimed more permanent power in Mexico and throughout Central America. In the name of “modernization,” these caudillos seized communal Indigenous lands previously devoted to maize cultivation and privatized them to foment agricultural exports (coffee, bananas, etc.) through free or low-cost land grants to foreign colonizers and companies. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Euro-American coffee businesses swallowed whole villages across the Q’eqchi’ region. They converted the populace into “resident workers” (mozo colonos) and kept them enslaved via plantation store debts. Guatemala’s longest liberal dictatorship, under Jorge Ubico (1931–44), reinforced this system of debt peonage with vagrancy laws that required land-poor and landless Maya peoples not already enslaved as mozo colonos to carry booklets to prove they had labored on a plantation 150 days a year. Ubico allowed subsistence maize cropping only insofar as it would allow Indigenous workers to subsist on submarket wages on plantations or for provisioning themselves for state labor brigades.¹³ Akin to colonial Spanish labor drafts (repartamientos), Ubico’s mandamientos forcibly conscripted not only Indigenous men into road construction, but also Indigenous women as maize grinders for the road crews.¹⁴

Partially offsetting the damage of plantation land grabs to national food security, Ubico’s road construction in Guatemala and Porfirio Díaz’s railroads in Mexico opened new corn markets during this era.¹⁵ Even so, domestic commercial corn production did not always keep pace with population growth. Basic grain availability went down 50 percent per capita under Mexico’s Porfiriato regime.¹⁶ Between 1871 and 1940, Guatemala also suffered repeated corn shortages and, as a result, remained dependent on corn imports until 1930.¹⁷ Without state investment in proper silos, corn prices would plummet in good harvest years due to oversupply and skyrocket in bad weather years, creating a perverse pattern of dependency on corn imports.¹⁸ However, by the 1940s agriculture for domestic consumption actually contributed $100 million more to the economy than exports.¹⁹

In the early to mid-twentieth century, Mexico and Guatemala enjoyed brief democratic periods following revolutions that ousted their liberal caudillos. A new generation of democratic presidents—Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico (1934–40), and Juan José Arévalo (1945–51) and Jacobo Arbenz (1952–54) in Guatemala—recognized the value of smallholder agriculture for national development.²⁰ Nonetheless, Mexico’s postrevolutionary ruling party, the PRI, kept a stranglehold on power from 1929 to 2000, in part through a political patronage system that addicted rural farmers to the use of fertilizers, hybrid seeds, and other agricultural modernization inputs.²¹

The Arbenz administration also promoted agricultural modernization alongside agrarian reform. Arbenz’s own cotton farm, El Cajón, became a model for modernized production.²² In less than two years his government expropriated and redistributed a million acres to one hundred thousand rural families, roughly 16 percent of the Guatemalan population. Maize production increased by a notable 12 percent after just one year of land reform.²³ But after the US CIA unjustly deposed Arbenz in 1954, a military junta returned 79 percent of the land to elites and plantations, and national maize production fell 10 percent by 1956.²⁴

The United States took advantage of the CIA coup to dump $3.8 million worth of corn onto Guatemalan markets in 1955 and $2.3 million in 1956. The harm to subsistence maize growers was so apparent that the CIA’s own puppet regime, led by General Castillo Armas, appealed to the United States to halve these corn shipments to twenty-five thousand tons.²⁵ Corn dumping continued under John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, which turned the US Midwest into a world farm.²⁶ Even after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States continued its Cold War–driven commodity “aid,” despite vocal critiques from global humanitarian experts that it was undermining local farming. After US farmers converted to GM crops, US food aid became a potent source of maize contamination.

Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress also encouraged cattle encroachment onto Indigenous lands to satiate the rising US demand for fast-food-chain hamburgers.²⁷ The Guatemalan state gave some cattle ranchers parcels in the northern lowlands that were forty-five times larger than those awarded to Q’eqchi’ farmers. Nonetheless, an indomitable Q’eqchi’ work ethic led to corn surplus sales that soon fed one-fifth of the country’s population.²⁸ Today, Q’eqchi’ farmers grow maize for themselves but also produce almost half the country’s surplus white corn that urban dwellers buy for their tortillas.²⁹ As such, Q’eqchi’ farmers are bellwethers of how cattle, corporate trade, and climate change impinge upon the maize economy.

A downward spiral of drought and unpredictable corn markets induced many small Q’eqchi’ farmers to sell their parcels after the signing of DR-CAFTA.³⁰ Agrofuel speculation further accelerated the land rush. Like corn and sugar, palm oil is a speculative flex crop, meaning it can be sold both as fuel and as a food or cosmetic ingredient.³¹ The Guatemalan government and investors have relentlessly targeted Q’eqchi’ maize growing regions for permanent conversion to agrofuel plantations.³² Oligarchic plantation owners are able to command the state to brutally evict Q’eqchi’ communities by torching their homes, fields, and maize bins (see fig. 7). Yet arguably more insidious than this overt violence is the “silent violence” of corporate trade agreements, which undercut maize prices and left Q’eqchi’ territory with the highest rates of childhood malnutrition in the country.³³

SUBSIDIES AND TARIFFS, DEBT AND TRADE

Trade should have never become a weapon. To the contrary, after the horrors of World War II, world leaders surmised that countries who traded together would avoid future armed conflict. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a key process arising from the Bretton Wood accords, was just a voluntary commitment to hold regular consensual meetings. Limited to discussions about commercial goods, the GATT left agriculture and food security policies to the discretion of sovereign nations.³⁴ After world leaders institutionalized the GATT (1986–93) into the World Trade Organization (WTO), however, they sought to expand trade rules over agriculture.³⁵ The anti-[corporate]-globalization movement countermobilized against the WTO, which became the foil to the global peasant network Via Campesina.

While free trade proponents espouse a rhetoric of “equalizing” or “harmonizing” trade, the WTO and other trade agreements establish uneven playing fields. Historically, rich countries have buttressed their farming sectors with direct payments, especially for products that instill national pride or maintain culture. France subsidizes wheat and dairy, Japan subsidizes rice, and the United States its “heartland” corn belt. With a smaller tax base, poor countries have instead historically relied on tariffs, quotas, and price regulations to protect their farming sectors. In a nutshell, trade agreements wipe out tariff protections in the Global South without addressing how the Global North underwrites the overproduction of cheap commodity foods that can be dumped on the markets of poorer countries. This pushes impoverished village farmers into direct competition with global commodities markets governed more by casino-like odds than fair economic rules.

To put this in perspective, US subsidies now constitute 40 percent of farm income, but agribusiness corporations—not small farmers—commandeer most government payouts.³⁶ Three in five US farmers receive no subsidies whatsoever, while the richest companies earn nearly half a million each.³⁷ In 2000, US corn farmers alone received about $10 billion—roughly ten times the entire Mexican government budget for agriculture.³⁸ The current value of these subsidies is ironically equal to the amount of corn the United States exports to Mexico (about 4 percent of the US harvest).³⁹

To produce this surplus, US farmers have access to various types of federal and private insurance programs that protect them from harvest losses or price fluctuations.⁴⁰ More than 90 percent of the US corn crop is underwritten by agriculture risk coverage (read: crop insurance), which pays farmers $2.8 billion annually. Above and beyond these direct price guarantees to farmers, other subsidies, both direct and indirect, include:

• the vast flat lands stolen from Native Americans that permit mechanization

• land-grant university extension support from endowments created by the continued theft of Native American land via the Morrill Acts⁴¹

• cheap irrigation water

• transportation infrastructure⁴²

• access to low-interest credit⁴³

• technology and low-cost fuel for farm machinery

• technology for long-term storage facilities that allow corporate grain sellers to game the market system

• endowed public university–funded research into hybrid and GM seeds⁴⁴

• scales of economy for large farms

• state cleanup of environmental externalities, like algal blooms from nitrogen fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi River

• insurance or public health care budgets that pay for the cancers and other morbidities suffered by farmworkers who have applied unsafe pesticides and whose corporate peddlers, in turn, are protected from litigation by ineffectual EPA regulations that presume chemicals are safe until proven guilty

• a military-industrial complex willing to embark upon trillion-dollar wars to maintain US access to cheap oil in the Middle East, which artificially supports the entire warped industrial food system with cheap petroleum fertilizers, agrochemicals, and asphalted roads

Together these direct and indirect subsidies allow corporations to sell corn at least 25–30 percent below the full cost of production.⁴⁵ By 2019, Guatemalan prices for white maize and yellow corn grown domestically were 38 percent and 50 percent higher than corn imported from the US under DR-CAFTA and WTO quotas.⁴⁶

Working without any of these safety nets, Mesoamerica maize farmers tend their rain-fed crops with machetes, hoes, and hard work. With remarkably little change in prices over the centuries, they sell cheap and buy dear. As a mountainous region, very little Central American land can be mechanized. With loans to buy farm machinery, a US grower can produce a ton of corn using 1.2 labor hours. A Mexican farmer, by contrast, would need 17.8 labor hours to produce the same.⁴⁷ US corn yields are about five times those in Central America (178 versus 36 quintals per hectare, respectively).⁴⁸ Sophisticated silo storage facilities exacerbate these disparities, allowing US corn growers to hold their grain while waiting to sell until prices rise, whereas most Central American maize farmers must immediately sell their harvests when the market is glutted to avoid postharvest losses.

The issue of transnational commodity dumping inspired the Via Campesina protests that brought down the barricades at the 2003 WTO tribunal in Cancún. A bloc of developing countries walked out of the tribunal and effectively shut down that meeting which, procedurally, requires a global consensus to move forward.⁴⁹ Agricultural subsidies continued to stalemate discussions at subsequent WTO tribunals. Unable to bully its trade interests through the WTO, the United States retreated to a neo–Monroe Doctrine policy approach in the Western Hemisphere, to push for a series of regional and bilateral trade agreements modeled on NAFTA in places where it would have outsized negotiating power.

CORPORATE CON OF NAFTA AND THEREAFTER

NAFTA began as a negotiation between just the United States and Canada, as relatively equal parties that signed a 1989 trade agreement. Mexican president Salinas de Gortari then requested bilateral trade talks with the George H. W. Bush administration. Advised by economists educated at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, Salinas hoped to gain relief from harsh structural adjustments imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after Mexico defaulted on its debt in 1982 and to win more favorable human migration terms. Canada unexpectedly inserted itself into the US-Mexico negotiations. Weighted in favor of the richer countries, that trilateral agreement was finalized in late 1992, ratified and signed in 1993 under the Clinton administration, and took effect January 1, 1994. Presciently recognizing the threat to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples from this neoliberal trade and market-oriented policy reform, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) declared “enough is enough” and symbolically timed its first (and only) offensive strike on NAFTA’s implementation day.

Unfortunately, much of the damage was already done. In preparation for NAFTA, Mexico had rolled back previous support to rural farming as preconditions for the treaty. Most controversially, the Salinas administration revoked constitutional land reform Article 27, to allow the privatization of common municipal farming lands (the ejidos). Salinas also replaced Mexico’s modest price supports for small farmers (dating back to the 1938 postrevolutionary government) with a new program that benefited larger farmers through technological incentives and payments based on acreage planted.⁵⁰ NAFTA also deregulated the seed sector by curtailing the power of the National Seed Inspection and Certification Service. Private control of seed sales rose from 22 percent in 1980 to 93 percent by 1993.⁵¹

The United States, of course, avoided any changes to its own subsidy system. At the time of NAFTA’s negotiation, subsidized US corn cost $101 a ton—less than half the price of Mexican white maize, at $240 a ton.⁵² Prior to NAFTA, Mexico had high tariffs on corn imports to protect its national staple.⁵³ In theory Mexico agreed to open its market to a base quota of 2.5 million tons and gradually increase imports by 3 percent per annum to allow farmers fifteen years to adjust.⁵⁴ Instead, Mexican officials inexplicably welcomed double the base quota.⁵⁵ By forgoing tariffs above the negotiated quota, Mexico sacrificed over $2 billion in fiscal revenue by 2003.⁵⁶ These profits went into the pockets of large industrial food millers, including Maseca and Bimbo, and grain exporters like ADM and Cargill, which tripled their earnings in the seven years after the signing of NAFTA (going from $253 to $714 million in combined revenues).⁵⁷ Although the Mexican Congress belatedly attempted to levy the proper tariff on corn imports in 2000, neoliberal government officials ignored its directive.⁵⁸

Instead of a gradual influx of US corn, NAFTA turned into a dumping deluge. US presidential candidate Ross Perot famously predicted “a giant sucking sound” of US jobs leaving for Mexico, but NAFTA actually hoovered Mexican, not US, livelihoods. The market share for US corn in Mexico jumped from 2 percent to 25 percent by 1999. In international markets white maize typically fetches a quarter more than yellow dent corn, but NAFTA treated them the same.⁵⁹ Thus although the US silos full of yellow corn being offloaded to Mexico are destined for animal feed and industrial foods, their existence undercuts the price of white maize used for tortillas.⁶⁰ For the small farmers who produced 40 percent of Mexico’s (mostly white) maize before NAFTA, market prices fell by 45 percent between 1993 and 1999.⁶¹ Indigenous farming families, who at that time comprised 60 percent of Mexican maize growers, were disproportionately hurt.⁶²

Those who migrated to become farm laborers on industrialized farms in northern Mexico encountered staggering wage cuts, as rural wages fell one-third by 2008 compared to pre-NAFTA figures.⁶³ Without the time or state support to adapt, emigration presented a better option, and half a million people left annually for the United States over the next decade. By 2006 almost 13 million Mexicans—roughly 10 percent of the population—were living in the United States.⁶⁴ Mexican economist Alejandro Nadal notes this had “a corrosive effect on social institutions, collective community actions, and traditional knowledge systems and practices that have historically been central to resource management and conservation of genetic diversity in many rural communities.”⁶⁵ Remittances became Mexico’s second most important source of revenue.

Even after ethanol speculation began to divert US corn harvests from commodity dumping, small Mexican farmers could not recover because so many of the state structures supporting them had been dismantled.⁶⁶ Large mechanized and irrigated farms in Sinaloa and Jalisco commandeered fertilizer subsidies and acreage payments ($52–$83 per hectare) from the PROCAMPO program established in 1993.⁶⁷ Those farmers now produce 70 percent of Mexico’s maize—even though their own regional diet ironically features bread, wheat tortillas, and rice.⁶⁸

The Mexican milperos’ loss was a US gain. As the National Corn Growers Association brags on its website, “The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has been an unequivocal success for American corn farmers. Since 1994, US corn exports to these regional partners have increased 300 percent and Mexico is now the top export destination for US corn.”⁶⁹ Before President López Obrador began a major initiative for import substitution in 2021, one-third of Mexico’s corn (mostly yellow dent for industrial foods and animal feed) was coming from the United States, at 30 percent below the real cost of production.⁷⁰

Despite NAFTA’s promises for prosperity, 60 percent of Mexico’s population now falls below the poverty line. From being calorically self-sufficient in 1970, Mexico now imports more food than any other country besides Indonesia and China.⁷¹ Walmart has replaced fresh open markets as the country’s primary grocery retailer. Mexico’s own Chamber of Commerce acknowledges that for every new convenience store that opens, five traditional shops (“tiendas”) go out of business. With corporate stores now supplying 35 percent of food sales, processed foods have replaced wholesome traditional Mexican meals.⁷² To conform to US business hours, Mexico ended the cultural practice of the long siesta that allowed time for a home-cooked midday meal. US fast-food chains are also running local eateries out of business.⁷³

Despite previously having had one of the healthiest autochthonous cuisines in the world, based on complex carbohydrates, vegetables, and plant-based proteins, Mexico is now among the countries with the highest diabetes rates in the world. Affecting 16 percent of the population (compared with 11 percent in the United States and 7 percent in Canada), diabetes is now Mexico’s number one killer. Seven out of ten Mexicans are overweight and one-third are considered clinically obese.⁷⁴ For Central American countries subjected to an even more pro-corporate trade agreement, “eating CAFTA” has caused similar social indigestion.⁷⁵

CAFTA COERCION

The Central American Free Trade Agreement was never about trade, but rather US imperialism, corporate greed, and presidential egos. Representing just 1.6 percent of exports from and 1.0 percent of imports to the United States, Central America was not particularly important to the US economy. Besides, Central America already held a concise (twenty-six-page) trade agreement with the United States called the Caribbean Basin Initiative, which excluded “sensitive” commodities like white maize essential for food sovereignty. Most analysts agree the United States only proposed CAFTA as a trial run for a larger Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), scheduled to be negotiated later in 2004.⁷⁶ Like Mexico, many Central American countries were enticed into these ridiculously imbalanced negotiations with promises of migration reforms on which the United States never delivered. Central America also hoped to secure more market access for beef, dairy, sugar, tobacco, and cotton—but the United States kept its crop subsidies intact.⁷⁷ Although it may seem they had been duped into a terrible agreement, Central American elites knew their private companies would benefit, even if the everyday farmer did not.

Although NAFTA was negotiated publicly over several years (allowing environmental and labor groups to secure side chapters, albeit nonbinding ones), the United States drafted the DR-CAFTA in English behind closed doors over just eleven months in 2003. US negotiators required Central American countries to sign a secrecy clause during the second round of negotiations in Ohio.⁷⁸ They also repeatedly refused FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests for the draft document, apparently modeled on the bilateral Chilean agreement, which then represented the most extreme neoliberal trade agreement ever devised.⁷⁹ Despite claiming that national security required them to hide treaty drafts from their own citizens and the press, the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR) gave a network of five hundred corporate trade advisors access to the document. Central American civil society leaders, however, were excluded from negotiations and complained their country delegates spent more time tourist-ing and shopping than attending the sessions. When Central American government representatives did show up, their legal teams were outnumbered one hundred to one. The result was a twenty-four-hundred-page document filled with legalese—longer than Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace and the King James Bible combined.

Central America was ill-prepared for these fast-paced, asymmetrical, and secretive trade negotiations. Costa Rica was arguably the strongest negotiating entity from the region, but even its lead delegate stated to the press that she had simply trusted the United States to write the appendix chapters fairly—which is precisely where corporate lobbyists inserted perks and loopholes and embedded other treaty requirements to their advantage. The USTR unilaterally announced the Dominican Republic as an added party with an almost identical bilateral treaty in August 2004, and CAFTA confusingly became the DR-CAFTA. The United States, oddly, excluded Panama so as to negotiate continued control of the Panama Canal through a separate agreement. With fox-henhouse irony, USAID allocated $38 million in technical assistance to “help” the Central American countries negotiate with the USTR.⁸⁰ As Salvadoran economist Raul Moreno put it, the CAFTA negotiations were like letting loose a tiger on a herd of tethered donkeys. A Nicaraguan leader likened Central America to a one-legged spider that tangled itself in its own net of legalese. As he observed, “We negotiated like a region without being a region.… [Central America] was not prepared for this negotiation; it did not have defined regional priorities, only national priorities.… The United States took good advantage of all our contradictions.”⁸¹

Because the five most-subsidized US products (rice, sugar, milk, wheat, beef) constitute half the agricultural GDP of Central America, Central American delegates did attempt to protect their food staples against commodity dumping. The United States “conceded” by allowing each country to pick one or two culturally sensitive food items to protect, with a gradual tariff phaseout over twenty years. The United States exempted sugar, while Costa Rica protected dairy, potatoes, and onions; Nicaragua chose beans; Honduras focused on pork; El Salvador excluded rice; and Guatemala prioritized maize and, to a lesser degree, poultry.

Here’s the rub: Because Central America was already a tariff-free common market that also held an agreement with Mexico, corporations could (and did) export food commodities to an already decimated Mexico or to whichever Central American country had the least trade restrictions, then resold them to the rest of the region.⁸² US Embassy reports frequently make note of this loophole, as well as opportunities to add WTO quotas on top of the DR-CAFTA’s tariff reductions.⁸³ Corporate agribusiness companies immediately began targeting Nicaragua as a conduit for rice exports, El Salvador for milk, Guatemala for poultry, and Honduras for GM-corn seed.⁸⁴

To avoid scrutiny from a US public embittered by NAFTA, before commencing CAFTA negotiations, the USTR asked the US Congress to give it “Fast-Track” authority on July 27, 2002. Even though Fast-Track authority undercuts its constitutional prerogative to modify or amend trade agreements, Congress abdicated its own power by a slim vote taken at 3:00 a.m., of 215-212.⁸⁵ Applied first to NAFTA, the Fast-Track designation limited Congress to just sixty days to review the proposed document (an absurdly short time frame for harried officials to read and analyze thousands of pages of legalese) and twenty hours of floor debate, after which a simple yea or nay vote was taken.⁸⁶ A Republican-controlled Congress further limited CAFTA’s Fast-Track discussion to a mere two hours. While watching that “debate” live on C-Span, I was struck by how many representatives were stuck in Cold War narratives that invoked long-dead “enemies” like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.⁸⁷

The US Congress voted on the DR-CAFTA on July 27, 2005, or “Ajmaq” in the Maya calendar, an ill-fated date in which “the ancestors see your wrong-doings.” Despite Vice President Dick Cheney’s offer of pork deals in exchange for votes, the DR-CAFTA was initially defeated, tallied at 180 “against” to 175 “for” during the normal fifteen-minute voting period. In an unprecedented move, House Speaker Tom DeLay illegally held the vote open for forty-seven minutes past its official close.⁸⁸ When asked how long he would do so, he replied he would wait until he had a one-vote majority. After the Republican leadership arm-twisted out its last “aye” in broad moonlight, DeLay gaveled the DR-CAFTA into and above US law. The National Corn Growers Association bragged that its eleventh-hour lobbying helped win the closest trade vote in US history.⁸⁹ The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) rejoiced, with annual growth forecasts of $19 million.⁹⁰

Central American ratification was also fraught. Polls showed 75–80 percent of the Guatemalan and Salvador public opposed the treaty. On the day of Guatemala’s vote, social and popular movements organized a national strike and blocked access to the Congress building until police and military troops cleared the streets, killing two people and injuring another ten. Anticipating similar protests, Honduras ratified CAFTA and called a special session five days early. Labor unions and students spilled into Salvadoran and Nicaraguan streets before ratification. The most democratic nation in the agreement, Costa Rica, submitted the treaty to a referendum, which passed only by a narrow margin after a recount. Had President Oscar Arias not campaigned for it, most analysts agree Costa Rica would have withdrawn from the treaty.⁹¹

TRICKS WITHIN THE TREATY

The public and most political authorities were unaware that ratification also meant commitment to multiple other treaties mentioned within it. Trade agreements thus became a new mode for corporate lobbyists to roll back a wide range of regulations and policies on which families rely for safe food, a clean environment, affordable medicines, and financial stability. Even before ratification, the USTR began arm-twisting Central American officials to get legislative changes related to the bidding of government contracts, insurance, branding and intellectual property, telecommunications, animal and vegetable sanitation, penal codes, medicine prices, occupational health, and other issues far beyond the scope of tariffs and trade. The Wikileaks trove of diplomatic cables reveals the intense pressure the US Embassy and USAID administrators put on Guatemala.⁹² To give one example, the Guatemalan Congress was compelled to repeal a hard-won bill that would have allowed the sale of generic pharmaceuticals to its impoverished and largely uninsured populace.

Also smuggled into the DR-CAFTA was a fine-print requirement for every member to amend its plant patent legislation to conform with the 1991 Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV).⁹³ While prior versions of UPOV (released in 1961, 1972, and 1978) permitted farmers to save seeds for replanting, the 1991 UPOV convention moved radically in favor of corporate seed breeders.⁹⁴ For instance, the 1991 version describes seed saving as an “optional exception” rather than a farmer’s privilege.⁹⁵ It lowers the patent bar from hybridization to any “discovered” varieties, which allows a corporation to claim intellectual property and exclusive royalty rights for up to twenty years, even if its so-called finished product is only a slight variation on plants domesticated and stewarded by Mesoamerica’s original peoples (e.g., Mars Inc.’s attempts to patent olotón maize).⁹⁶ To help breeders enforce these new patent rights, UPOV signatories must establish a registry of “seed users” to facilitate the same kind of farmer surveillance Monsanto exercises in the US Midwest.⁹⁷

With so many unratified conventions like UPOV covertly embedded within the legal maze of broader trade treaties, knowing which agreement trumps another is increasingly unclear.⁹⁸ UPOV, for example, has seventy- two adhering countries, but only twenty-four are in active process of compliance.⁹⁹ Although the USTR continues to pressure Guatemala to ratify UPOV 1991, Guatemala already subscribes to several other competing treaties that emphasize farmers’ rights, including: the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Resolution 5–89 on Phytogenic Resources (which gives farmers the right to hold breeder rights); the 2006 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (also under the FAO); the 1992 Earth Summit “precautionary principle”; and the right to free prior informed consent, which is embedded in the International Labor Organization Convention 169 and the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In forcing Central American countries to “harmonize” (the old lingo) or “streamline” (the new lingo) their intellectual property laws to match those of the United States, the underlying goal of the DR-CAFTA is to make it as easy for US corporations to do business in Quetzaltenango as in Kansas.¹⁰⁰ As one State Department cable notes, “one of the main benefits of CAFTA will be greater legal certainty, which is essential to attract foreign investors.”¹⁰¹ After complaining that Guatemala had an “inconsistent regulatory structure,” such as “time consuming administrative procedures, bureaucratic impediments, inconsistent judicial decisions,” other department cables posted by Wikileaks note that judicial corruption is common or explain how foreign investors can access high-ranking officials in order to circumvent basic rules of business incorporation.¹⁰²

Should states not bow to transnational capital, corporations can sue. NAFTA (ratified in 1994) was the first trade agreement to allow corporations (not just states) to challenge another country’s laws as an unfair barrier to trade. It is difficult to be a fan of the WTO, but that institution at least aims for a more even playing field by only allowing for trade challenges between sovereign nations. Like NAFTA, the DR-CAFTA gives corporations the legal personhood to sue nation-states for perceived barriers to trade. Known as “Chapter 11” or “investor-to-state” disputes, these battles are arbitrated by a secret panel of three judges: one supposedly neutral, one appointed by the challenging corporation, and one by the state being sued.¹⁰³ Through this system, corporations have struck down environmental, labor, and any other democratic laws they perceive to infringe on their businesses, even laws passed in the United States and Canada. The watchdog group Public Citizen calculates that through US trade agreements with other nations, including NAFTA, countries (and, by default taxpayers) have shelled out $4.5 billion to corporations through these investor-state lawsuits, with $59 billion in pending claims.¹⁰⁴

There are many examples. Under NAFTA, the US corporation Ethyl challenged a Canadian ban on the gasoline additive MMT, and settled for $13 million. A Canadian firm, Methanex, challenged California’s prohibition of another gasoline additive MTBE.¹⁰⁵ Metalclad, a hazardous waste exporter, filed a $90 million suit against Mexico and won $15.6 million after being denied a license to construct a dump in an ecological reserve in San Luis Potosí. Canada banned the import of PCBs to protect First Nations’ food systems from toxic bioaccumulation of carcinogens, but after corporate chemical coyote S. D. Meyer challenged the import ban, Canada had to repeal the law and pay the polluter $4.8 million. The tobacco industry has used NAFTA to strike down a Canadian public health law requiring cigarettes be sold in black-and-white packaging.

Even worse than NAFTA’s Chapter 11, the DR-CAFTA permits corporations to bully countries through slapsuits for even larger sums that represent hypothetical future profits. During CAFTA negotiations, in fact, Harken Energy (on whose board then president George W. Bush had served) pre-threatened Costa Rica with a lawsuit of $57 billion (three times the country’s GDP) if it were not permitted to drill for oil at a UNESCO World Heritage Site.¹⁰⁶ Currently, Nevada-based firm Kappes, Cassiday & Associates is suing Guatemala for more than $400 million of imagined future profits, after being denied the right to mine gold and leave open pits outside the Indigenous community of La Puya. Poor countries are simply unable to incur the kinds of legal expenses required to arbitrate this kind of corporate blackmail and, in many instances, they have preemptively repealed their own legislation upon the threat of USTR sanctions.

DR-CAFTA AND CORN

Boasting larger budgets than the combined GDP of Central American countries, ADM and Cargill profiteered immensely from DR-CAFTA trade loopholes.¹⁰⁷ During the CAFTA negotiations, US yellow dent corn was priced at $120 per metric ton, 42 percent lower than Central American maize, at $206 per ton.¹⁰⁸ Aided by sophisticated silo storage that holds 299,735,826 metric tons, gringo grain corporations can wait to sell until prices rise.¹⁰⁹ As described earlier, Guatemala privatized its state silo storage in the 1990s, so by 2021 it only had a capacity for 70,000 metric tons.¹¹⁰ Central American corn farmers must, therefore, either sell immediately at harvest or store what they can in rustic bins in the home or field.

Just as Mexico did, Central American countries inexplicably capitulated to US pressure to allow imports above and beyond the mandated DR-CAFTA quota system. In addition, the United States “donated” to Guatemala another 18,000 tons of yellow corn in 2006.¹¹¹ In El Salvador, one year after DR-CAFTA implementation, local maize prices fell from $12.00 to $8.50 per ton, while US corn sold for $6.40. Compounding these losses were rising fertilizer prices, which spiked over a single year, from $18 to $23 a sack.¹¹²

How much US corn is currently dumped on Guatemala is unknown, because, as documented by anthropologist Rebecca Galemba, corn flows freely across the Guatemala-Mexico border, with local mayors authorizing smuggling operations as “free trade.” Black market trade is so routinized in this region that smugglers are deemed “merchants” or good “businessmen,” while mayors endorse and “regulate” the process as an assertion of the municipal autonomy promised in Guatemala’s 1996 peace accords. As one border resident put it, “Corn is not contraband, it is a basic grain.”¹¹³ US officials estimate that this contraband may be equivalent to 16 percent of national production.¹¹⁴

Within a decade following the passage of the DR-CAFTA, the United States was officially exporting to Guatemala $1.1 billion worth of yellow corn, wheat, soybean meal, and poultry parts.¹¹⁵ Barely the size of Tennessee with just three times Tennessee’s population, Guatemala is now the seventh-largest importer of US corn ($219 million) behind the economic powerhouses of Mexico, Japan, China, Colombia, South Korea, and Canada.¹¹⁶ US officials know very well that they are dumping corn in Guatemala at a price that is 38 percent less than national grain.¹¹⁷

US officials were also cognizant that the DR-CAFTA—like NAFTA before it—would turn human flesh into Central America’s principal export. I remember seeing in 2005 the USTR website hypocritically noting, “Remittances from families in the United States are an important and rapidly growing source of foreign exchange throughout the region and help to fund continued imports of US goods and services.” US officials similarly tried to console El Salvador to be grateful for new export opportunities for the “ethnic food market” in the United States.¹¹⁸

El Salvador resisted US intimidation, however, by cleverly using capitalistic principals against their corporate bullies. Prior to 2013, as part of a national Family Agriculture Program to help half a million small farmers, the Salvadoran government bought 70 percent of its annual staple seed from Monsanto’s Central American subsidiary, Cristiani Burkhard, at twice the local price.¹¹⁹ Discontented with these profits, the USTR and the American Chamber of Commerce complained that the Family Agriculture Program discriminated against US corporations and threatened to withdraw $277 million in foreign aid if Monsanto were not allowed to grab a larger market share. El Salvador shrewdly resisted within the rules of the capitalist game by advertising its bid process in local newspapers. The Salvadoran Ministry of Agriculture staff worked with key peasant cooperatives and associations to help them understand how to submit bids and tripled the number of participating entities in 2014. They exposed that local peasant seeds were simply better and cheaper than Monsanto’s offerings.¹²⁰ By 2015 the Salvadoran government was expected to purchase nearly 50 percent of its corn seeds from local suppliers. In a world of free market fundamentalism, a literal interpretation of the rules can be an odd, but effective form of trickster resistance.

CONTAMINATION AND COERCION

Remember, of course, that corn is grain, but it is also seed. It is anyone’s guess as to how much of this US corn dumped on Central America has been planted by curious farmers and contaminated local maize varieties, but from the Aventis StarLink debacle in the early 2000s, we can assume contamination is widespread. That scandal bears re-mentioning, and not only because Bayer-Monsanto now owns Aventis. While Guatemala played only a minor role in the drama, the incident exposed fundamental gaps in regulatory structures and inspired the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Bank to help train countries in biosafety protocols with projects that became Trojan horses for GMO legalization.¹²¹

Although the US FDA abdicated its regulatory authority by ruling that Roundup Ready crops were “substantially equivalent” to conventional crops, the EPA decided to review StarLink in 2000 under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), since Bt corn incorporates a pesticidal toxin into the whole plant.¹²² During that regulatory process it discovered that certain StarLink proteins (Cry9C) failed to break down in the gastrointestinal tract, thereby causing anaphylactic shock and other severe allergic reactions in some people (for which Aventis eventually paid $9 million to claimants). In a rare ruling, the EPA banned StarLink from human consumption, but it had no authority to compel Aventis to report where and how it was planted for animal feed.¹²³ It seems regulators simply trusted that Aventis would make clear to corn farmers the need to separate StarLink by planting other non-GM crops in buffer zones and only selling StarLink harvest for animal feed.¹²⁴

Less credulous were two nonprofit groups, the Center for Food Safety and Friends of the Earth, which began testing foods. They discovered StarLink in Taco Bell’s iconic taco shell in 2000. In October of that year the USDA recalled 350,000 acres of StarLink corn that had been planted in the United States, but this corn had already traveled into processed foods destined for countries as far away as Japan and Korea.¹²⁵ Although at the time less than half a percent of the corn cultivated in the United States came from StarLink seeds, the FDA provided little to no instruction to grain operators about separating corn for animal feed from corn destined for food, so the crops had been comingled in an “unambiguously unlawful” manner.¹²⁶ Federal inspectors found traces of StarLink genes in 10 percent of 110,000 grain tests conducted in the United States between November 2000 and April 2001.¹²⁷

Eventually some three hundred products were recalled from US grocery store shelves, but products bound for Mexico via the Sabritas brand were not.¹²⁸ After initially responding, “We have difficulty imagining how our corn could end up in the human food supply,” Aventis admitted in March 2001 that 143 million tons of corn had been contaminated, forcing farmers, seed companies, processors, and food makers to spend over $1 billion in recalls.¹²⁹ In the recall process, Aventis failed to locate 1.2 million bushels produced from seed sales in 2000.¹³⁰ Then, in July 2001, the FDA discovered StarLink genes had crossed into white corn that had been assumed to be GMO free, since only yellow corn had been genetically modified by that point in history.

In 2002, Friends of the Earth released a report documenting how USAID and the World Food Programme had sent food “aid” laced with StarLink and other GM corn brands to numerous countries, including Guatemala. While African countries began requiring the prior milling of food aid to prevent replanting, corn still arrives whole kernel in the Americas.¹³¹ Another 2005 study showed that four-fifths of some fifty samples of corn and soy sent as food aid to Central American countries and the Dominican Republic were genetically modified. (As a point of comparison, the European Union rejects imports that have more than 0.9 percent contamination). According to a 2005 exposé published by Friends of the Earth, 80 percent of seventy-seven samples taken from food aid and corn sold on the open market in Guatemala City were already contaminated by GM traits, including StarLink.¹³² Another study of food aid in the Guatemalan highlands and in Chiquimula, an impoverished state in eastern Guatemala, revealed these GM sequences: Mon NK 603 (Roundup Ready), Dow AgroSc TC1507 (Herculex Liberty Link/Bt), Syngenta Bt 11 (YieldGard), Mon 810 (YieldGard), and soya Mon 40-3-2 (Roundup Ready).¹³³

In examining how and why StarLink and other experimental varieties of GM corn not approved for commercial production continued appearing throughout the global supply chain a full five years after the first scandal, trade expert Jennifer Clapp concludes that without penalties or regulatory oversight, these “accidents” will only continue.¹³⁴ A laissez-faire system of voluntary self-policing by agribusiness is hardly a viable regulatory strategy.¹³⁵ All the major biotech companies have been caught in similar scandals. When the USDA discovered that an experimental Syngenta crop that could increase ampicillin resistance was being “accidentally” grown on fifteen thousand acres, it merely slapped the company with a $375,000 fine.¹³⁶ In another case in which an experimental rice strain was leaked, Bayer excused its mistake as “an act of God.”¹³⁷

Perhaps the biotech giants hope that governments will shrug off contamination as inevitable and regulators will loosen restrictions.¹³⁸ Indeed, one Guatemalan food industry representative suggested moving forward with biotech crops stating, “In my view, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.”¹³⁹ Another USDA-FAS scholarship recipient from Guatemala notes, “The best way to proceed is just to start growing [extra-legally] … the ministries will not care.”¹⁴⁰ Or perhaps these “accidents” are also a backdoor trick for eventually demanding royalties on homegrown seed, as Monsanto famously did to Percy Schmeiser. The Guatemalan farmers with whom I have shared these contamination cases invariably remark, “If they can do that to the gringos, imagine what will happen to us.”

Once GM corn gets planted, no farmer’s crops are safe, because corn cross-pollinates by wind over long distances, irreversibly transforming plant DNA. In the United States, producers are required to leave a non-GMO “refuge” or buffer zone that is significantly larger than many entire Central American farms. One need not have passed calculus to understand that GM contamination will spread more quickly across irregularly shaped and contiguous small parcels in Mesoamerica, where farmers also routinely exchange seeds.¹⁴¹ A single row of GM seed on a one-hectare plot will taint 65 percent of the parcel in a mere seven years.¹⁴² Unlike chemical pollution, which might dissipate over time, GMOs are a “living pollution” that can spread geometrically, once transgenic traits are released into the environment.¹⁴³

CUSMA, USMCA, LET’S CALL THE WHOLE THING OFF

Although late megatrade agreements like the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas sputtered due to activist opposition, Donald Trump made the “modernization” of NAFTA a priority of his administration, alongside his facile claims that Mexico would pay for his border wall. His staff began negotiations in August 2017 with the hope of passing a new pact before the elections of 2018. Democratic lawmakers put up a tepid fight about labor and environmental standards, but the House approved the revised version of the agreement 385–41, while the Senate vote was 89–10. Mexico ratified it in June 2019 (114–4) and Canada rushed its vote through Parliament in early 2020, before the pandemic.

Much of the language came from the failed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) pushed by the Obama administration to integrate the trade activities of twelve Pacific Rim nations, which represent nearly 40 percent of the global economy. Some six hundred corporations were involved in negotiating the TPP, but US congressional representatives were forbidden from receiving copies of the actual treaty. They were told if they wanted to read the document they would have to surrender their smartphones or other recording devices before entering a secure soundproof reading room in the Capitol basement, and none of their legislative staffers could attend. The few elected officials who bothered to do so were only “in the single digits.”¹⁴⁴

The head of the USTR office, Ron Kirk, justified this unprecedented executive branch secrecy by arguing that that disclosure of early drafts of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas had led to its downfall and therefore “some measure of discretion and confidentiality” was justified “to preserve negotiating strength and to encourage our partners to be willing to put issues on the table they may not otherwise.”¹⁴⁵ The reality is that when people learn what is in these kinds of agreements, the agreements often fail. A Wikileaks release of only one of the TPP’s twenty-nine chapters helped raise enough opposition to scuttle that agreement.

How many legislators actually read the new NAFTA agreement before rubber-stamping it is unknown.¹⁴⁶ Like the DR-CAFTA, negotiations remained hidden from the public view and Freedom of Information Act requests for the “negotiating text, proposals of each Government, accompanying explanatory material, and emails related to the substance of negotiations” were denied.¹⁴⁷ Public participation was limited to a twenty-two-day period for submitting written comments. Testimony at a three-day oral hearing was further limited to corn grower associations, grain corporations, and food industry lobbyists. The US Corn Growers Association lobbied heavily for the “new NAFTA” to expand ethanol markets “down there.”¹⁴⁸ Pat Binger, representing Cargill, bragged about the company’s “American success story,” growing from a single grain facility in 1865 to a transnational corporation with business in seventy countries and more than 150,000 employees, including 10,000 employees in Mexico and Canada and almost $2 billion annual operations in those two countries. He said, “Cargill supports trade agreements that foster the inter-connectedness of our food system … and reinforce the importance of rules in the global trading system.”¹⁴⁹ Binger also championed the Chapter 11 dispute mechanisms as “a critical insurance policy for US agriculture.” Although it avoids the trigger language of GMOs, and refers instead to “science based sanitary and phytosanitary measures,” the new NAFTA was the first trade agreement negotiated by the United States to encompass biotechnology.¹⁵⁰

While Article 5.7 of the World Trade Organization’s Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS) allows countries to pass regulations under a precautionary principle, the new NAFTA may (or may not) oblige all parties to accept products authorized by just one member state.¹⁵¹ Trade analyst Steve Suppan raises another disturbing question about transnational subsidiaries. As he asks, what happens “if the exporting entity and importing one belong to the same [corporate] parent, such as Cargill North American exporting to Cargill Latin America”?¹⁵² Contradicting a Canadian policy permitting 0.2 percent contamination of GM strains not yet approved for safety, the “new NAFTA” makes it more difficult for Mexico to reject imports contaminated by GMOs.¹⁵³ It also allows for corporations to file suit if patent rulings are “unreasonably” delayed. Most hypocritically, the new NAFTA freed Canada from “investor-state” (i.e., Chapter 11 treaty) lawsuits from US corporations and vice versa, but Mexico inexplicably agreed to allow foreign corporations to continue challenging its democratic legislation.¹⁵⁴

In social media posts Trump gloated repeatedly about his “wonderful new Trade Deal,” replete with his characteristic ignorance of capitalization rules. He renamed it the “US-Mexico-Canada Agreement” just because he liked that it sounded like USMC, the acronym for the US Marine Corps. On January 30, 2020, he typed, “BIGGEST TRADE DEAL EVER MADE, the USMCA, was signed yesterday and the Fake News Media barely mentioned it. They never thought it could be done.” In a mini-acronym war, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called it CUSMA (Canada-US-Mexico Agreement). Incoming Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador had criticized NAFTA on the campaign trail as “the biggest pillage in history.”¹⁵⁵ López Obrador nevertheless signed his predecessor’s agreement, but he made clear that whether it was called CUSMA or USMC, like the Gershwin tomato/tomahto, potato/potahto show tune debate, he would have rather “called the whole thing off.”

At the URL betterseed.org, American Seed Trade Association (ASTA) lobbyists detailed the group’s plan to maintain close relationships with the US Patent and Trademark Office and encourage national legislation throughout the Americas to comply with regulations in the UPOV.¹⁵⁶ The ASTA celebrated that the new agreement gave Mexico an explicit four-year deadline to approve UPOV 1991. Opposition from the powerful Sin Maíz no Hay País movement, however, scuttled a 2020 bill (“The Federal Law of Vegetable Varieties”) to conform Mexican law to UPOV 1991, but this trade threat remains.¹⁵⁷

Over the last five hundred years, foreign colonizers and corporations have attempted to conquer corn through legal edicts, contamination, and commercial lobbying, but maize has remained mutinous through the ages. By necessity, peasant networks like Via Campesina became experts in these imperial legal mazes in order to protect their millennial rights to save seeds stewarded by their ancestors. While the captains (of industry) write illegalities into their ship logs, grassroots Mesoamerican leaders have charted a different course, mobilizing public sentiment through social media and on the streets. Although trade proponents bluster that “a rising tide raises all boats,” the brute imposition of GM corn will capsize Mesoamerican farmers. Or, perhaps, the swelling waves of resistance from Mexican and Guatemalan food sovereignty movements will sink the titanic US trade power.