FIVE Many Mexican Worlds in Defense of Maize

After several months as an uninvited guest at the Aztec court, Hernán Cortés had returned to Veracruz to meet a Spanish crew sent from Cuba to arrest him for insubordination. Cortés left his lieutenant Pedro Alvarado and eighty soldiers stationed in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan. On the eve of July 1, 1520, Alvarado’s band, without provocation, massacred crowds celebrating a sacred festival. Realizing they were outnumbered, Spanish soldiers decided to escape with their loot. Weighted down by the heavy gold bars from melted Aztec treasures, many drowned as they fled. In Mexico, this day is remembered as “La Noche Triste” (the Night of Sorrows). Alvarado, unfortunately, survived and soon led the Spanish invasion of present-day Guatemala.¹ With his spoils of conquest, Alvarado became the second richest and most widely diversified conquistador. Like a proto-transnational corporate executive, he collected tribute from twenty- three thousand subjects, and combined those with profits in mining, cattle, transport, and gambling. By his death he had amassed a fortune worth almost $18 million in today’s dollars.²

On July 1, 2020, exactly five hundred years after that sorrowful night, CUSMA (the “new NAFTA”) took effect. Dr. Alejandro Espinosa, one of the key biologists leading Mexico’s fight against GM corn, evocatively refers to Mexico’s era of trade agreements in speeches as “a long neoliberal night.”³ Like the Aztec warriors who defended Tenochtitlan, Mexican state officials are now fighting back against a corporate food regime to defend the country’s biocultural treasures: maize diversity and its derivative gastronomy. Reversing four decades of structural adjustment and corn dumping, Mexico’s former president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (often abbreviated with his initials AMLO), reasserted food sovereignty on a scale only possible with the backing of the state’s political will. He pledged in 2020 that Mexico would ban Roundup, become self-sufficient in growing its own non-GM white maize for tortillas, and phase out the yellow GM corn being imported from the United States for animal feed.

Mexico’s audacious attempt to overthrow its corporate food occupiers is symbolic in other ways. Not only is Mexico the birthplace of maize, it also is where Via Campesina coined the term “food sovereignty.”⁴ Even though Mexico hosted the world’s first Green Revolution research center, one scientist employed in that endeavor, Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi (1913–91), became the father of agroecology. Although Hernández Xolocotzi trained at Cornell University in positivist science, he remained an “organic intellectual” (in the Gramscian sense).⁵ From early in his childhood in Tlaxcala he recognized the intellectual contributions of Indigenous peoples and peasants as cocreators of contextual knowledge through language, territorial intimacy, and especially cultural memory.⁶

From the mountains of Chiapas, the Zapatistas led the world’s first armed rebellion against neoliberalism, embracing diversity as a core principle of Indigenous autonomy. Then when GM corn contamination was discovered in Indigenous maize fields in the mountains of Oaxaca, Mexico again found itself center stage in the global debate about the perils of biotech crops. After a long struggle by diverse actors, Maya plaintiffs from another Indigenous-majority region of Mexico, the Yucatán Peninsula, won legal cases to ban GM corn.

Over its tumultuous twentieth century, Mexico’s political leadership often pitted the urban poor against rural interests.⁷ As a sacred foundation of the “imagined community” of Mexico, however, the charisma of maize helped mend these political fault lines. The protracted Mexican saga over GM corn illustrates that when social movements rise above traditional differences and forge complex coalitions and odd alliances, they can move mountains. Should the Mexican state successfully send its corporate bullies scurrying, this nation could shift from being the second-largest importer of industrially grown corn to becoming an international model for agroecology and food sovereignty.

Mexico’s resistance to Monsanto also matters for people far beyond its borders. The country’s unique maize landraces and endemic teosintes—adapted to a dizzying array of environmental conditions, photoperiods, altitudes, rainfall, wind patterns, and soil quality—are a treasure for humanity.⁸ Mexico has the genetic material within its own natural heritage and the traditional ecological knowledge embedded within its sixty-two Indigenous languages to help the world adapt to climate change. Besides being the birthplace of maize, present-day Mexico is the center of origin for dozens of other crops: beans, squashes, vanilla, chocolate, chicle, chayote, chili peppers, papayas, amaranth, avocados, agave, chia, jicama, spirulina, tomatillos, and more. Covering just 1 percent of the earth’s surface, Mexico’s ancestral farmers domesticated 15.4 percent of crops that entered the modern world food system.⁹

Just as women played critical roles in the Zapatista movement and the Mexican Revolution before it, Mexican opposition to GM corn is a h(er)- story of anonymous Mexican women of all ethnicities, who labor daily in their kitchens to conserve millennial foodways.¹⁰ After NAFTA propelled millions of men to emigrate, women-headed households sustained maize cultures through hard decades of government policies and corporate plans intent on destroying their small farming economy.¹¹ These rural women were joined by urban housewives who banged pots to protest high tortilla prices. And forging the resistance to GM corn are brilliant urban intellectuals like Silvia Ribeiro, Maya beekeepers represented by Leydy Pech, prominent women scientists like Elena Álvarez-Buylla, and coalition organizers like Adelita San Vicente—many of whom are now in charge of the governmental ministries and agencies working to return Mexico to food sovereignty after a century of state policies intent on destroying the milpa system.

ASSAULTS ON THE COUNTRYSIDE

On the eve of the Mexican Revolution, only 4 percent of the rural population owned land. Favoring large estates (haciendas) and export plantation agriculture, the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884–1911) embraced Euro-American models of modernity and land concentration. During the “Porfiriato,” Mexico began importing US corn. Even a maize-centric cultural region like Oaxaca was importing one-third of its corn between 1908 and 1910.¹² Ignoring rural poverty and landlessness, Porfirio’s advisors blamed Mexican underdevelopment and malnutrition on maize and promoted wheat as a more “progressive” alternative.¹³

Maize production rebounded after the Mexican Revolution because of land reform. President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–60) redistributed 60 percent of the country’s forests and fields into 29,500 municipal ejidos governed by community elections and deliberation.¹⁴ Although Cárdenas’s successors were considerably less revolution-minded, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) continued to promote national food security in an effort to secure the rural votes needed to sustain the party’s long political monopoly.¹⁵ Revenue from Mexico’s oil boom helped grease the PRI’s elaborate patronage system. In 1962 Mexico’s president Adolfo López Mateos declared, “Mexicans would never again have to suffer the ignominy of eating tortillas made with imported corn.”¹⁶

However, by the 1970s inflation had eroded the value of price supports, causing many farmers to seek off-farm wages. After Mexico’s 1982 debt crisis, the IMF imposed austerity measures and dismantled Mexico’s decentralized support to rural farmers and small tortilla businesses. By 1991 a high-ranking official from the Ministry of Agriculture went so far as to declare, “It is the policy of my government to remove half of the population from rural Mexico during the next five years.”¹⁷ In 1992 Mexico ended federal support to its hybrid seed production program (the Productora Nacional de Semillas). Private seed companies stepped into the void—growing from a 22 percent market share in 1980 to capturing 93 percent of the market by 1993. By deregulating the seed sector, the government rescinded its right to inspect seed, a task previously performed by the National Seed Inspection and Certification Service. Ergo, even before GM corn entered the picture, a “neoliberal food regime” was already dismantling the traditional milpa system and maize diversity, setting the stage for GMO contamination.¹⁸

Despite having negotiated a tiered increase of US corn imports, in the first year of NAFTA’s implementation Mexico inexplicably lifted all quotas and sacrificed $2 billion worth of tariffs it could have collected between 1994 and 1998.¹⁹ National maize production plummeted 41 percent in 1994.²⁰ Before NAFTA, Mexico imported 500,000 tons of corn, but within a decade, 7.5 million tons of US corn flowed into Mexican markets at below-market prices.²¹ Before NAFTA, agriculture historically employed 23 percent of the population, but between 1991 and 2007 Mexico lost 20 percent of its farm jobs, a net loss of 2.1 million livelihoods.²²

Although Mexico maintains a stronger system of agricultural supports than most countries in Central America, the United States subsidizes its corn farmers with a sum roughly ten times the entire Mexican agricultural budget.²³ Although the Mexican government invested US$20 billion on new types of subsidies (irrigation systems, credit, and marketing support) over fifteen years (1994–2009), large industrial farmers monopolized most of these benefits. The wealthiest 10 percent of Mexican farmers—including high-profile agricultural appointees and drug lords²⁴—captured more than half of these NAFTA-transition funds.²⁵ The transnational grain giant Cargill even collected 500 million pesos (about $38,000) of marketing support payments.²⁶

Mexico’s agrarian bias toward the rich was so pronounced that even the World Bank commented, “Agricultural spending is so regressive, it cancels out about half the redistributive impact of rural development spending.”²⁷ Mexico’s agriculture secretary defended this strategy, arguing that his job was to uplift “those [large farmers] who are economically viable” and incentivize subsistence producers to leave agriculture and collect welfare-type payments.²⁸ An undersecretary of the same ministry, speaking to the New York Times, even praised “rural to urban migration” as “a highly desirable phenomenon.”²⁹

Despite the greater productivity and higher per-acre nutritional value of the traditional milpa system, Mexico’s public investments have long discriminated against small farmers, especially Indigenous communities concentrated in southern Mexico. Mexico’s sixty-eight Indigenous groups constitute a quarter of the population, but Indigenous-majority municipalities receive only 12 percent of agricultural spending, just 6 percent of environmental funds, and one-tenth of 1 percent of public agricultural credit.³⁰ Consequently, between 1980 and 2015, rainfed maize production decreased 53 percent in the municipal ejidos (down by 1.2 million hectares)—while irrigated industrial maize increased at a rate of 49,000 hectares (121,082 acres) per year.³¹ Urbanites largely met these assaults on the countryside with apathy, until soaring tortilla prices shocked them into action.

THE TORTILLA CRISIS

During the 1980s austerity period, to avoid food riots from other budget cuts, the Mexican government continued to control maize prices and distribute tortilla flour at a 40 percent discount through a parastatal agency called the National Company for Popular Subsistence (CONASUPO), which manages its distributor network (DICONSA) of twenty-two thousand rural stores that sell discounted seeds and staple foods.³² Starting in the late 1980s, however, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari approved an increase to the price that traditional tortilla vendors paid for maize while simultaneously fixing tortilla prices. Then, in 1990, the Mexican consumers bureau forgave the loan of any tortilla shop that shifted to dehydrated tortilla flour (masa harina), while traditional millers and tortilla shops still had to pay full price for maize.³³

Combining these subsidies with economies of scale, over two-thirds of Mexican tortillas are now factory made using the Gruma corporation’s Maseca flour.³⁴ Founded by Roberto González Barrero (“Don Maseco”), Gruma also controls 90 percent of tortilla flour markets supplying immigrants in California, as well as 80 percent of Central America’s market (with manufacturing plants in Honduras, Guatemala, and Costa Rica).³⁵ In the lead-up to NAFTA (1991–93), the proportion of tortillas made from industrial flour nearly doubled, from 15 to 27 percent. This made Don Maseco the seventh-richest man in Mexico and also one of the richest men in the world (number seventeen on the Forbes list).³⁶ After NAFTA, US grain corporations strategically acquired shares in these tortilla flour businesses: ADM aligned with Gruma, and Bunge bought out the smaller state company Minsa.³⁷ This duopoly controls 96 percent of Mexico’s tortilla flour market.³⁸ At a time when commercial loans in Mexico came with 30 percent interest rates, Gruma also benefited from NAFTA’s low-interest loans from the US Commodity Credit Corporation.³⁹

Despite reduced labor costs for factory tortillas made from instant masa flour, the consumer price of tortillas bizarrely increased 483 percent in inflation-adjusted value in the first five years of NAFTA’s implementation.⁴⁰ In the midst of this crisis, President Ernesto Zedillo inexplicitly liquidated CONASUPO. He shifted government supports from rural producers to urban consumers through a new welfare program to distribute a kilo of tortillas daily to poor families, using coupons called “tortivales,” which some joked were really “torti-votos,” or tortilla vote bribery.⁴¹

Just as US citizens grow indignant about high gas prices, tortilla prices are a common topic of daily conversation about the perceived health of the Mexican economy.⁴² When Mexico eliminated the tortilla coupons in 1998, that policy change hit rural workers hard.⁴³ Maize accounts for 40 percent of urban calories but 70 percent of the rural diet.⁴⁴ Whereas tortillas consume perhaps 3 percent of average urban income, rural households that do not plant maize spend upward of 45 percent of their cash on tortillas.⁴⁵

In response, the debtors’ movement El Barzón and the largest peasant associations joined forces in 2002 to launch a campaign called “El Campo No Aguanta Más” (the countryside can bear no more, or ECNAM). This coalition brought together hundreds of rural associations, NGOs, government agencies, scientists, and intellectuals.⁴⁶ Through dialogue they realized Mexico’s food insecurity was a consequence of a longer-term erosion of the rural economy. To defend maize, therefore, the coalition would have to defend rural lifeways holistically.⁴⁷ The ECNAM campaign coordinated a march of some one hundred thousand people in Mexico City on January 31, 2003.⁴⁸ Internationally famous Mexican intellectual Gustavo Esteva coined a phrase (and an eponymous 2003 book) that became a mantra of the movement: “Sin maíz, no hay país” (Without maize, there is no country).⁴⁹ In a negotiated “Accord for the Countryside,” the Mexican state responded with some changes to rules governing its rural DICONSA stores but skillfully avoided the fundamental issue of NAFTA corn imports.⁵⁰

The ECNAM alliance sprang back into action in 2006, when corn prices rose after the United States diverted more of its corn crop to ethanol.⁵¹ Mexico’s incoming president in December 2006, Felipe Calderón, faced angry crowds because tortilla prices had doubled within a year to 11 pesos (three times the inflation rate and four times salary raises).⁵² This tortillazo (tortilla crisis) aligned sectors—rural and urban, producer and consumer—that the PRI’s corporatist political strategies had previously divided. Many people who had never before been politically engaged joined the demonstrations. Maize—as both staple and heritage symbol of the Mexican nation—had inspired them to act. Women banged pots in a cacerolazo and marchers chanted “Yes for tortillas and no to the ‘PAN’!” (in reference to the National Action Party, whose ironic acronym means “bread” in Spanish).⁵³ In response, the state brokered a voluntary compact among tortilla factories and supermarkets. To standardize maize prices at 3.5 peso per kilo; tortilla flour at 5 pesos/kilo; and finished tortillas at 8.5 pesos/kilo, the government awarded Maseca and Minsa a subsidy of 625 pesos per ton of corn.⁵⁴ Sourced from Sinaloa’s industrial farms and US imports, that tortilla flour was likely already contaminated by GM corn, as portended by Oaxaca’s scandal.⁵⁵

OAXACONTAMINATION

When Mexico negotiated NAFTA in the early 1990s, commercial GM crops were not yet a reality.⁵⁶ But the issue soon “rubbed salt into the wounds opened by NAFTA.”⁵⁷ Like Europe, Mexico initially permitted field trials of GM crops, but then reversed course in late 1998 with a complete moratorium. That ban was more of a practical decision than an ideological one, as Mexican officials concluded that Monsanto’s GM traits were irrelevant to the predominant pests and growing conditions of Mexico. The European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilis, targeted by the Bt insecticidal toxin was not a problem for Mexican maize;⁵⁸ nor did the Mexican countryside need labor-saving herbicides, given the high rates of rural unemployment.⁵⁹ Monsanto’s own data showed that regular hybrid varieties performed better than GM corn in Sinaloa trials.⁶⁰ In fact, without GMOs Mexican maize producers managed to raise their yields by 63 percent between 1980 and 2010, mostly due to irrigation and experimentation with no-till planting.⁶¹

Although it had technically banned GM corn, the Mexican government did nothing to test the genetic provenance of the mountains of midwestern corn kernels flowing into Mexico—of which probably 25–30 percent were then transgenic.⁶² Imported as whole kernel corn, any curious farmer could plant it.⁶³ Greenpeace Mexico made news when it announced in March 1999 that corn entering the port of Veracruz was genetically modified. The Mexican government assured the public not to worry, claiming the grain had been sterilized with a fungicide. In response, ornery Greenpeace activists planted those kernels (but carefully destroyed the plants before they could pollinate). And, yes, apparently the US corn was viable as seed.⁶⁴

The next year, two researchers discovered that GM corn from the United States had cross-pollinated into native Mexican landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico’s cradle of maize domestication.⁶⁵ This set off a worldwide scientific scandal about the environmental risks of gene dispersal, barely one year after world nations had negotiated the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.⁶⁶ Because of Mexico’s moratorium on GM corn, no one expected to find contamination so soon in a majority-Indigenous region (with seventeen ethnolinguistic groups) and where 93 percent of the population plants traditional, open-pollinated seeds.⁶⁷

The Zapotec community in question, situated high in the Sierra Juarez, is twenty kilometers from a main highway. Farmers there rarely if ever buy store seed.⁶⁸ Only by happenstance did UC Berkeley graduate student David Quist stumble upon GM strains in an educational community workshop meant to demonstrate the difference between native maize varieties and canned corn from the United States.⁶⁹ Quist carefully reconfirmed the results with his advisor, Ignacio Chapela. They sampled maize from twenty-one other communities, and found GM strains in fifteen. Back in their UC Berkeley lab, Chapela’s team noticed something else: the genetically modified DNA sequences had fragmented and inserted themselves randomly into the native maize genome. The unpredictable effects of this genetic intrusion raised the possibility that GM strains could introgress (jump back) into teosinte, turning maize’s progenitor into a superweed or cumulatively induce other catastrophic changes to maize.⁷⁰

After rigorous peer review, one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Nature, published Quist and Chapela’s paper.⁷¹ In violation of academic ethics, however, Monsanto appears to have received an advanced copy of the article. On the day of its release, two fictitious personas in science chatrooms, dubbed “Mary Murphy” and “Andura Smetacek,” posted immediate critiques on a pro-GMO site, AgBioWorld. It turns out “Murphy” was an employee of the Bivings Group, a public relations company subcontracted by Monsanto, and Smetacek’s posts had originated from an IP address based at Monsanto offices in St. Louis, Missouri.⁷² Under political pressure from corporate advertisers, and for the first time in the 130-year history of the journal, Nature’s editors retracted the publication and demanded further evidence about where and how these transgenes appeared in maize DNA.⁷³ In dispute was Quist and Chapela’s minor conclusion about random gene fragmentation, but the overall result—the fundamental presence of transgenes— remained unassailable.⁷⁴

Throwing fuel into the controversy, Novartis-Syngenta had a $25 million contract with Chapela’s public university department.⁷⁵ Signed in 1998, this five-year deal gave the biotech corporation the right to file patents on a third of discoveries made using funds from the “donation.”⁷⁶ Long before the Oaxaca scandal, an untenured Chapela and his students had vociferously opposed this deal.⁷⁷ When Chapela came up for tenure in 2002, the senior faculty voted 32–1 to approve his promotion, but an upper-level administrator denied it for mysterious budgetary reasons—a situation that almost never happens in academic life.⁷⁸ Chapela eventually won his case through legal appeal and continues to work at UC Berkeley, but disappointingly he did not respond to repeated email inquiries for advice about current struggles.

Before the 2001 Nature article was released, Chapela had shared his results with Mexico’s National Biodiversity Commission (CONABIO) and National Ecology Institute (INE).⁷⁹ Those agencies independently collected samples from twenty locales in Oaxaca and two in Mexico’s other origin center of maize, Puebla. In 95 percent of those twenty-two communities, the Mexican government found that one particular transgene (a CaMV 35S promoter) tainted an average of 7 percent of the native samples, though in some communities contamination was as high as 35 percent.⁸⁰ Even more disturbing, the Mexican government confirmed in January 2002 that a possible source of contamination was corn seed distributed by its own DICONSA stores around the country.⁸¹ At that time about 40 percent of DICONSA’s supplies came from the United States with a 37 percent transgenic rate.⁸² The Oaxacan maize harvest in 1997–98 was so poor that farmers may have turned to DICONSA stores for seed corn to replant their fields.⁸³ Nevertheless, Quist and Chapela found contaminated maize on farms that had never planted store-bought seed.⁸⁴

Almost thirty Oaxacan leaders from twenty-one Indigenous and peasant communities—primarily from the Ixtlán district, but with representation throughout the state⁸⁵—filed a petition in 2002 with the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC), a trinational agency established under NAFTA. Some ninety experts and organizations also wrote letters calling for the CEC to analyze the facts and weigh in on the controversy. Dr. José Sarakhán, an illustrious biologist who in 1992 had founded the National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO) and later served as chancellor of Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), chaired the CEC investigation.

While the official study was underway, a coalition of Mexican NGOs used commercial test kits and found evidence that StarLink, among other transgenes, had crossed into Mexican subsistence maize fields.⁸⁶ Biologists from UNAM collaborated with 138 Indigenous and peasant communities across nine states to test two thousand maize plants; in 2003 these tests again found multiple types of contamination (and again including the allergenic StarLink).⁸⁷ The scientists presented the results directly to civil society groups converging at the second “Forum in Defense of Maize.” One Zapotec leader from Oaxaca, Aldo González, responded, “What has taken our indigenous people thousands of years to develop, today the industries that do business with life can destroy in little time.”⁸⁸ In another riveting speech at the third Forum in 2004, Gonzalez reminded the crowd, “We are heirs to a great treasure that is not measured in money and that they want to take away from us. This is no time to beg for alms from the aggressor.”⁸⁹

The 2004 CEC report assembled an impressive portfolio of agricultural, environmental, economic, and cultural experts as coauthors, advisory group reviewers, and external reviewers. Unusual for that time in its use of phrases like “political autonomy” of Indigenous peoples, the report erred on the side of precautionary risk assessment, given the deep cultural and spiritual value of maize in Mexico.⁹⁰ Sarakhán’s team concluded that GM contamination was a threat to maize diversity and recommended that Mexico should: maintain its moratorium on GM corn; proactively label or mill imported corn; educate farmers about not “deliberately or inadvertently” planting imported seed; create a program by which farmers could submit saved seeds for testing; and invest more into conservation of maize diversity in situ.⁹¹ The CEC team submitted its investigation to Nature to vouch for Quist and Chapela’s work, but the journal’s editors rejected the study on “technical grounds.”⁹² However, by 2007 another ten studies reconfirmed widespread contamination. Due to English-language barriers, however, only three have entered into the “peer-reviewed” literature.⁹³

UC Davis professor George Dyer led another study that sampled 1,765 households in eighty localities in fourteen of Mexico’s thirty-one states, and paradoxically Dyer found that Mexico’s most heavily Indigenous southern states had the highest rates of contamination.⁹⁴ These revelations suggested that transgenes can travel more than seed corporations had been willing to admit, whether through pollen dispersal or, more likely, via seeds carried from place to place and outside the radar of regulation.⁹⁵ Such contamination can be difficult to monitor or eliminate because transgenes are not always phenotypically expressed.⁹⁶ While most studies of maize contamination have focused on pollen, maize seeds can be purposefully leaked from experimental plots in counties with high indexes of corruption or, more innocently, accompany human migration.⁹⁷ Between 1997 and 2001, at least 0.5 percent of Mexican seasonal or temporary migrants to the United States admitted to bringing corn seeds home with them.⁹⁸ They likely did so because small farmers traditionally exchange and mix seeds to strengthen their vigor and diversity.

Administrators for the global maize seed bank housed at CIMMYT temporarily halted the collection of maize varieties from Oaxaca, but then distanced the organization from the furor and downplayed the consequences of contamination, saying, “It’s just one [new] gene among 50,000 to 60,000 [maize] genes.”⁹⁹ CIMMYT’s founder and Nobel laureate, Norman Borlaug, minced fewer words, arguing that the “utopian idealists worried about contamination of the old with the new” are “completely idiotic.”¹⁰⁰ Throughout Mexico’s saga, CIMMYT continued its own biotech research program, including field tests of GM wheat starting in 2008.¹⁰¹ CIMMYT’s blasé response is worrisome, considering Mexico’s maize accessions constitute a third of the global collection and they are frequently shared with corporations and researchers around the world.¹⁰²

Mastering all these technical details and biotechnology trends was Silvia Ribeiro, a bilingual Mexico City–based journalist and intellectual. Through a regular newspaper column in La Jornada, Ribeiro kept GMOs in the public eye for decades while also amplifying the voices of Indigenous critics.¹⁰³ As an analyst for the nonprofit Erosion, Technology, and Concentration Group (ETC; formerly RAFI, the Rural Advancement Foundation International), Ribeiro and ETC’s founder (and Right Livelihood awardee) Pat Mooney presented Mexico’s contamination saga to the international food movement at Via Campesina meetings, at the World Social Forum, and at other social movement convergences. Unlike the often-preachy anti-GMO literature, their soothsayer communiques deliver delightful repartee, including phrases like “genetic roulette,” “pardon my patent,” “coming detractions,” “transgenic trade agreement,” and “dignified science” (the latter in reference to Indigenous knowledge).¹⁰⁴ They vividly nicknamed Monsanto’s propriety technology to sterilize plant progeny as a “Terminator” threat—a phrase that went viral among food movements and almost single-handedly quashed this threat. The ETC Group restores one’s faith that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can indeed change the world.

UNDIGNIFIED POLICY

Too many others are corruptible. Just as GM foods fell in the fuzzy lines separating the US EPA, the FDA, and the USDA, Mexico’s regulatory response to GM technology fell through similar bureaucratic cracks.¹⁰⁵ Despite the dignified science behind the CEC report, other officials within the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources decided to lift the GM crop moratorium on August 13, 2002, and began preparing guidelines for experimental permits. Under pressure from a consortium of biotechnology corporations called AGROBIO, the Ministries of Environment, Commerce, and Health embraced GMOs and even approved the use of Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (rBST) four years before it was approved for use in the United States.¹⁰⁶

Despite having signed the 2003 Accord for the Countryside, the Mexican Congress approved that same year the Biosecurity Law for Genetically Modified Organisms without public consultation or debate.¹⁰⁷ Greenpeace-Mexico dubbed the biosecurity bill a “Monsanto Law”—an epithet that would eventually circumnavigate the world and reappear in Guatemala’s discourse, when a similar law slipped through its legislature in 2014. One serious loophole in the Biosecurity Law was that the size of “field tests” was never defined, so agribusiness could grow commercial quantities on “experimental” plots if they wanted.¹⁰⁸ By 2013 Mexico was growing more GM crops than any European country except Spain.¹⁰⁹

Like in the United States, where Monsanto maintains a revolving door with the leadership of the USDA and the EPA, many key Mexican regulatory posts—for example, the director of the State Board of Maize—were occupied by former Monsanto executives.¹¹⁰ Then secretary of economy Bruno Ferrari, who previously directed Seminis-Mexico (which was sold to Monsanto), repaid his former employer by arranging a personal meeting between President Felipe Calderón and Monsanto’s CEO Hugh Grant at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2009.¹¹¹ Shortly thereafter, Calderón’s administration ended Mexico’s moratorium on GM corn and welcomed other GM crops (cotton, soy). As though nature herself mourned this policy shift, that same year three-quarters of monarch butterflies died in their migration home to Mexico.¹¹²

Confirming that Monsanto was in cahoots with the political establishment, the Mexican delegate to the tenth Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Japan in 2010 attempted (unsuccessfully) to break the voluntary global moratorium on Terminator technology.¹¹³ In 2011 Monsanto and Pioneer (which was acquired by DuPont and later merged into DowDuPont) applied to plant 1.4 million hectares of GM corn in Sinaloa and 1 million in Tamaulipas—an extension larger than El Salvador.¹¹⁴

Mexican courts initially rejected the first lawsuits that Greenpeace and other environmental and peasant associations filed against these permits. The lead plaintiff Dr. Adelita San Vicente formed a coalition of environmental lawyers, twenty civil groups, and fifty-three citizens and scientists filed a “collective demand” (akin to what in the United States would be called a “class action lawsuit”) in 2013 against the Ministries of Agriculture and Environment for having rubber-stamped GM crop permits (they had approved 283 of 327 requests).¹¹⁵ Citing the precautionary principle in dubio pro natura (when in doubt, favor nature), a Mexico City (D.F.) court judge, Marroquín Zaleta, agreed and suspended all permits for GM field trials.¹¹⁶ When corporate biotech lawyers appealed Marroquín Zaleta’s decision, another seventy-eight high-profile chefs joined the struggle, including Mexico’s Enrique Olvera, chef and owner of the acclaimed Pujol restaurant, which is ranked in the top twenty restaurants worldwide.¹¹⁷

Although the Mexican state treated northern Mexico as a safe growing region for GM crops, that region has unique landraces developed over centuries through ethnocultural selections for cuisine, forage, and construction.¹¹⁸ With strong Indigenous representation from Mexico’s northern peoples, the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) denounced the existential threat of GMOs in their territories. As Pedro Turuseachi (Tarahumara, original people of present-day state of Chihuahua) wrote, “With [maize], we are born, we grow, we die.… The contamination of our seed is an attack to the heart of Indian communities.”¹¹⁹ Wixárika elders note, “Only among all of us do we know everything” (Sólo entre todos sabemos todo)¹²⁰—an insight that reflects a deep Indigenous respect for plurality, which also has been a core tenet of the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico.

ZAPATISTA MAIZE

Although prior to NAFTA the Mexican state was aware of the growing National Zapatista Liberation Army (ELZN) that was amassing in the southeast, government officials remained mum about it so as not to jeopardize trade negotiations. Even so, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas on NAFTA’s implementation day of January 1, 1994, took officials by surprise. Demonstrating their hallmark flair for public relations, the Zapatistas kidnapped a former governor that day and placed him on trial; rather than shooting him, they sentenced him to a life term of “hard peasant labor,” but soon released him to Bishop Samuel Ruiz who negotiated a truce. Early Zapatista declarations notably demanded equal access to Green Revolution technologies, but within a couple of years the guerrilla movement dropped these demands.¹²¹ Although the Mexican state agreed to improve public services in the 1996 San Andrés Accords, by the turn of the millennium the Zapatistas realized that the “bad government” would never fulfill its promises.

This marked a transition toward a strategy of internal self-reliance on community governance, healthcare, education, and especially agriculture. Zapatista territory returned to pre-NAFTA maize acreage by 2007.¹²² Another important transition came in 2003, when the EZLN demilitarized its autonomous municipalities and passed decisions to civilian-run “councils of good government.” After some forty thousand Zapatistas seized five Chiapan cities by surprise on December 21, 2012 (at the end of the thirteenth Maya baktun) —using a silent, peaceful march to demonstrate their growth and unity—their spokesperson, Subcommander Marcos, wrote, “Did you hear it? It is the sound of your world collapsing. It is that of ours rising anew.”¹²³ In September 2019 the Zapatistas announced that eleven more zones (known as caracoles, or “snail shells”) had voluntarily joined their autonomous territory, making essentially half of Chiapas a land where “the people rule, and the government obeys.” Still flourishing three decades later despite paramilitary repression, the movement now represents a thousand communities in thirty-one autonomous municipalities.¹²⁴

Maize is a potent cultural symbol of the movement. Zapatista artwork often features rebels as a collectivity of maize kernels, maize as mask, Zapatista soldiers growing from stalks of maize, or rainbow maize colors as an illustration of the philosophy of “unity within diversity.” In one of Marcos’s more famous essays against the “fourth [neoliberal] world war,” he noted: “Groups of protesters, kernels of rebels, are forming throughout the planet. The empire of financiers with full pockets confronts the rebellion of pockets of resistance. Yes, pockets. Of all sizes, of different colours, of varying shapes.”¹²⁵ Using Monsanto as a foil, the Zapatistas launched the Mother Seeds in Resistance campaign in 2002 (immediately after the Oaxaca scandal) and declared Zapatista territory to be “GMO free”—a task easier said than done.

Prior to the rebellion, Chiapan villages had lost significant maize diversity and were mostly planting white varieties amid heavy agrochemical use.¹²⁶ The San Diego–based nonprofit Schools for Chiapas worked with them to create a joint program of seed conservation and maize testing for GM sequences (2001–4). Communities politely collaborated with an ex situ seed bank but then abandoned it once the foreigners left, because the concept of “banking” was anathema for Zapatistas. In three years the project managed to save only 61 varieties, while an estimated 280 unique cultivars grow in Zapatista milpas. The Zapatistas began developing in situ experimental plots to identify native maizes better suited for climate change. Over time the Zapatista communities began to cultivate three to five colored varieties.¹²⁷ Even though many Zapatista farmers still use herbicides to save labor, they are now trying to reduce the use of agrochemicals both in maize and in coffee systems, arguing that within Maya cosmology, “organic is what our grandparents did.”¹²⁸ Also reflecting the adaptive resilience of the rebellion, Zapatista communities have improvised a stylized new Maya altar ceremony to bless their seeds before planting.¹²⁹

Enmeshing biotechnology debates into Maya cosmology and autonomy, Zapatista educators have characterized GMOs as being something like an infection or plague introduced by foreign invaders, rallying farmers to join in conducting thousands of field tests for contamination.¹³⁰ Wherever GM strains are detected in their native maize fields, Zapatista farmers pull the crop and receive support to buy tortilla flour until the next maize season. Because this flour likely contains GM corn imported from the United States, science studies scholar Marisa Brandt insightfully noted, “This policy sets the Zapatista anti-GM movement distinctly apart from consumer-based anti-GM movements wherein concerns over their unknown health risks take center stage.”¹³¹ To finance the testing program, the Schools for Chiapas nonprofit shares Zapatista maize seeds with small donors and recommends they be sown with “much water, rich soil, plus dignity, democracy, justice, and especially revolutionary love!” In turn, small donors must promise to “never patent nor abuse the genetic material or life force of this seed.”¹³²

HONEYCOMBING THROUGH THE COURTS

Another Mexican region with a long history of armed resistance and autonomy inspired other strategies that halted a national onslaught of GM crop permits. The Yucatán Peninsula is divided into the three states of Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo, with a majority population that is of Maya descent. Maya activists and journalists like Bernardo Camaal have self-consciously compared their contemporary resistance to Monsanto to the long nineteenth-century Caste War Rebellion (1847–1901) against sugar and henequen planters who encroached upon Yucatec Maya milpas. From a town renamed Chan Santa Cruz, Maya rebels established autonomous rule for half the nineteenth century over a 150-mile swath of Quintana Roo stretching from the resort town of Tulum to Bacalar, which became one of the contemporary plaintiffs against GM crops. These Yucatec Maya rebels followed divine signs, like a “talking” cross that was a syncretic blend of Catholicism and maize iconography.¹³³ Even after the Porfiriato dictatorship quashed their rebellion, some insurgents retreated to rainforest hamlets and continued to expel all non-Maya people who attempted to enter these areas well into the twentieth century.

Throughout the region today, Maya people work in sustainable timber, tourism, and agriculture, as well as the pre-Columbian tradition of beekeeping.¹³⁴ The region’s forty thousand beekeepers, 90 percent of whom are Maya, are organized into 162 cooperatives (mostly in Campeche but covering all three Yucatec states).¹³⁵ These collectives cultivate commercial honey from domesticated European bees (Apis mellifera) for export to Europe, but have also conserved a stingless bee that is unique to the region, Melipona beecheii, for ritual and special culinary uses and other high-end markets. After more aggressive “Africanized” bees infected European honeybees in the late 1980s, Maya men moved their apiaries away from their villages. Maya women then assumed more responsibility and took cultural pride in cultivating the Melipona bees in tree trunks closer to home.¹³⁶ Between the two types of production, Mexico is the world’s sixth-largest producer of honey—40 percent of which comes from the Yucatán Peninsula.¹³⁷

In a strange cultural twist, people encroaching on Maya land today are a conservative sect of Old German–speaking Mennonites who had fled cartel violence in northern Mexico and settled in the Yucatán region in the 1980s. Numbering about ten thousand settlers, they live in twenty-two colonies that lease or buy Maya ejido land in addition to federal land concessions.¹³⁸ In the Yucatán, as throughout Latin America, Mennonites have deforested and plowed large tracts of Indigenous territories in Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Belize, and beyond. In 2012 the Mexican government awarded Monsanto a permit to commercialize Roundup Ready soy on almost 225,000 hectares, a quarter of which was in the Yucatán Peninsula.¹³⁹ As Monsanto’s best new clients, the Mennonites centered their production in Holpechen, Campeche, where some twenty-five thousand Maya families practice beekeeping. The very next year aerial herbicide spraying killed at least fifteen hundred hives, an estimated loss of 10 million pesos, roughly $786,000.¹⁴⁰ By 2014 four-fifths of Holpechen’s cultivated land had been converted to GM soy.

In response, one Holpechen “Meliponera,” Leydy Pech, organized a coalition of Indigenous beekeepers, scientists, and environmentalists into a group called Ma OGM, meaning in Yucateco and Spanish “No GMOs.” Ma OGM filed a lawsuit against the Mexican government based on International Labor Organization Convention 169 (ratified by Mexico in 1990), which requires “prior, informed consent” of Indigenous communities for development projects. Pech recruited scientists from the Autonomous University of Campeche, who found definitive proof that GM soy pollen was contaminating local honey production. This jeopardized the export of $70 million of otherwise organic honey to the EU (representing 40–70 percent of household income for the beekeepers). Beekeepers lost around a quarter of their income when forced to redirect sales to the nonorganic US market. The Campeche toxicologists also tested Pech’s hometown water supply and residents’ urine and found significant levels of glyphosate herbicide in both. With this evidence, Pech organized concurrent protests in seven ancient Maya sites across the Yucatán.¹⁴¹ Mexico’s Supreme Court heard her lawsuit in November 2015 and unanimously ruled that the permits for GM soybean violated principles of Indigenous consultation. A Monsanto lawyer remarked that he couldn’t believe that “this little woman” beat them.¹⁴² This “sweet” story reverberated around the world, and Pech won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2020.

Another less internationally known but just as legally consequential case was an injunction filed by Bacalar’s Regional Maya Council in Quintana Roo (the center of the Caste Rebellion) challenging the constitutionality of Mexico’s 2005 Biosecurity Law.¹⁴³ Then, in the adjacent state of Yucatán, home to about eleven thousand beekeepers, a scholar-turned-planner from the Ministry of Urban Development and Environment declared his state a GMO-free zone, aiming to protect its unique karstic underground water reserves. Tourists flock to this region for its stunning sunken wells, known as cenotes, leading urban tourism business owners to join as unusual political allies.¹⁴⁴ The UN Development Programme, honey companies, eight different universities, and at least thirty-six nonprofits also aligned with the struggle.¹⁴⁵ It was truly a joint effort, giving rise to a new coalition in 2019 called the Kabnáalo’on Maya Alliance for Yucatán’s Bees, to address the broader threat of pesticides from other crops.¹⁴⁶

In 2017 the Mexican Food and Agricultural Service revoked Roundup Ready soy permits in all seven states and penalized Bayer-Monsanto for the first time.¹⁴⁷ Despite this series of court victories, GM soy plantings mysteriously continue, leaving activists to speculate on the source of the seeds.¹⁴⁸ Given the Mexican government’s refusal to enforce the ban on GM soy, activists began ongoing discussions for local enforcement mechanisms.¹⁴⁹

Writ large, the anti-GM organizing in the Yucatán helped revive latent Maya governance structures, alongside and within complex coalitions of national peasant organizations, beekeeping associations, environmental nonprofits, scientists, journalists, business elites, and human rights organizations.¹⁵⁰ Before organizing against GM crops, only a small group of politicized, educated, or organized leaders identified with a collective Maya identity. Despite speaking fluent Yucateco, most Maya peoples in the region identified as mestizo or simply as members of their regional townships. In the process of mobilizing against Monsanto, however, a new sense of pan-Maya identity blossomed and inspired the next Indigenous generation to pursue legal and scientific careers in support of Mexico’s unfolding agroecological revolution.¹⁵¹

DIGNIFIED SCIENCE

Mexican food and farming movements clearly gained traction when they enlisted sympathetic scientists to provide the hard data needed to inform policy.¹⁵² Leading the laboratory resistance was Mexican science laureate Dr. Elena Alvarez-Buylla. A molecular geneticist from an elite family of scientists, she earned her doctoral degree at UC Berkeley in 1992. A decade later she led the UNAM team that had confirmed Chapela’s findings, and then went on to organize Mexico’s Union of Scientists Committed to Society (UCCS) in 2006.¹⁵³

Alvarez-Buylla then supported a high-profile study of the presence of GM corn in the food supply.¹⁵⁴ Her team hypothesized that random samples of Mexican food ought to have low rates of GM contamination since Mexico had reinstituted a moratorium on planting GM corn, and yellow corn imports supposedly only went toward animal feed and industrial uses. They found the opposite. A shocking 82 percent of 367 Mexican food samples contained GM sequences—mostly the genetic marker NK603 associated with Roundup Ready crops. Tortillas had a 90 percent contamination rate! Even hand-nixtamalized “artisanal” tortillas tested 18.5 percent positive for recombinant sequences. Half the snack foods labeled “GMO-free” had transgenic markers. Twenty-eight percent of food samples that tested positive for GM strains also contained measurable glyphosate residues. A later 2021 study of ninety-five children in Jalisco found that 100 percent had glyphosate in their urine, including children not involved in agriculture.¹⁵⁵

These studies ripped through the national media, marshaling broad public support for regulation. As a prescient 2004 Oaxacan declaration noted, “[Maize] is the heart of rural life, and an important ingredient of the city … [it] summarises our past, defines our present, and provides the basis for our common future.”¹⁵⁶ The No Maize, No Country coalition (established in 2007) remobilized, urging the government to mill corn imports at the border (as many African countries do), to post warning labels against planting imported corn, and to establish monitoring programs to detect field contamination more systematically.¹⁵⁷ Prior to this moment, Mexico had relied on expensive PCR testing, but the Zapatistas showed how inexpensively farmers could test for contamination.¹⁵⁸

Then something extraordinary happened. After the left-center party Morena (Movement for National Renewal) swept into office by a landslide, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–24) made good on his promise to revitalize Mexican agriculture and to protect “native maize, milpas, bio-cultural wealth, farming communities, gastronomic heritage and the health of Mexicans.”¹⁵⁹ True to his campaign promises to create a Plan de Ayala XXI (with a hat tip to Emiliano Zapata), in August 2019 López Obrador announced that Mexico would no longer use glyphosate (Roundup) in governmental programs and would stop all imports of the chemical within four years. He also directed regulators to lead a comprehensive reform of the country’s pesticide inventory, which includes a disturbing number of chemicals already banned in the United States but legally exported by US corporations to the Global South.¹⁶⁰

To backstop the science, López Obrador appointed Alvarez-Buylla as the first woman to lead CONACYT (the National Council of Science and Technology), which she renamed CONAHCYT, to acknowledge the role of the humanities. President López Obrador also appointed an illustrious but dissident agroecologist Víctor Manuel Toledo as secretary of environment. As a scholar, Toledo was part of a school of Mexican agroecologists inspired by Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi.¹⁶¹ Toledo was famous for having proposed, as early as 1992, a genuine diálogo de saberes (dialogue of knowledge) with peasants and Indigenous peoples, a phrase later embraced by Via Campesina.¹⁶² During his first week in office, Toledo invited one of the No Maize, No Country key leaders and legal representative, Adelita San Vicente Tello (also an agronomist by training), to serve as director of goods and natural resources within the Environment Ministry to create the very regulations that López Obrador had promised.¹⁶³ Another No Maize, No Country leader, Víctor Suarez, became undersecretary of food self-sufficiency, a new position within the Agriculture Ministry. In addition to blocking glyphosate imports (which equaled 67,000 tons in 2019), Toledo laid out a broader plan not just to prohibit eighty pesticides outlawed in other countries, but also to clean up Mexico’s pesticide-filled and factory-polluted rivers, ban fracking, and tackle climate crises.¹⁶⁴

Toledo’s bold reforms unfortunately met with resistance from others in López Obrador’s “hybrid” government of leftists and neoliberals.¹⁶⁵ Billionaire Alfonso Romo, the great-great-nephew of Francisco Madero (betrayer of Emiliano Zapata), was at time the president’s chief of staff. Originally making his fortune in tobacco, Romo had expanded into agricultural biotech and once commented to the press, “Seeds are software.” Romo’s firm, Pulsar Group, operated an all-seasons biotech laboratory in Tapachula, Chiapas, which benefited from the privatization of ejido lands.¹⁶⁶ In collaboration with Monsanto, Romo’s company tried to create a Roundup Ready lettuce, and the relationship between the corporations blossomed. In 2005 Monsanto paid Romo $1.4 billion for his seed company, Seminis, which at one point controlled one-fifth of the world’s seed market.¹⁶⁷ Romo also holds enormous private land holdings in Yucatán and founded the company Enerall to bottle aquifer water.¹⁶⁸ Not surprisingly, Romo was quoted in a 2020 news cycle criticizing Yucatec Maya agriculture as unproductive and “worth nothing” (no vale nada).¹⁶⁹

Prior to his appointment as environment secretary, Víctor Toledo had published withering editorials eviscerating Romo as a corporate-brained wolf in sheep’s clothing hiding within the administration and lambasting one of Romo’s pet projects, a Disney-esque “Maya Train” that would enrich corporate tourism in the Yucatán.¹⁷⁰ Then in August 2020 someone leaked comments from a private meeting in which Toledo criticized “brutal” internal contradictions within the cabinet. Shortly thereafter, on August 14, 2020, unknown goons emptied bags of a mysterious powdered chemical onto Toledo’s home patio. Toledo resigned weeks later, due to “stress-induced” health problems¹⁷¹—a hardly credible excuse for an almost superhuman scholar who has published eighteen books and almost two hundred articles while being actively engaged in social movements and time-consuming leadership positions.

Despite Toledo’s departure, López Obrador clarified that he would move forward with the glyphosate ban and other agrochemical regulations that were already set into motion. On New Year’s Eve 2020, López Obrador formalized his promises with a decree to ban GM corn and phase out both glyphosate and US corn imports by 2024. He tasked Mexican agencies to develop methods for boosting maize productivity to meet the reasonable goal to “produce in Mexico what we consume.”¹⁷² Cleverly, Mexico’s presidential decree did not call for a ban on all US corn per se, only low-quality GM-corn imports.¹⁷³ Just as Mexican farmers had been expected to adapt after NAFTA had gutted corn prices by 70 percent, US farmers could adapt to these new market conditions.¹⁷⁴ Instead they hollered all kinds of hypocrisies and hyperbole. One Nebraska lobbyist, for example, complained that returning to conventional hybrids “would be like getting rid of electricity and going back to candles.”¹⁷⁵

NORTH AMERICA V. MEXICO

Within a week of the Mexican presidential announcement, the US Embassy’s GAIN employees published a translation and critique of the decree. They have continued to provide detailed reports of harvest trends and export opportunities in the hope that Mexico cannot reach its 2024 goal to be self-sufficient in maize production and that the United States can continue to dump one-quarter of its surplus corn exports on Mexico.¹⁷⁶ Chris Novack, president of the agribusiness industry group CropLife, immediately sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, complaining that Toledo’s decree was “incompatible” with the USMCA. CropLife also commissioned a “Chicken Little” report that used faulty modeling to warn that Mexico’s economy would collapse without US corn dumping.¹⁷⁷ Helping CropLife from within the EPA was a Trump-appointed lawyer who rallied others in the agency to think “how we could use USMCA to work through these issues.” A journalist privy to those documents reported that CropLife executives worried the ban on glyphosate would encourage other countries to follow suit and possibly place limits on other pesticides or lower permissible level of pesticide residues on foods.¹⁷⁸

Meanwhile, Bayer-Monsanto’s regional director, Laura Tamayo, filed some seventeen legal challenges in Mexico via a front group called the National Farm Council. So far the Mexican courts have rejected all but one of them, but Bayer and other corporations continue to plead the courts for injunctions. Foreign biotech corporations have also continued flooding the Ministry of Agriculture with experimental permit applications.¹⁷⁹

The National Corn Growers Association piled on more pressure. Founded in 1957, this $22 million trade association (which enjoys 501c5 status) represents some forty thousand dues-paying members (less than a tenth of the estimated three hundred thousand US farmers who grow corn). Its stated purpose on tax filings is “to create and increase opportunities for corn growers as we seek to sustainably feed and fuel a growing world.”¹⁸⁰ The association sponsors harvest yield contests but also works to open new markets for the fifteen billion bushels of chemically pampered corn that is grown each year in the American Midwest. The association vociferously complained that the loss of the Mexican market would cause farmers to lose $73.8 billion over ten years. However, to put that $7.4 billion annual figure in perspective, in 2020 the United States gave corn growers $9 billion in subsidies (via commodity protection, disaster relief, conservation, subsidized insurance, and more) to overproduce.¹⁸¹

In October 2021 Mexico’s minister of agriculture, Víctor Villalobos, assured US emissaries that the decree would not affect yellow corn for feed and industrial uses. But by November 2022, tensions persisted, leading López Obrador to clarify that his policy would, in fact, apply to yellow dent corn for feed but could exempt more processed foods like cooking oil. In December 2023 Mexican negotiators offered an olive branch to extend the implementation deadline to 2025 and reiterated that Mexico was not refusing to trade. They would be perfectly willing to import non-GM corn from the United States, or any other country. With ample time to adjust, Mexico presented to its northern neighbor a golden opportunity to reform its distorted subsidy system.

The United States nevertheless filed a trade challenge in August 2023. Secretary of Agriculture Tom “Mr. Monsanto” Vilsack blustered that Mexico’s new precautionary policies were “not grounded in science.”¹⁸² He appointed Doug McKalip as the USTR official. Following his boss’s lead and ignoring his own country’s case law (which has awarded billions to plaintiffs for lymphomas from Roundup exposure), McKalip is now demanding that Mexico “prove” the science behind its ban.¹⁸³ Yet, even Bayer-Monsanto’s own headquarters country, Germany, decided to ban glyphosate by 2024.¹⁸⁴ As I was concluding the writing of this book, the entire EU was also fiercely debating whether or not to renew glyphosate’s registration.

Even so, Mexico’s research council, CONAHCYT, convened biologists, toxicologists, oncologists, geneticists, and other renowned scientists from around the world to reassemble that proof.¹⁸⁵ They quickly organized a database of 331 (at last count) peer-reviewed scientific articles on glyphosate’s known health harms, with summaries translated into Spanish.¹⁸⁶ Alvarez-Buylla also mounted a two-year study on the effects of GM-food diets on farm animals (not laboratory rats).¹⁸⁷ This is cutting-edge science that was left “undone” in the United States when the FDA declared, without evidence, that genetically modified food was ipso facto “substantially equivalent” to conventional crops.¹⁸⁸ As Mexican scientists emphasize, even if residual amounts of glyphosate on GM foods have no effect on people eating a standard US diet, the risk-benefit equation will be different for Mexicans who consume 53 percent of their calories from maize as a whole food.¹⁸⁹

Making clear that its new pro-health maize policies apply to all trade partners, Mexico presented its new quality guidelines to the World Trade Organization in July 2023.¹⁹⁰ It also graciously invited the United States to form a joint scientific panel to investigate how Bt or Roundup residues may be causing health harm by altering the human microbiome, but US officials declined.¹⁹¹ In late 2023 the United States filed a formal challenge against Mexico’s “Tortilla Corn Ban” to the USMCA secretariat. Other than a couple of 2021–22 articles about climate change and agriculture, almost all other scientific articles cited by the United States predate the first Roundup cancer trials in California and the new associated science on the carcinogenicity of glyphosate that snowballed thereafter. Instead, the US submission largely relies on non-peer-reviewed pieces and industry documents representing pro-GMO interests, including opinion columns by Norman Borlaug.¹⁹² Even after Dow Chemical used NAFTA’s mechanisms to challenge Canada’s science-based decision to ban 2,4-D and other home-use herbicides, Canadian officials deplorably joined the US in questioning Mexico’s dignified science. Although Canada does not export corn to Mexico, they submitted a brief in support of the US based on subclauses in the “Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures” chapter of the 2020 trinational trade agreement.¹⁹³

In stark contrast to these two legalistic briefs, Mexico’s nearly two-hundred-page rebuttal brims with novel cultural, toxicological, and agricultural arguments. With 360 citations, it incorporates exceptional new research on how extensively GM traits have transgressed into native Mexican maize; the cultural, agronomic, and climatic value of Mexico’s maize diversity; the failure of US agencies to exert proper regulatory oversight on agritech corporations; and the disproportionate risks of Bt toxins and glyphosate residues for Mexicans who consume maize as a dietary staple.¹⁹⁴ Ten nongovernmental organizations from all three nations submitted a treasure trove of shorter supplementary briefs in support of Mexico’s food sovereignty and right to exert a precautionary principle for public health.¹⁹⁵

How the trade panel will rule in November 2024 is anyone’s guess. Selected from the tiny number of legal experts in international trade disputes, these arbitration panels are notoriously unpredictable. Just three people will decide a case that will supersede national democratic laws, with profound consequences for all of humanity. The United States appointed Hugo Perezcano Díaz, while Mexico appointed Jean E. Kalicki. By lottery, Swiss lawyer Christian Häberli was named the “neutral” panel chair.¹⁹⁶ Having once led the WTO’s Committee on Agriculture, Häberli now serves as an academic fellow with the World Trade Institute, with expertise in climate change mitigation, food security, agriculture, trade, development, and dispute settlements.¹⁹⁷ Should the United States prevail, it could withhold preferential tariffs worth the “lost” revenue.¹⁹⁸ Should the United States lose, Vilsack preemptively allocated $1.2 billion to the Commodity Credit Corporation to help his corporate corn farm friends secure new export markets in Asia and Africa.¹⁹⁹ Regardless of the outcome of this dispute, trade is a voluntary act. No country can be obligated to accept commodities it already produces.²⁰⁰ Mexico has set into motion critical reforms to boost its national production and conserve its native maize diversity.

A FOURTH FOOD REGIME

How, exactly, will Mexico make up its maize shortfall? That glass is surprisingly more than half full. Despite NAFTA’s assaults, three-quarters of remaining Mexican farmers still save seed, and two-thirds of those conserve native landraces.²⁰¹ Maize still occupies half of Mexico’s cropland, and nine-tenths of Mexico’s maize fields are smaller than five hectares.²⁰² Beyond satisfying their own needs, small farmers sell significant surplus through local markets.²⁰³ A third of Mexico continues to live in the rural areas, making homemade nixtamal with their own slaked maize. Why? Because native maize makes better quality tortillas.²⁰⁴

Recall that Mexico imported virtually no corn before the signing of NAFTA. Within two years, however, the country was importing 5 million tons, and by 2021 nearly 18 million tons.²⁰⁵ Most of that, however, is yellow corn feed for Mexico’s growing demand for meat and processed foods. Through milpa surplus and production from large Sinaloan farms, Mexico remains almost self-sufficient for white maize. Antonio Turrent, another distinguished member of the Union of Scientists Committed to Society, has long argued that by better supporting small farms in southeast Mexico, the country could easily triple its production using only its own landraces and state-developed hybrids (which cost one-third less than GM corn seed).²⁰⁶

To replace the 10 million tons of yellow corn imports, Mexico’s Agriculture Ministry is pursuing a two-prong strategy to promote alternative feedstock, like cassava and beets, while also developing new improved dent varieties adapted to Mexican conditions.²⁰⁷ A Chapingo-trained agronomist known for his understanding of agricultural economics, Agriculture Undersecretary Víctor Suarez has formulated a pragmatic transitional plan to boost production in the short term, using nationally produced fertilizer, while developing agroecological extension programs to eventually phase out fertilizers by replenishing soil fertility. From previous experiments when he directed a nonprofit called ANEC, which supports marketing for sixty thousand rural producers, Suarez has shown that farmers who inoculate their soils with good microbes can increase their maize production by 30 percent and reduce their production costs by 30 percent, and therefore make 60 percent more profit.²⁰⁸ To expand such lessons, through his new authority as undersecretary, Suarez has launched an impressive forty-two hundred state field schools in eight hundred municipalities across 90 percent of Mexico.

Suarez has also overhauled the subsidy structure to support two million smallholders, especially those in previously neglected Indigenous-majority states in southern Mexico. From the scandalous 12 percent of subsidies distributed to Indigenous farmers under previous neoliberal governments, smallholders now represent 84 percent of beneficiaries.²⁰⁹ The next challenge is to make irrigation more accessible to small farmers, which alone could increase maize production another 43 percent.²¹⁰ Others have suggested investing in programs that can link traditional maize producers with urban markets and restaurants that appreciate heirloom varieties.²¹¹ Last, but not least, the state has committed to buying from smallholders at least 15 percent of their maize harvest for a new strategic storage reserve. The idea is to decouple Mexico’s higher-quality white maize production from the Chicago Board of Trade, to prevent corporate grain traders from undercutting commercial maize producers during the harvest glut, as they have done since NAFTA began.

This multipronged strategy appears to be working. In 2023 Mexico imported 85 percent less white corn.²¹² In June 2023 Mexican regulators also raised the white corn import tariff to 50 percent. Replacing yellow feed corn will take more time, so regulators extended that deadline to 2025. Even so, Mexico is leading the world into a new agroecological era—perhaps even a fourth food regime—that recenters maize in its national identity and supports climate resilience. To that end, right before the COVID crisis, the Mexican Senate unanimously passed a law to foment and protect native maize.²¹³

MANY WORLDS OF MAIZE

Like the cultural diversity that sustains Mexican maize, this extraordinary political transition was made possible by a tapestry of multiple players, shifting locales, tenacious peasant and Indigenous organizations, formidable intellectuals, oddball allies, radical environmental groups, and even “interspecies alliances” with monarchs and Melipona bees.²¹⁴ Although some have criticized how scientific debates about contamination privileged the voices of those with biotechnology expertise over the livelihood concerns of peasants and Indigenous peoples, Mexican scientists provided critical evidence that was “legible” to the state and developed cutting-edge methodologies for continued monitoring of genetic seed pollution.²¹⁵ Even so, Indigenous and peasant leaders have been the moral force behind this movement, from hosting “maize fairs” to hunger strikes in Mexico City.²¹⁶ Throughout the struggle, a small group of committed and coordinated organizations have shared their respective grains of talent in legal, organizational, scientific, and analytical activism and tolerance for each other’s radical-to-centrist missions. Together they welcomed the Mexican state as a sturdy cob to support their kernels of resistance.²¹⁷

As the brilliant Silvia Ribeiro has reflected in one of her newspaper editorials in La Jornada, transnational corporations are like the soulless “men of wood” rejected by the Maya gods as described in the Popol Vuh. In contrast, the grassroots Indigenous coalitions against GM corn “are [like] knots in the fabric of daily acts that strengthen resistance to transgenics from the local level day by day, integrating this issue with many others.” Organizing against “the men of wood … the people of [maize] weave.”²¹⁸

In the plaited dialogues described in this chapter, Mexico’s “many worlds” realized that what made their maize vulnerable to contamination was “a series of national and international economic and political factors (free-trade agreements, massive migration, cultural and food erosion, urban and rural poverty, etc.)” and, therefore, “they could only defend maize by defending the wholeness of peasant and indigenous life.”²¹⁹ Following nearly a hundred years of Mexican policies that discriminated against subsistence farming, this anti-GMO movement has reinvigorated a sense of cultural pride in the milpa. Although foreign agricultural interests immiserated the Mexican countryside, a more dignified rural future awaits.

As ANEC’s new director, Leticia López Zepeda, emphasizes, food sovereignty “means we get to determine where, when and how we source our food and how we feed our people. And that can be from trade. That’s a choice—how much trade, how much domestic production—a sovereign choice that Mexico should get to make.”²²⁰ Celebrating their renewed commitment to food sovereignty, Mexican state agencies and allied coalitions and nonprofits organized a flurry of conferences and events for National Maize Day on September 29, 2023. Five hundred years after Pedro Alvarado marched through Oaxaca on his way to invade Guatemala, the Mexican government hosted another international conference in Oaxaca City titled “Self Sufficiency and Agroecology in a Multipolar World,” to which they invited committed scientists and food sovereignty leaders throughout the Americas, including Guatemalan friends, whose David and Goliath story continues next.