SIX Guatemala and Goliath

Across its varied terrain—from fertile coastal plains to swamps, deserts, rainforests, cloud forests, mountain plateaus, terraced hillsides, and even deserts—tiny Guatemala is custodian to an amazing one-tenth of the world’s maize diversity. Less auspiciously, Guatemala ranks in the bottom one-tenth (125 out of 152 countries) according to an economic inequality index. Just 1 percent of the population controls half Guatemala’s financial wealth.¹ Because an oligarchy that racially identifies as “white” controls the government and the military of this majority-Indigenous country, Guatemala is essentially an apartheid state. Although the country has rich agricultural soils naturally fertilized by volcanic ash, the wealthiest 2 percent hoard 57 percent of the land, while 92 percent of farming families subsist on just 22 percent.² Compared to the rest of Latin America, Guatemala has the lowest ratio of public agricultural research to GDP.³ The last time the Guatemalan Congress passed a law to support the production of basic grains was 1974.⁴

Although 60 percent of the population (overwhelmingly Maya) devotes itself to agriculture, Guatemala is the most chronically malnourished country in Latin America and ranks sixth in the world for childhood hunger.⁵ Despite having one of the healthiest staple diets in the world, a mind-boggling one in every two Guatemalan children (and 61 percent of Maya children) suffers from malnutrition. This hunger is a structural consequence of grotesquely inequitable land distribution, but also other US interventions that have enriched transnational corporations.

As retired general Smedley D. Butler noted in a 1933 speech, he spent most of his time in military service “being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business.” Butler eventually concluded, “I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.” In addition to supporting US oil interests in Mexico, he admitted, “I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street” in the early twentieth century.⁶ After the CIA orchestrated a coup on behalf of United Fruit profits, Guatemala’s Green Revolution unfolded under a US-supported military dictatorship and a thirty-six-year genocidal war (see chapter 3). “Gene guns” are really just the newest tool of a century of US gunboat diplomacy in the service of private corporate interests.⁷ Guatemala does not have a seed gene problem. It has a greed problem.

Despite all the horrors the Guatemalan people have endured from US intervention, for a quarter of a century this tiny country held out against GM crops and then humiliated Monsanto in a 2014 legislative upset. Until 2021 it remained among the two dozen countries in the world (mostly now European) that had banned GM crops entirely. With an annual budget of about $9 billion serving 17.6 million citizens, Guatemala’s entire government apparatus equated to just over half of Monsanto’s annual revenues before it merged with Bayer.

While Guatemala was grappling with COVID, a GM Goliath—pumped up on trade pact steroids and coached by US racketeers—returned via Guatemala’s back door (literally its southern border). Working from a fortified bunker in Guatemala’s most luxurious neighborhood, Goliath’s goons in the US Embassy monitor Guatemala’s maize harvests for opportunities for US corporations to fill their piggybanks (“piggy” being the operative word). Agricultural attachés openly ruminate in US FAS reports on how to impose GM corn on a country that had firmly rejected it thrice over through mass civil disobedience. This chapter recounts how those Maya-led mobilizations to defend maize evolved into an anticorruption movement that won the presidency and helped rebirth Guatemalan democracy.

EARLY SCANDALS

Because Mexico and Central America enjoy a temperate, year-round growing season, many biotech companies have operated field labs or developed partnerships with local companies located there (like Monsanto’s partnership with Alfonso Romo). In Guatemala the key player is Semillas Cristiani Burkard S.A. (SCB Inc.). Founded in 1966 by Antonio Cristiani, the brother of President Alfredo Cristiani (1989–94), SCB was originally a Salvadoran firm that relocated to Guatemala in 1980 amid civil wars.⁸ SCB thereafter benefited from its access to Guatemala’s Green Revolution–era seed bank, producing hybrids that are resold in twelve countries throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

When SCB requested a permit in 1998 to trial Monsanto’s YieldGard corn in Guatemala, this triggered the Guatemalan Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock (Agriculture Ministry henceforth) to update its seed regulation for the first time since 1960.⁹ Through an administrative decree (36–1998) and internal bylaw (278–1998), the Agriculture Ministry created a new Unit of Norms and Regulations charged with reviewing requests for GMO research, but then it suspended all commercial GM crop approvals until the Guatemalan Congress could pass a formal seed law.¹⁰ The stipulated fine for any biotech research violations was laughable: ranging from just $1,300 to $3,200.

Monsanto reportedly partnered with SCB for another field test in 2000, but then abandoned the work due to uncertainty about the Guatemalan regulatory field.¹¹ SCB continued its own experimentation and announced in 2007 that it would launch a GM corn for commercial sale by 2012. The results must have been promising enough to pique the interests of Monsanto executives. After acquiring the Mexican-based Seminis in 2005, Monsanto bought SCB in June 2008 for $135 million.¹² A Monsanto vice president noted to the press: “This acquisition, which solidifies Monsanto’s position as the leading corn seed provider in the Latin and Central American regions, will enable our companies to provide new and innovative higher-yielding corn seed offerings to farmers.”¹³ Through SCB, Monsanto launched sales of its GM crops and herbicides to other Central American countries, particularly in Honduras. Monsanto executives even threatened to relocate the company’s regional headquarters from Guatemala City to Tegucigalpa were Guatemala not to loosen its restrictions on GM crops.¹⁴

Although GMO testing was then rare and limited to ELISA assays of food aid, every experiment revealed contamination. Although most environmental organizations in Guatemala are focused on park management, one Guatemala City–based NGO, Madre Selva, began watchdogging the issue. The organization tested sacks of food aid donated by the World Food Program in 1998 to a village in eastern Guatemala and found three types of GM corn contamination: Liberty Link (produced by Aventis and Monsanto), BtXtra (Dekalb-Monsanto), and Roundup Ready (Monsanto).¹⁵ Four years later another nonprofit, Friends of the Earth (FOE), found GM strains in supplements destined for pregnant women and schoolchildren in Guatemala and Bolivia.¹⁶ FOE tested another seventy-seven food aid samples in 2004 and found that 80 percent contained GM strains banned for consumption in the United States and the European Union, including the infamous StarLink.¹⁷ The Guatemalan organization Ceiba, directed by agronomist Mario Godinez, continued testing in 2006 and found the presence of other GM strains—Roundup Ready, Herculex, Liberty Link, and Yieldgard—in food aid given to villages in three regions with endemic teosinte, including San Mateo Ixtatán in Huehuetenango.¹⁸

In 2007 another newly formed network to support food sovereignty, REDSAG, organized a high-profile press conference about GM strains found in a blend of soy and corn Vitacereal that had been distributed to combat malnutrition in regions with unique maize diversity.¹⁹ REDSAG’s former director Ronnie Palacios presciently commented to the press, “When all the corn in the United States is contaminated, Guatemala may be the only country left able to maintain this biodiversity [unless contaminated by food aid].”²⁰

Angered by these scandals, Maya organizations and other citizen groups began forming “knowledge alliances” to educate themselves and their networks about the agronomic, social, and ecological risks of GMO technology.²¹ Many were involved in regional networks with Mexican organizations fighting the Puebla to Panamá Plan, so they heard about the Oaxaca contamination scandals. Guatemala’s four regional peasant federations are also member organizations of Via Campesina, so they also knew of Percy Schmeiser’s case. In 2005 the Committee of Peasant Unity organized an eighty-mile march against GMOs. At a 2007 intercontinental meeting of Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Abya Yala) held in Iximché, Guatemala, attendees called upon all peoples to join in this struggle against GMOs in order to “guarantee our future.”²²

Because Guatemala has never invested in establishing a state laboratory with the PCR technology to test field maize, no one knows where curious farmers may have planted contaminated food aid or GM seed smuggled from Honduras, but they likely did and contaminated native maizes. Since 2010, I have heard frequent reports from confidants about GM corn being planted in Petén and other parts of the lowlands. With research assistance from a maize broker, we investigated some of these claims in 2010 and concluded that in most cases people were confusing ICTA’s new high-protein hybrids (“improved varieties”) with GM corn. Nevertheless, farmers mentioned very specific technical names during research interviews, such as Bt 11, Mon-810, NK-603, and even StarLink.

We did track down one credible case in northwest Guatemala, where substantial amounts of Mexican maize are smuggled across the border at Ingieneros.²³ People from three villages reported that in 2007, a Mexican merchant had sold twenty-kilogram bags of presumed GM corn seed to several farmers. Although the cost was two to three times that of hybrid corn seed, the merchant assured the farmers the seeds would pay for themselves with higher yields. In the first season the alleged GM seed in fact yielded seventy to eighty quintals per manzana (a local land measurement equal to 1.7 acres), which is twice the average. The next season, however, the yield decreased to fifty quintals, and the farmers observed worrisome changes in maize plants in nearby fields (thicker stalks, narrower leaves, shorter cobs), plus strange rashes in children who ate the harvest. Mixing the purported GM corn with the hybrid corn they normally cultivate (HB-83), the Guatemalan farmers sold it back to middlemen-truckers returning to Mexico. Although the individuals in this particular case appear not to have acted with malicious intent, those genes likely cross-pollinated and continue to circulate in Guatemalan maize fields.²⁴

TROJAN HORSES

Despite growing awareness and opposition to GMOs, the US Embassy’s annual GAIN reports lamented that Guatemala’s GMO regulations remained in limbo. As an intellectual exercise in “corporate mentality” and “seeing like a seed company,” in the early 2010s I spent time sifting through the GAIN reports looking for clues to how biotech corporations make decisions about investment climate.²⁵ As a progressive person I often argue for stricter regulations. For Guatemala, however, the unpredictability and inertia of its colonial-inherited bureaucracies seems to have indirectly protected maize farmers from GM corn.

In a country with one of the highest indexes of corruption in the world, and where bribery is rarely prosecuted, uncertain regulation was actually more protective than a little regulation. Another agronomist reached the same conclusion, commenting to a fellow researcher, “There are organizations proposing laws, but I’m very skeptical in a state like ours in Guatemala, that law is the solution to the problem because the laws are always ambiguous. Having a law, what it does is open the door [for GMOs]. So, I’d prefer they continue to delay eventual legislation because, how things are now, they’re [GMOs] prohibited.”²⁶ Just as the opacity of local vernacular cultural practices can parry state intrusion, the opacity of Guatemala’s administrative processes has indirectly repelled foreign corporations.²⁷

Unfortunately, the United Nations Environmental Programme and the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility sponsored three projects to clarify and “harmonize” biosafety frameworks. However well intentioned, these projects uprooted the GM crop debates from the socioeconomic realities and concerns of the countryside and transplanted them to “technical” conversations in carpeted hotel meeting rooms. By standardizing regulation, the organizations made Guatemala “legible” and vulnerable to repeated attempts to legalize GM corn (see the time line in table 4).

Before Guatemala signed the UN Cartagena Protocol in October 2004, UNEP/GEF organized the first two-year project (November 2002–July 2004) to help Guatemala develop its initial biosecurity policy. At that time Guatemala did not yet have a functioning Ministry of Environment, so the national park service CONAP (National Council of Protected Areas) created a Technical Office for Biodiversity to serve as the UN focal point.²⁸ The project organized a National Committee for Biosafety Coordination (CNCB), composed of government officials from various institutions, academics, and other “specialists”—with only two representatives invited from one of Guatemala’s four major peasant coalitions. Through twenty consultative workshops this committee drafted a national framework for biosafety and a proposal to Congress for a national biosafety law that was critiqued from the right for not being sufficiently “scientific” and from the left for not being sufficiently inclusive.²⁹ In the middle, politicians were annoyed they had not been invited to help draft the legislation. The proposed biosafety legislation died in congressional committee.

TABLE 4. Time line of key events, repeated threats, and legislation in Guatemala

The designers of a second UNEP/GEF project funded in 2010 observed, “Although import, planting and/or use of [GMOs] are not fully regulated, neither are they out rightly prohibited.”³⁰ They advised project technicians simply to circumnavigate the democratic process, arguing that “biosafety guidelines can be drafted and implemented even in the absence of official regulation.”³¹ The only mention of maize or Indigenous people in this forty-page planning document was a single sentence in an annex: “The country’s indigenous peoples revere maize, as did their ancestors, as a seed that symbolizes life and rebirth.”

To somehow prove that GMO technology could happily coexist with Guatemala’s agrodiversity, the team directed project funds to CONAP to create a digital atlas of Guatemala’s general biodiversity.³² Devoting the same number of pages to maize as to rare wild fruits, the slipshod atlas provided no new information about Guatemala’s two unique teosinte species and just recited gringo studies of maize from the 1940s and 1950s.³³ By 2022 the atlas had disappeared from the internet entirely.

A third UNEP/GEF project (2020–21) ostensibly aimed to help Guatemala draft legislation to implement the Kuala Lumpur addendum to the Cartagena Protocol, by defining sanctions for people or corporations violating Guatemala’s (still nonexistent) GMO regulations. Otherwise, based on Guatemala’s 1973 Penal Code, Article 347A, the most a corporation could be fined for contaminating the environment or harming biodiversity would be between $39 and $645 (if the perpetrator were an individual) or $26 to $193 (if it was a business plan).³⁴ To prove contamination would be difficult. As of 2009 Guatemala only had fifteen biotech PhD-credentialed scientists and only one private lab with the potential for testing genetic engineering in plants.³⁵ Despite repeated budget allocations across these three projects to establish state-led PCR testing, by 2023 Guatemala still did not have a single certified laboratory that could (or would) test maize samples for GMO contamination.

The budget for a third project proposal, which relied on a 1958 map locating unique endemic maize landraces throughout the entire country, inexplicably tossed money to CONAP to turn one small area of highland Huehuetenango into a GMO-free zone and leave the rest of Guatemala as a sacrifice zone to GM corn. Deep in that document’s appendixes, one of the World Bank/GEF’s internal reviewers questioned the rationale for cherry-picking Huehuetenango and pointed out another elephant in the room: “The project needs to explain whether or not there is a request for the use of GM-Maize [sic] in Guatemala and how the existing provisions will respond to such request. Please review the status of GM-Maize in Mexico (top of page 12). It is the understanding of the GEF that GM-Maize is currently banned in Mexico.”³⁶ Although the query went unanswered, GEF leaders nevertheless rubber-stamped the proposal.

When I contacted them in 2022 to ask about Indigenous consultation, all the previous GEF managers involved had moved on, so no one could be held accountable. In reading these hundred-page proposals with elaborate charts and frameworks, only one report notes in tiny print in a “risk log” table, “Biosafety is a polarized and sensitive issue that might produce institutional/social conflicts.”³⁷ One would never guess from these project documents that in 2014 mass civil disobedience had reversed a congressional attempt to legalize GM crops.

While these three GEF projects bumbled along under the park service’s authority, biotech proponents regrouped to put the more friendly Ministries of Agriculture and Economy in control of GMO policy. The US Embassy put this institutional shift into motion through a counter-workshop in 2005, which included representatives from the private sector, including Antonio Cristiani from SCB and Manuel Rivas of Monsanto. The tone was so pro-biotech that CONAP representatives left in protest on the first day.³⁸ As an observer of this meeting as a doctoral researcher, James Klepek notes although “science” was the excuse for excluding Indigenous peoples, the meeting had little technical discussion and was more of a “performance of expertise.”³⁹ Biotech proponents argued that Guatemala’s laws should just mimic US regulations, though one Guatemalan confided privately to Klepek, “How then is the US supposed to make recommendations in a country that has a complete lack of infrastructure to manage the risks of agricultural biotechnology? … The economic interests driving the biotechnology agenda and promoting a US-style regulatory system do not have the best interests of Guatemala in mind.”⁴⁰ Another private sector representative bluntly suggested circumventing the Guatemalan government entirely: “In my opinion, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. We need to develop the technology through the private sector and in the next two to three months, create a cooperative growing GM corn. Then the UNEP-GEF program will not be relevant.”⁴¹

Out of this particular meeting, pro-GMO interests formed the Intersectoral Technical Commission on Biotechnology, coordinated by Guatemala’s business-friendly National Council on Science and Technology (CONCYT). CONAP was removed from the equation. Eight of the twenty members came from the private sector—again, with zero representation from popular or Indigenous organizations. The USDA-FAS program bedazzled the group with luxurious fellowships, exchanges, training programs, and talking points on intellectual property and patents.⁴² With this commission’s blessing, the Agriculture Ministry broke Guatemala’s tacit GM ban by publishing an internal decree (no. 386) in 2006 to allow for field research and commercial production of GM seeds for export. The US Embassy soon reported with glee that the Agriculture Ministry had approved field trials of both the YieldGard gene to control against Lepidopteron species corn borers and the glufosinate-resistant Liberty gene for cotton production.⁴³ Another trial was approved in 2010–11 for a GM corn varietal that had already been commercialized in Honduras.⁴⁴ None, thankfully, were executed.

Tracking all these stepwise regulatory changes, I concluded a 2014 research article with these words: “If by manipulation of the vulnerabilities discussed in this paper, Monsanto or another corporation should acquire permission to distribute or sell GM [corn] in Guatemala, beware: for millennia, the country’s majority Maya population has regarded maize as a sacred symbol of their lifeways and culture … and the desecration of maize would be also symbolic of a deeply remembered history of colonialism. Corn prices, corn seed, corn markets are issues around which thousands of Guatemalans—from both the political right and the left—can mobilize against the injustices they perceive from neoliberalism writ large.”⁴⁵ Little did I imagine that just six months later Monsanto would appear to be orchestrating a bald attempt to legalize GM crops, contrary to the peoples’ will. The manipulative timing and audacity of the 2014 Monsanto Law and the ferocity of its opposition took me and all of Guatemala by surprise.

MONSANTO LAW 1.0

In 2011 the Guatemalan Congress reviewed a draft law that would have displaced CONAP as the country’s biosafety focal point and permanently shifted GMO regulatory authority to three other government ministries: Agriculture, Environment, and Health.⁴⁶ Private sector representatives, including Monsanto, participated in those hearings, but Indigenous and environmental organizations were once again excluded.⁴⁷ For unknown reasons the law was tabled. The Patriot Party then reintroduced a less- detailed version in June 2014 while the public was distracted by the soccer World Cup (held June 13–July 14). To smooth its passage, this bill was linked to $65 million in road contracts unrelated to seeds. Although no smoking gun has been found to link Monsanto to the law’s text, the Dominican Republic passed a strikingly similar bill in May 2014, suggesting that external actors may have drafted both.

Called the Law for the Protection of New Plant Varieties (Legislative Decree 19–2014), it passed by only one vote. After being signed by President Otto Pérez Molina, the law entered the official record on June 26, 2014, with implementation scheduled to commence ninety days hence.⁴⁸ The law would have allowed breeders initially to patent fifteen undetermined species and genera as chosen by the Agriculture Ministry, but within ten years it would apply to all plant species and genera.⁴⁹ The stipulated patent period was, notably, five years longer than in other countries (twenty-five years for trees and vines and twenty for other plant species). The most controversial provision was Article 51, which authorized harsh sanctions for patent violators, including prison terms of one to four years and monetary fines of up to US$1,300 (the salary equivalent for small farmers of seven months’ hard agricultural labor).

Not until late July, after the World Cup, did social movements hear about the new law. As dissidents once had done in Mexico about similar legislation, they dubbed it the “Monsanto Law.” The first press release came July 30, 2014. Videos circulated on social media about a Colombian group that had burned GM seeds to object to another similar law. A small group of foodies staged a protest in Guatemala City.⁵⁰

Soon thereafter, op-eds began to appear in all the daily newspapers. By virtue of class connections and perceived expertise, journalists first interviewed agronomists and environmentalists about the law. What seemed to anger the agronomists was foreign imperialism orchestrated by invisible trade bureaucrats. They took umbrage with gringo economic monopoly, not agribusiness per se. Such critiques clearly went beyond mere annoyance at not having been consulted in drafting the bill (although that certainly affected the opinions of some), but also reflected a genuine concern among agronomists about national food sovereignty and the “looting” of traditional farmer varieties.⁵¹

On August 5 the College of Agronomic Engineers announced its formal opposition to the law and the college’s president, Alvaro Amilcar Folgar, explained the association would also be filing legal appeals, because “the law was approved under the auspices of the DR-CAFTA, but they didn’t consider that Guatemala has subscribed to other commitments to safeguard the country’s natural patrimony and we cannot allow someone to patent it.”⁵² The agronomy college’s elected secretary, Professor Mario Godinez, cited previous cases of biopiracy in which corporations had failed to share royalties.⁵³ Francisco Vásquez, another agronomist with an advanced law degree, denounced the criminalization of seed-saving.⁵⁴ Dr. Samuel Reyes, the assistant dean of Galileo University’s School of Science, Technology and Industry, pointed out that cross-pollination might lead to legal claims against peasants.⁵⁵ Interviewed many times in the press, Reyes emphasized how the law would lead Guatemala to become economically dependent on transnational agribusiness. The dean of the School of Agronomy at Guatemala’s national public university, San Carlos (USAC) noted that the law defined the rights of breeders and discoverers but specified nothing about producers and consumers.⁵⁶ Then, on August 22, the director of Guatemala’s parastatal Science and Technology Research Institute (ICTA) clinched the nationalist discourse against the law when he warned that his agency had never patented any of its 148 improved seeds, including 11 hybrid and 35 open-pollinating corn varieties, such as a high-protein corn strain his institute had bred from a natural mutation of Peruvian maize discovered in 1964 at Purdue University.⁵⁷ Therefore, all these state-funded seeds could be vulnerable to foreign patenting.⁵⁸

Anger about the Monsanto Law exploded across social media. One petition quickly gathered 27,438 signatures. Behind the scenes, Indigenous and peasant groups were initiating legal cases but also planning mass demonstrations, the likes of which Guatemala had never seen either in scope or diversity. While the peasant and environmental sectors in Guatemala are often at odds, in this instance a mutual hatred of Monsanto and previous peace-era relationships helped key individuals and nonprofits quickly form coalitions against the seed law. The food sovereignty network REDSAG, plus other preexisting Maya and peasant networks and sympathetic academics, all played critical connective roles.⁵⁹ As Daniel Pascual, spokesperson of the Committee on Peasant Unity (CUC) eloquently explained during a press conference on August 19, the Monsanto Law was one of a series of laws aimed at privatizing water, land, plants, and ancestral knowledge, all of which had to be rejected and resisted with mass mobilization.⁶⁰

This made for a powerfully diverse coalition of strange bedfellows that included peasant federations, health workers, biologists, Maya spiritual leaders, environmentalists, Pentecostals (who regard Monsanto as an Antichrist), opportunistic politicians, college students, middle-class workers (like Josita, a secretary for a sugar cane corporation who resented being “human experiments for foreigners”), and even foodies from Guatemala City’s oligarchy. For Guatemala’s Indigenous majority, the law was simply anathema. While a few pointed to consumer health concerns, by far most critiques were either founded on cultural or economic concepts. My own qualitative accounting of all public comments in national news articles over two days revealed that ninety-nine out of one hundred were against the law; the one undecided voice wanted to read the law more carefully before commenting.

From the wealthy conservation sector came denunciations by the preexisting National Alliance for Biodiversity Protection in Guatemala and ASOREMA (National Association of Natural Resource and Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations) whose leader, Marco Vinicio Cerezo, the son of former Guatemalan president Marco Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo (1986–91), warned that the Monsanto Law would have “nefarious consequences.”⁶¹ Another former president, Jorge Serrano Elías, started a YouTube campaign against it. Other members of the oligarchy pointed out how the law might allow foreign entities to patent any orchid, Guatemala’s national plant, whose cultivation is an elite hobby.⁶² Whether from genuine appreciation of maize or in anticipation of associated tourism profits, earlier that year the Ministry of Culture and Sports—hardly a radical institution—had decreed maize as an intangible cultural heritage of the nation.⁶³

With political pressure building from all sides, by August 22 a few politicians suggested mild amendments to specify that the law did not apply to traditional crops and to remove the controversial prison sentences. However, even the bill’s original author, ex-congressman Mariano Rayo, suggested it ought to be repealed until the Agriculture Ministry could properly consult with scientists and present a clearer regulatory framework.⁶⁴ Nonetheless, the leader of the Patriot Party’s majority congressional bloc emphasized to the press, “We will not support abolishing the law,” while another party leader asked for public patience and trust while they “dialogued” with their internal congressional committees for Agriculture and Economy about possible changes.⁶⁵ Agronomy professor Mario Godinez warned congressional representatives that it was already too late for amendments; the people were furious, and anyone voting for a compromise would be voted out.⁶⁶

A genuine cross section of Guatemala joined demonstrations that erupted Tuesday, August 26. While rural coalitions often turn out by the thousands in solidarity regarding national issues, urban people had rarely, if ever, mobilized reciprocally on behalf of rural Indigenous issues.⁶⁷ In this instance, they did. University agronomy students walked from the Constitutional Court to Congress and blocked a major Guatemala City artery, Petapa Avenue, for two hours. While lawyers for the Indigenous & Peasant Union Movement (MSICG) presented an appeal to the Constitutional Court (the country’s highest jurisdiction), a group rallied outside, carrying signs that read: “I am a man of maize of Guatemala, not Monsanto” and “We are the sons and daughters of maize, not of Monsanto.” Signs incorporated nationalist rhymes like “Our Maize, Our Country” (Nuestro maíz, nuestro país). Others alluded to the Popol Vuh, like “I am Maya! My blood, my bones, my muscles, my hair are made of maize! No to Law 19–2014!” Peasants in straw hats marched alongside foodies carrying stainless steel water bottles. Beyond the usual skull and crossbones and devil images typically witnessed at anti-Monsanto rallies worldwide, Maya women and men carried native maize props—dried stalks being wielded like rifles; cobs strung together like an ammunition belt or bandolier; red, black, and yellow ears brandished like batons.

To give some context for the courage required to attend this demonstration, former army general Otto Pérez Molina (or simply “Otto,” as the Guatemalan public usually refers to him) was then Guatemala’s president. Like previous Guatemalan dictators, the US military had trained Otto in torture techniques at the Fort Benning School of the Americas as a cadet in 1969 and again as an officer in 1985. Otto rose to command the army in one of the worst regions of human rights atrocities and civilian massacres during the country’s civil war. Rewarded for his crimes against humanity, he was promoted to head of military intelligence. Through that position he orchestrated the assassination of Guatemala’s Bishop Juan José Gerardi in 1998, just days after the Catholic Church released its truth commission report.⁶⁸ Elected in 2011 to be president of Guatemala with a hardfisted campaign platform to fight drug crime, Otto instead regularly declared martial law to repress community protests against oil and mining concessions. Under his watch, police had gunned down and murdered at least seven Maya protestors who had blocked the Pan American Highway over electrical price hikes. And just four months before the Monsanto Law uprising, he sent four thousand troops to brutally repress Indigenous communities fighting mines in their territory. As the furor over the Monsanto Law unfolded, Otto made clear to the press that he supported the plant patent law for maintaining trade relations with the United States.

Despite a looming threat from Otto, courageous demonstrators organized a torrent of press conferences over the next ten days. Said key spokesperson Lolita Chavez of the Maya Peoples Council: “This is a frontal attack on our people, because it is a frontal attack on seeds, and if they attack seeds like maize, beans, and others, they are attacking our lives and territories.”⁶⁹ Dozens of other social media posts and testimony to the press began with a phrase “The law is an attack,” which, in Guatemala, strongly evokes the genocidal civil war. Others described the government’s actions as an attempt to criminalize Maya culture and threaten the right to assembly. A powerful network of civil war widows called the law “racist” and “dehumanizing” and called upon “the men and women of maize to use their inalienable right to peaceful resistance and act collectively to defend [all the foods of the milpa from] transnational corporations.”⁷⁰ Comments from Q’eqchi’ Maya people in news articles regularly alluded to political violence, as in “naq nake’xyiib junaq li chaqrab’ cho’qre xkamsinkil laj awinel ixim” (when they made this law for murdering the people of maize). One Kaqchikel columnist described the agro industry’s tactical mission to expropriate collective patrimony for profit as “alimentary genocide.”⁷¹

A columnist for Guatemala’s most-read newspaper foresaw that “violent scenes of police surrounding a maize farm to scorch and arrest the responsible peasants or the burning of tons of beans because of patent problems is not far from the imaginable.”⁷² Hector Tiul, a Q’eqchi’ man from Alta Verapaz, was one of hundreds who commented on news coverage. He declared that he and other Indigenous people would rise up, saying: “This is what we call death and destruction since the only objective of this so-called Monsanto Law is to poison the people so that the rich can take our lands … so that their children grow healthy and free while they kill ours.”⁷³

In late August, Guatemala’s judicial system emitted conflicting rulings about whether and how to resume a stalled trial against former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt for genocide. Despite the timidity of the higher courts to prosecute war crimes, the Constitutional Court’s ruling on the Monsanto Law was unequivocable. Using a technicality about the road construction funds that had been tacked onto the bill to win votes, on August 29 this court temporarily suspended implementation of the Monsanto Law. Demonstrators continued insisting the law be repealed entirely.

The schoolteachers’ union held a protest. Another workshop in Guatemala’s second largest city, Quetzaltenango, rallied people in that highland area. The weightiest factor, however, was undoubtedly the spontaneous mobilization of seventy community mayors from the western highland department of Sololá, where 96 percent of the population are either Kaqchikel, Tz’utujil, or K’iche’ Maya. On Sunday, August 31, the mayors held a series of teach-ins and town hall consultations to analyze the law collectively. As one leader noted, “We cannot live without our [maize]. It makes up all of our lives. We consume it for our food, we sell it, it is us.”⁷⁴ Many elders were said to have shed tears about the desecration of maize, recounting memories of how the army had razed their subsistence crops as a genocidal tactic during the civil war.⁷⁵ These ancestral authorities urged communities to join protests that would block intersections to Guatemala City. Word spread nationwide that the time had come to move mountains.

On Tuesday, September 2 (13 Ajaw, 13.0.1.13.0, an almost palindromic date in the Maya calendar, a day to face the mightiest challenges), an estimated 120,000 people (in a country of only 14 million people) halted traffic along the Pan American Highway for eight hours. In Sololá alone an estimated 30,000 converged.⁷⁶ To the north, Q’eqchi’ groups blocked another major highway that is a shipping gateway to the Petén lowlands. A third group from another highland department, Totonicapán, held vigil in front of the National Congress building in Guatemala City. With a bit of vaudevillian comedy, they lobbed tomatoes at representatives and shouted, “We don’t have a salary … we won’t go home for the weekend, and neither will you!” Protestors remained steadfast until congressional representatives promised later that evening to reopen debate on the law in a three-day session.⁷⁷

Meanwhile, cibernautas (netizens) from a Guatemalan branch of the famous hacking group Anonymous shut down multiple government websites, including those of the Superintendent of Taxation Administration, the Constitutional Court, the National Police, and the Ministry of Finance. Anonymous’s Facebook page and Twitter feed instructed volunteers to “Keep firing!” (“Sigan disparando!”) but also to take precaution, as less-experienced hackers appeared to be joining the attacks. In a video that went viral, a Guy Fawkes–masked figure threatened more internet chaos in muffled, but obviously Guatemalan-accented Spanish.⁷⁸ One hacker said, “The people must not fear their rules, but the rules must fear the people.”

In a final crescendo, Maya communities from all corners of Guatemala held all-night vigils, and many composed petitions that their leaders would travel ten to twelve hours overland in order to hand-deliver to Congress. There were multiple assemblies across Q’eqchi’ territory in Verapaz; a doctoral researcher observed one in Lanquín, while Maya photojournalist Cristina Chiquin reported that Q’anjob’al, Chuj, Akateka, and Popti communities throughout Huehuetenango held vigils.⁷⁹ Schoolchildren joined on social media.

Under this intense public and media criticism, the Guatemalan legislature convened an emergency session to repeal the law on September 4, 2014, three weeks before it was scheduled to take effect. The two major political parties, Patriot and Leader, reversed their support with unprecedented apologies. In an almost reverse mirror image of the prior aye votes, 117 voted to repeal, with 38 abstentions and just 3 votes to uphold the law. Repeal of the Monsanto Law fell on • • Iq (2 Wind), a Maya day of healing appropriate for rituals to purge illness from the body. Against long odds, naysayers, and decades of political impunity that have reinforced fatalistic views about the unchanging status quo, an unlikely set of allies forced the Guatemalan Congress to call Monsanto’s bluff.

One of the best celebratory reflections was a column about how the “Lord of Corn [Monsanto] does not respond to prayers, only money.”⁸⁰ It pointed to the absurdity of how corporations claim legal personhood, yet they have no morality, no senses, no taste. Indeed, I thought Monsanto knows nothing of the milpa delicacy of fried corn turnovers (empanadas) stuffed with tziquinché, a mushroom that grows wild on tree stumps in organic maize fields fertilized by ash. Corporations can neither savor squash seed sauces (pepian) from millennial-old recipes centered on the first plant to be domesticated in Mesoamerica, nor relish the juicy squirt of ripened pineapples cropped alongside maize fields. They cannot experience the village joy of sharing freshly harvested corn-on-the-cob maize drinks with any neighbor that visits until everyone has a bellyache. Nor can they understand the contentment of eating comfort foods like tortillas with eggs and beans that millions of satisfied Guatemalans undoubtedly ate on the eve of September 4, 2014.

However tenuous, the victory over Monsanto in Guatemala instilled many people with hope, civic and national pride, and the possible rebirth of their democracy. Flags were among the most surprising symbols in celebratory posts after the repeal. As Poqomchi’ columnist Kajkoj Ba Tiul wrote, “What made the people go out into the streets and roads to demonstrate their displeasure, because their sacred corn was to be given to Monsanto, is a sign that gradually people are taking their dignity and are expressing that the authorities are not those who [really] rule, but who obey; they are not who decide, but who must respond to what the people want.”⁸¹ After centuries of dictatorship and corruption, the people, united, had defeated an odious law.

Four days after the repeal, Monsanto responded with an ominously worded press release, titled “Statement on Guatemala,” which said: “They have even named it the ‘Monsanto Law,’ implying that Monsanto has been its principal promoter and beneficiary. We are not. We have always respected the independence of the legislative process of the Congress of the Republic of Guatemala.”⁸² The corporation nevertheless made known that it had immediately communicated with the international seed breeders’ convention (UPOV) about next steps. The struggle was not over yet.

SUSTAINING THE PRESSURE

In the long struggle to reverse five centuries of colonialism, Guatemalan social movements never rest. Said Miguel Olcot, a community leader from the highlands, “The victory against the Monsanto law was not the end. It was the beginning.”⁸³ When a rare victory such as this occurs, as underdogs they understand the imperative to press forward with renewed collective energy to push for the deeper systemic reforms for decolonization. True to pattern, rural and Indigenous organizations reassembled two weeks later, on September 17, to condemn a series of other “neoliberal laws that threaten life”—over mining, telecommunication monopolies, and more.⁸⁴ An astute few noted that social movements really needed to call for de-ratifying the DR-CAFTA as the root cause of so many ills. Organizers mounted fifty decentralized demonstrations across Guatemala, calling for a legislative slurry to support small farmers, including protections for community radio stations, defense of sacred places, and, above all, passage of a long-awaited Integrated Rural Development Law first drafted in 2009. Congress, however, returned to its old ways and familiar allegiances, and the rural development law failed to win passage. To date, Guatemala has yet to fulfill the many obligations to the countryside promised in the 1996 Peace Accords.⁸⁵

As if the Monsanto Law uprising had never occurred, six months later President Pérez Molina’s administration directed the Agriculture Ministry, through executive order no. 207, to move forward with an internal ministerial policy to deregulate GM crops, independent of congressional action. Dissident Byron Garoz, a professor and leader of the Rural Studies Collective (CER-Ixim), played a pivotal role in alerting the public, and social movements swiftly remobilized. In a torrent of press releases and communiqués to their members, Indigenous and peasant networks rejected the proposed ministerial policy. Anonymous Guatemala decried it as the “Monsanto Law in disguise.” Reminding their followers that GM crops are “just a tool to loot [Indigenous] territory,” the REDSAG food sovereignty network paused a campaign for educating Indigenous youth about the health hazards of junk food and organized an urgent workshop. Participants posed for photos holding homemade banners that declared, “We cannot allow policies that devour and destroy what is ours.”

No one imagined that two months later a corruption scandal would rock the country. Alliances established during the Monsanto battle snowballed into a broader clamor for justice, democracy, and structural transformation not witnessed for sixty years in Guatemala. The people, united, again won the impossible: they compelled a right-wing congress to rescind presidential immunity, thereby sending a genocidal figure to jail.

OTTO AL BOTE, “TO THE SLAMMER”

In April 2015 the United Nations International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG) surprised the nation with revelations that a customs mafia going by the name La Línea (the telephone line) had infested the highest levels of Guatemala’s presidential administration and bilked the Guatemalan public of no less than $130 million in annual customs tax revenue. Dozens of government officials and staffers were arrested, including the head of the Bank of Guatemala itself—and rumors swirled about the involvement of the vice president, Roxana Baldetti. Initially led by students under the hashtag #RenunciaYa (Resign already), middle-class families also joined street protests. Mass demonstrations quickly spread throughout the country, again transcending the usual class, age, ethnic, and geographic divides that otherwise structure Guatemalan politics. Similar social media feeds, key connective individuals, and networks (Anonymous Guatemala and others) sprang back into action. Three weeks of relentless rallies led to Baldetti’s resignation, prosecution, and eventual imprisonment.

Suspicion then shifted to President Otto Pérez Molina himself. Weekend demonstrations continued. Wiretaps that the United Nations released on August 21, 2015, definitively linked Otto to the crime gang and fueled public indignation. Fed up with corruption and secrecy, protestors immediately demanded his resignation. A hundred thousand people converged on the Guatemala City center during a national strike on August 27, 2015, and rural communities blocked a half dozen highways. Children, office workers, doctors, merchants, and teachers alike came together under rainstorms to wave their sky-blue national flags and sing their national anthem with earnest dignity.

While urbanites condemned Otto for robbing public coffers, Maya organizations remembered his role in the genocide. An image of four elderly Maya women giggling behind a slightly vulgar placard saying, “Otto, cerote, te vas a ir al bote” (Otto [expletive for turd], you’re headed for the slammer) went viral and became a street chant. In a historic press conference on September 1, whose convergence is likely never to be repeated, the ultraconservative Chamber of Commerce united with peasant organizations, the public university, and human rights organizations to call for his resignation.

With Otto still refusing to relinquish power, citizens spilled into the streets in crowds so congested that Congressional representatives could not enter their building. Uniting with police (another first), protestors formed human chains on September 1 to escort legislators into Congress. Some carried eggs and signs signaling their legislators to “have the balls” and vote Otto out. The streets erupted in jubilation when a messenger rushed to Congress’s front door to announce that Otto’s own Patriot Party voted to rescind his presidential immunity with one month left in office. A very courageous judge issued orders for Otto’s arrest on September 2, 2015. Exactly a year after the Monsanto Law repeal, Otto’s corruption trial began.

Although Otto Pérez Molina’s leadership role in the Guatemalan genocide as “Major Tito” has yet to be prosecuted, he was eventually sentenced to sixteen years for racketeering.⁸⁶ He spent nine years in military prison and continues under house arrest. Despite six decades of US intervention, a brutal thirty-six-year civil war, and encrusted narco violence, Otto’s downfall showed that the dream of democracy—however tattered—can be reborn in the unlikeliest of places. Out of connections formed through these mobilizations, a small group of academics and professionals established a new political party they symbolically named “Seed Movement.” This was merely an opening gambit in a much longer struggle.

FROM THE SHADOWS

After Otto’s arrest in 2015, a social movement alliance attempted to organize a plurinational assembly to rewrite the constitution, but with presidential elections just a month away, there simply was not enough time to remobilize the populace. Guatemalan voters were left to choose between a business elite with ties to the narcos (who eventually spent time in a Florida penitentiary for this) and a racist television reality show comedian, Jimmy Morales (aka “Guatemala’s Trump”). The latter won. Morales was a Manchurian candidate with no political experience but clear ties to the military. He campaigned on a populist slogan that he was “not a criminal, not a crook.” It soon became clear that he was both.

Guatemalans again held a national strike on September 20, 2017, in which hundreds of children participated. Citizens regularly took to the plazas to demand Morales’s resignation. When rumors circulated that the UN’s CICIG had evidence against Morales’s brother, son, and possibly Morales himself, Morales evicted CICIG’s leader and ended the UN anticorruption mission. To maintain support from the US Embassy, Morales ingratiated himself to Donald Trump—his gringo alter ego—by becoming the second country to support Trump’s relocation of the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.⁸⁷

Guatemala’s next presidential race in 2019 was an equally dismal choice between two apparently corrupt elites. Guatemalans manifested their dissatisfaction through the lowest voter turnout since “democratic” elections resumed after the civil war. Although Alejandro Giammattei won, protests against his administration became so commonplace that popular movements simply referred to them in shorthand by the date (e.g., #20S for September twentieth). Giammattei nevertheless stacked the courts with sycophant judges. With no international monitoring, corruption ran rampant everywhere. Guatemalans began referring to their elected officials as the “corrupt pact” (pacto de corruptos). During the COVID-19 pandemic, hospitals lacked even basic provisions. Promised vaccines never arrived.

Besides corruption, social movements in Guatemala also confront “privatization, free trade, austerity, resource extraction, land grabs, kleptocracy, impunity, crime, narco-trafficking … unprecedented violence … unemployment, abandonment, collapsing subsistence, natural disasters, and environmental destruction.”⁸⁸ It is almost impossible to solve these problems when graft runs rampant. Guatemala’s private oligarchs are known to reward government and military officers with special perks and cash bonuses known as dobletes.⁸⁹ An analyst for the investigative media outlet Insight Crime noted, “It is not surprising, therefore, that said ministers are always available via phone, or in person, for those who are really paying their salary and that these ministers make fulfilling their patrons’ request a high priority.”⁹⁰ Such shadowy vested interest appeared to be behind another attempted “Monsanto Regulation” abetted by the US Embassy.

SMUGGLED THROUGH CUSTOMS

The USDA maintains a bureau of well-informed analysts in its Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) who have blatantly used their research power to identify cracks and loopholes in Guatemalan law by which foreign agribusiness corporations could introduce GM crops to Guatemala. As the brilliant Indian author Arundhati Roy once quipped about neoliberal corporate power, “This time around the colonizer doesn’t even need a token white presence in the colonies. The CEOs and their men don’t need to go to the trouble of tramping through the tropics risking malaria, diarrhoea, sunstroke and an early death. They don’t have to maintain an army or a police force, or worry about insurrections and mutinies. They can have their colonies and an easy conscience. ‘Creating a good investment climate’ is the new euphemism for Third World repression.”⁹¹ In Guatemala, corporations can certainly rely on the US State Department for the intel they need.

US attachés and analysts pretended that the 2014 uprising against the Monsanto Law never happened. Their embassy reports confirm my hunch that the inertia of Guatemala’s bureaucracy—for better or worse—has indirectly protected the country from the corporate seed industry. For example, even though Pioneer won permission to test Herculex corn in- country, paperwork proceeded so slowly that the company withdrew the trial after three months of fieldwork.⁹² Written by the same FAS analyst, her mopey annual reports seemed virtually copied and pasted from one year to another. They are filled with racist lines about the ignorance of Indigenous seed sovereignty movements. In 2017, however, her reports suddenly shifted tenor, celebrating “a final solution”: they would turn border customs procedures against Indigenous customs.⁹³

Bowing to US pressure, Honduras had long before legalized GM crops. Since Guatemala held an obscure customs agreement with Honduras, the FAS analyst suggested that “to avoid ‘illegal’ transit of seeds, government authorities negotiated a unified and harmonized regulation that would allow both countries to comply with regional integration and compliance with international commitments.”⁹⁴ While the US government was compelling Guatemala to block migrant caravans from attempting to pass the Guatemala-Honduras border, it was at the same time pressing for customs “harmonization” so that illegal GM seeds might cross that same border unobstructed.

For all the talk about “harmonizing” procedures, very different agencies were invited to the table. Honduras authorized its health authority, SENASA (National Service for Agrifood Health and Safety) to manage GMOs while Guatemala’s more progressive Ministry of Health and its Directorate for Consumer Attention and Assistance were excluded from these negotiations. Albeit a customs agreement, no plans were made to establish a border laboratory to test for GMOs, nor for Guatemala’s tax authority (SAT) to monitor or track shipments.⁹⁵

Here’s how the scheme unfolded. Guatemala and Honduras sent a draft regulation to the World Trade Organization in 2018 which ipso facto reassigned the Guatemalan Ministries of Agriculture and Economy to become the default “national competent authorities” on GM crops. On the heels of its own GEF/UNEP Trojan “biosafety” project, El Salvador then joined the Honduras-Guatemala customs agreement.⁹⁶ In March 2019 representatives from these three Central American countries signed “technical rule” RT65.06.01:18, which required each government to organize a regulatory facade for approving old and new forms of plant gene editing (the newer technology is CRISPR, euphemistically known as “precision biotechnology”). Prior to the October 1, 2019, deadline, Guatemala’s Agriculture Ministry released an internal regulation to establish a permanent Technical Committee of Agricultural Biotechnology (CTBAG) composed of five Agriculture Ministry functionaries, four people from the “academic sector” (with three voices from institutions known to support biotech diluting the one public university representative), and two lobbyists from the Chamber of Agriculture and the Association of Seed Sellers—and, of course, no representation from Indigenous people.

The FAS analyst was clearly thrilled that this technical committee structure would likely dilute the pesky influence of public university scholars known to “oppose biotechnology,” while also excluding “human rights activists, indigenous groups, and some small farmers.”⁹⁷ She rationalized sidelining CONAP’s prior established authority as the Cartagena Protocol focal point by arguing that its role was and is purely secretarial: “Although CONAP coordinates the regulatory efforts on [GMOs], the ministries keep their corresponding regulatory mandate, as CONAP is not a regulatory authority on agriculture, environment or health.”⁹⁸ While CONAP might retain its mandate over GMOs inside protected areas, she argued, the Agriculture Ministry should be the rightful authority regarding the rest of Guatemala—as though genes know where a park begins or ends.⁹⁹ She also assured biotech investors that “indigenous communities’ consultation process” would be an easy process “embedded in the operative manual of the Ministry of Agriculture”—a link that, of course, dead-ends on the internet. No such regulation can be found.

To have a seat at this CTBAG table, the rules stated, committee members had to hold a university degree, possess a technical or scientific background, have knowledge of biotechnology, and pay dues to a professional association.¹⁰⁰ Nonpublic meetings were to be held at the Agriculture Ministry offices every two months, in order for it to be able to review and approve within 270 days any application for a commercial GM crop.¹⁰¹ According to cryptic “workplans” available on the internet, the COVID pandemic disoriented the committee in 2020, but by 2021 it had begun lobbying for Guatemala to celebrate a “National Day for Biotechnology.”¹⁰² Leading this customs coup was Guatemala’s Ministry of Economy—an entity that hitherto had never participated in biosafety fora but which is known to follow the dictates of the oligarchy’s most powerful trade association, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial and Finance Associations (CACIF). Corporate America rejoiced. CropLife International gloated that at long last Central America would follow Honduras’s “vanguard” leadership.¹⁰³

The FAS analyst cheerily dismissed worries about the contamination of native maize—speculating that GM crops would likely only be planted in lowland regions.¹⁰⁴ Even if that were true, Guatemala has an endangered, endemic teosinte, Zea luxurians, that grows in the lowland border region with Honduras in the departments of Jutiapa, Jalapa, and Chiquimula. To greenwash this magical thinking that GM corn genes grown in the lowlands would not contaminate highland native maizes, the World Bank’s GEF threw $1.4 million at all the ministries involved in this customs coup. Whether the World Bank project managers were simply ignorant, lazy, or corporate conspirators, this third GEF project sounded suspiciously like an FAS report by the same US embassy attaché, Karla Tay.¹⁰⁵ Seemingly pulling facts from thin air, the World Bank consultant who designed the project rationalized that since women are prone to nutritional deficiencies while pregnant or breastfeeding, “GMOs could potentially help reduce their malnutrition problems.”¹⁰⁶ The project also clearly violated several internal World Bank directives for consultative processes with Indigenous peoples.

THE CUSTOMS COUP DE GRÂCE

After the Ministry of Economy published the customs regulation that had de facto legalized GMOs through Guatemala’s geographical back door, Indigenous groups immediately responded during a public comment period. REDSAG and others argued that the regulation threatened Guatemala’s agrodiversity. When the ministry ignored their comments, on September 20, 2019, a newly established legal guild for and by Indigenous peoples (Bufete para Pueblos Indígenas) filed a cease and desist (amparo) challenge with the Supreme Court. Lead attorney Juan Castro argued the Agriculture Ministry could not simply name itself as “national competent authority” because the Maya people of Iximulew (invoking a Kaqchikel term for Guatemala as “land of maize”) are the real owners and stewards of their traditional knowledge, as stated in the Convention of Biological Diversity and many other international human rights conventions.

Professor Byron Garoz organized a teach-in at the public university on October 8, 2019. Later that month he and I established a Facebook group named “Reglamento Monsanto” (the “Monsanto Regulation”). That first day we added 5 people; by the end of the next day 108 had joined, and within a week 211. Later renamed Monsanto Law 2.0, this online group has remained a space for cross-organizational sharing of information during and after the pandemic. A score of Indigenous and peasant networks held a press conference on November 20, 2019. On January 15, 2020, the Supreme Court ordered a provisional halt to implementation of the customs regulation and elevated the case to the higher Constitutional Court for a final decision. The National Alliance to Protect Biodiversity (ANAPROB) and REDSAG held more press conferences, radio shows, and workshops and added more social media posts to help explain to the public that the new acronym in this customs agreement—LMOs or “living modified organisms”—is just a euphemism for GMOs, better known in Guatemalan Spanish as “transgenics.”

Many Maya ancestral authorities traveled to Guatemala City for the Constitutional Court’s public hearing, scheduled for February 27, 2020, but inexplicably canceled that morning at 9:20 a.m. and delayed until March 24. In the interim, the world locked down. The court rescheduled the hearing for August 6, 2020—but again canceled it the day before, due to “technical difficulties.” Outside the building, leaders expressed their indignation, using allusions to the civil war: “It’s an attack against our original peoples. The big businesses that are behind this agreement have purely mercantile interests. They don’t care about human rights violations to the original peoples—as they disappear our seeds, as well as our medicinal plants that are so important to Maya peoples’ lives.”

Domingo Quino, leader of the powerful Alliance of Ancestral [Maya] Authorities of Sololá, stated, “In trying to exterminate our maize, they are trying by all means to exterminate the original peoples in Guatemala.” In transcribing these press conferences, I was struck by the comments of another leader who stated, “Genetic modification doesn’t just hurt the maize, but it hurts our health too.” He clearly foregrounded the harm to maize before mentioning the personal health effects that dominate the Euro-American food movement. Protest banners hung outside the court also contained incisive agroecological principles: “To authorize transgenics is to leave our maize in the hands of mega corporations whose purpose is the right to property over seeds and the sale of agrotoxics.” And, “The best defense against pests is a diverse agrosystem. To accept transgenics is to implement homogenous maize, vulnerability to pests and diseases, and dependency to agro-poisons that contaminate our soils and water.”

At long last, the Constitutional Court heard comments on August 11, 2020. Civil society mounted a blitz of memes. Risking their own health in the middle of a pandemic, elderly Indigenous ancestral authorities traveled from all parts of the country to attend the hearing. Sent to a separate room away from the justices, the sound system failed repeatedly. On what otherwise should have been a celebratory National Day of Maize (August 13), social organizations expressed distress about the anticipated court ruling. Indeed, on January 29, 2021, the Constitutional Court dismissed the Maya lawyers’ appeal and the customs regulation became another fait accompli. The FAS analyst gloated in her next report, “The rule is fully in place as the Supreme Court and the Court of Constitution have both confirmed its legality after activist opposition.”¹⁰⁷

A week later, in a rare joint appearance, representatives of all of Guatemala’s Indigenous peoples—Maya, Xinka, and Garifuna—denounced the ruling while symbolically sitting behind a copy of the Popol Vuh. On March 25, unknown assailants ransacked the Maya lawyers’ office, stealing computers that apparently did not have backups. As always, when faced with setbacks, wise Maya organizers shift to the long game. By May 2022 they had coordinated a broad movement to lobby the Guatemalan Congress to approve the Law for Biodiversity and Ancestral Knowledge. If this bill (no. 6086) to comprehensively protect Indigenous traditional knowledge is ever approved, it would allow creation of a registry of collective patrimony—from medicinal plants to music to seeds to Maya weaving designs (often stolen by the tourist industry).

The pandemic, unfortunately, dragged on. Unknown numbers of elders (and the wisdom they carry) perished, and other leaders were disabled by Long COVID. Corruption ran rampant. Hospitals were empty. Tourism collapsed and donors left. Although the GM corn customs coup was an outrage, social movements were simultaneously dealing with pandemic destitution, martial law, a countrywide extractive assault on Indigenous territories (via mines, dams, and plantations), criminalization of social movements, imprisonment of journalists, and more. A relatively small number of heroic but overtaxed leaders juggle all these threats with aging computers, poor internet connections, a decrepit public transportation system, and shoestring budgets. But social media continues. For all their commercial faults in the United States, Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp in Guatemala have become vibrant tools for coordination and popular education for the long game of decolonization.

FROM THE TERRITORIES

For whatever reason, social unrest in Guatemala always seems to crescendo in the month of September. Once again, a September 4th brought mass protests in 2022 about the rising cost of living. The grassroots organizations leading the hard work of food sovereignty—focused on saving seed and revitalizing polycultural cropping systems—have found new audiences. In a country where agricultural work was once associated with poverty, hip millennials have rediscovered gardening with new respect for Indigenous wisdom. As an example of Maya-led agroecology, in one town outside of Chimaltenango, San Juan Comalapa, 10 percent of the community has switched to organic methods, and the town’s leaders have begun challenging Green Revolution propaganda with their own experimental plots, comparing ICTA’s hybrid seed (20-cm cobs) with their own (30 cm).¹⁰⁸

With a tiny staff and small donations from European churches, REDSAG manages a network of sixty organizations using a sophisticated social media strategy about seed fairs, youth conferences, and field tours they organize throughout the country. With the same tests kits used by the Zapatistas, they began testing for contamination among member organizations (results forthcoming). Other movements fighting extractive industries “from the territories” have also begun testing water for pesticides and heavy metals.¹⁰⁹ At long last, from the grassroots they are amassing the scientific data in defense of maize that has been long available in Mexico but utterly missing in Guatemala.

If food sovereignty is the aspirational noun, agroecology is the practical path.¹¹⁰ “[Agroecology] is cosmovision and it is resistance.”¹¹¹ Agroecology also connects food sovereignty to a deeper defense of Indigenous territory and decolonization processes. According to anthropological ally Nicholas Copeland, agroecology represents a “proactive practice of reclamation and restoration of land through indigenous knowledge within a territorial frame.”¹¹² This broader Indigenous “defense of territory” goes beyond the economic to include the rights of nature, especially seeds as living entities. As Maya lawyer Juan Castro commented on a September 2023 radio program I transcribed, “Humanity is no longer the center of attention or the center of life. Humans are one living entity among all the diversity on the planet.” Defending the common good of seeds is one catalytic method for rebuilding social and ecological commons.¹¹³ Seeds have a particular charisma, but, as Copeland notes, the drier topics of state accountability, redistributive agrarian reform, and respect for Indigenous governance of territory are also fundamental to food sovereignty.¹¹⁴

Just as the concept of food sovereignty weaves together local and global organizing, Guatemala’s new “defense of territory” discourse is a response to top-down geopolitical restructuring (market-assisted land policies, extractive concessions, megaprojects without consultation) but also bottom-up Indigenous resurgence. Prior to defense of territory, Indigenous peoples aspired to “integrated rural development,” which served as a coded phrase for state promises made in the 1996 Peace Accords. Decades later, many people have given up that the Guatemalan government will ever implement those accords. Like the Zapatistas, they have moved forward to govern their own territories with dignity through traditionally elected community leaders, whom they call “ancestral authorities.” As one street protest sign against the Monsanto Law 2.0 noted, “We don’t ask anything of the state only not to meddle with what is most sacred to the people. We demand that they respect our millennial practices for survival.”¹¹⁵

MONSANTO LAW 2.0

Something fundamental is shifting in Guatemala. The academics and professionals who formed the new Seed Movement political party following Otto Pérez Molina’s imprisonment ran a shoestring presidential campaign against corruption in 2023. No one ever imagined they could win against entrenched and deep-pocketed political parties. But the Guatemalan public had had enough. In August 2023 they elected president, by a landslide, the Seed party’s center-left leader, Dr. Bernardo Arévalo, who happens to be the son of President Juan José Arévalo, who led the October 1944 democratic revolution. Before Arévalo’s anticipated electoral victory in August 2023, I was in Guatemala and the populace was humming with hope. After the election, many friends and acquaintances pinned a seed emoticon to their social media posts. But the kleptocracy was determined to hold on to power. Guatemala has a painfully long five-month transition period between elections and inauguration. In that interregnum many outgoing Congress members made clear they were open to accepting bribes.

At the end of July 2023, the outgoing Congress’s agricultural, ranching, and fisheries commission introduced a new “Law for the Breeder Protections of Plant Varieties,” which would lead Guatemala to sign onto the radically pro-corporate convention, the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV 1991). This time social movements immediately caught wind of this legislative surprise. The “Monsanto Regulation” Facebook group renamed itself “Monsanto Law 2.0.” REDSAG, CerIxim, the progressive agronomists, the legal guild by/for Indigenous peoples, newspaper columnists, political cartoonists, the tiny number of leftists in Congress, and others sprang into action.

It is essentially the same law as the 2014 Monsanto Law 1.0, but with more draconian fines for patent violations: four years imprisonment and $50,000–$100,000 fines. In a tacit acknowledgment of its foreign intellectual authors, yes, the bill listed the penalties in US dollars. It also authorized the Agriculture Ministry to create a registry to support international plant breeders and enforce their patents. Even more amazing, the Agriculture Ministry had already prepared a bylaw to enforce the law (a procedure in Guatemala that can take years, if ever, to accomplish). It seems as though this plot was clearly planned. In another session, on August 26, Congress’s agricultural commission invited the trade group AgExport to testify in support of the law, but blocked Maya elders and organizers from speaking. When Indigenous organizations filed a legal appeal on September 29, demanding the right to speak, Congressional guards denied them entry into the hearing until a sympathetic representative escorted the group in. It was the same old pattern: exclusion, disrespect, and neocolonial business as usual.

Having apparently learned nothing from the long series of September uprisings, Guatemala’s attorney general, Consuelo Porras, and other corrupt officials made moves in September 2023 to invalidate the presidential election—even breaking into the Supreme Electoral Tribunal offices to steal ballot boxes. At the end of September, REDSAG and the Ancestral Authorities of Iximuleuw issued a press release demanding that the government “respect [our] ancestral food systems” and use the precautionary principle to guarantee that people have a right to “health, a healthy environment, adequate food, free of toxics and genetic alterations.”¹¹⁶

In response to both threats—to maize seeds and the Seed Movement’s presidential victory—K’iche’ Maya ancestral authorities from Totonicapán’s “48 Cantones” issued a call to Guatemalans to block roads on October 2, 2023, and to continue indefinitely until a peaceful political transition was ensured. In that press release they asked for the election results to be respected, but also for Congress to reject Monsanto Law 2.0 and two other odious bills (one renewing petroleum concessions to a company that had not paid adequate royalties and another granting immunity to military officials). The 48 Cantones are famous for their pre-Columbian governance structure, which manages communal forests among other secular and spiritual responsibilities. These ancestral authorities are truly servants to the people, as every community leader serves a year without pay. Through agile coordination, the Xinka Parliament, the powerful mayors of Sololá, and others joined the 48 Cantones and began a rotating Indigenous occupation outside the Public Ministry.

To their surprise, cityfolk joined with them and donated provisions. Migrants from around the world staged parallel demonstrations of solidarity. Universities closed and students spilled into the streets and blocked the highway circling Guatemala City. Market vendors donated food and went on strike. Nuns joined the marches and priests offered mass on the front lines. Anonymous Guatemala took down an impressive number of government web pages. Over the month of October, road blockages spontaneously grew to more than a hundred points around the country. The barricades became spaces of ceremony, music, joy, guerrilla theater, film festivals, bingo games (with cards showing corrupt officials), and spontaneous dancing, both traditional and modern. The generosity of strangers and the dignity of the protestors showed immense hope for a better Guatemala.

Although the primary focus of these protests was to respect the elections, they were also spaces for education and reflection about the Monsanto Law 2.0. More than seventy groups signed onto a declaration against the law on October 16. As one Sololá leader noted, “We already know the consequences these [GM] seeds bring.” Signs from the barricades expressed, “We’ll sell Consuelo Porras [the corrupt attorney general], but not our seeds” and “Ancestral seeds are sustenance for the peoples, not a commodity for capitalism.” Wrote another newspaper columnist, “Seeds are sacred for Maya peoples, but they are also sacred to any cultural group that respects life.”¹¹⁷

Day after day, more people participated. Youth on motorcycles peacefully routed riot police. Despite crackdowns to remove blockades in wealthy Guatemala City neighborhoods, the protests continued for 105 days. This symbolic number was hardly coincidental. It is the difference between the Maya tzolk’in calendar of 260 days (thirteen cycles of twenty days) and the solar calendar. That period also represents the average growing season for maize at certain Guatemalan altitudes. Despite the sacrifices involved for extremely poor people to leave their jobs and farms to protest for three and a half months, these united Maya and other citizen movements routed a coup and harvested democracy.

Although the primary focus of these protests was to support the elections, Maya authorities never forgot that the Monsanto Law 2.0 was a co-trigger. More than seventy groups signed onto a declaration on October 16 against the legislation being discussed in Congress to legalize GMOs. REDSAG and the Maya lawyers’ guild filed a preemptive motion against the bill on November 24, 2023 (3 Tz’i’, 3 Dog, an auspicious day in the Maya calendar for legal justice). They did so in coordination with Maya food sovereignty leaders who were celebrating a seed fair outside the Constitutional Court. With a highly disproportionate show of force, riot police intimidated and removed the seed protectors/protestors (fig. 19), but the court accepted the motion.

How shall I draw this chapter to an end when the outcome remains unknown? Mostly I want to ask what degree of avarice motivates corporate executives to try over and over and over to legalize GMOs in a country that has firmly rejected them? How can corporate sycophants propose the criminalization of seed saving when one in two Guatemalan children already go to sleep hungry? To be sure, Maya people have one of the healthiest plant-based subsistence diets in the world. But, as Kaqchikel scholar Sandra Xinico has observed, “The system is eating away our life.”¹¹⁸ Permitting GMOs for large-scale industrial farming on the plantations of the 1 percent will do nothing to resolve chronic hunger or support climate change adaptation in vulnerable Maya communities. Indigenous peoples starve in Guatemala not for lack of agricultural knowledge or poor seeds, but because they lack land, good feeder roads, transparent marketing practices, and access to clean water. Being fined for planting crops involuntarily contaminated by GMOs would be the “last straw.”

Much as I ended my 2014 article on Guatemala’s vulnerabilities to GM corn with a predictive warning, I close this chapter with another prognostication. The Maya calendar dates back to the approximate domestication of maize as its year zero (3112 BCE in the Gregorian calendar). For a people both spiritually and practically attuned to long and complex cycles of time, the five hundredth anniversary of Pedro Alvarado’s 1524 brutal invasion of Guatemala and thereafter could unleash mobilizations and demands for structural changes, the likes of which the Guatemalan oligarchy and its corporate colluders have never seen.