Category Archives: Mexico

U.S. wins trade dispute, forces Mexico to end GM corn restrictions

by Jim Hodgson

A trade dispute panel has ruled against Mexico’s restrictions on the use of genetically modified (GM or genetically engineered) corn, siding with the United States in forcing Mexico to allow the use of GM corn for food. Canada backed the U.S. position. 

The decision, announced Friday afternoon, Dec. 21, is another demonstration of how free trade agreements are used to undermine policy options made in the public interest.

Mexico City’s La Jornada daily newspaper contains an excellent series of articles today about the consequences for Mexican agriculture of 30 years of free trade with the United States and Canada; climate change is another factor in the fall of production.

In Mexico, a coalition of 300 farming, Indigenous and environmental groups said the Mexican government should not modify its policy and called on civil society organizations to maintain their defense of native varieties of corn. 

The Sin Maíz no hay País (“Without Corn There is no Country”) group told La Jornada that the decision is designed “mostly to protect the interests of transnational corporations, instead of giving priority to the rights of the Mexican people or to sustainability of the environment.”

The trade panel, they added, was made up of three experts in international trade who were not “scientists or experts in public or environmental health” and had no “legitimacy or capacity to evaluate measures taken by a country that were intended to protect its population, preserve its biocultural richness and safeguard the genetic reservoir” of corn.

A La Jornada editorial said the administration of President Joe Biden “fought a legal battle against food sovereignty, health, biodiversity, and the right to an adequate diet for Mexicans—not to favour its citizens, but rather four giant global corporations and a handful of rich farmers.”

The Mexican government said it would comply with the decision though it maintains that the restrictions are in line with the principles of public health and the rights of Indigenous peoples, established in national legislation and in the international treaties to which it is a party. On Feb. 13, 2023, Mexico published a Presidential Decree that included stopping the use of GM white corn intended for use in traditional foods such as tortillas and stated Mexico’s intention to eventually replace all GM (yellow) corn in processed food.

The United States challenged Mexico’s restrictions under the Canada-United States-Mexico trade agreement (referred to variously as USMCA or CUSMA) as being a disguised trade restriction. The restrictions were first announced by then-President Andrés Manuel López Obrador at the end of 2020, and revised in 2023.

“This trade panel decision runs counter to a national consensus in Mexico on the threat of GM corn to Mexico’s food sovereignty,” said Cathy Holtslander of the National Farmers Union (NFU) in Canada. “The people of Mexico have the right to protect their unique relationship with corn.”

Holtslander’s comments are included in a Dec. 23 joint news release from the NFU, the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN), the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Trade Justice Group of the Northumberland Chapter of the Council of Canadians.

“Canada joined the US challenge to force open an unwilling market to genetically modified corn,” said Lucy Sharratt of CBAN.

“This outcome demonstrates how free trade agreements can be used to overthrow democratic decisions for corporate interests,” said the joint news release.

The 117-page decision did not assess the scientific evidence on GM corn provided by Mexico but concluded that Mexico did not conduct a risk assessment that conforms to the terms of the trade agreement. “The Panel recommends that Mexico bring its Measures into conformity with its USMCA obligations under Chapters 2 and 9 of the USMCA. The Panel accepts that Mexico is seeking to address genuine concerns in good faith, and suggests that such concerns be channeled into an appropriate risk assessment process, measures based on scientific principles, and in dialogue among all USMCA Parties to facilitate a constructive path forward.”

“Mexico’s GM corn policy was clearly meant to achieve several goals at once, such as supporting biodiversity, cultural diversity, food sovereignty, Indigenous Peoples’ rights, public health and economic development,” said Stuart Trew, senior researcher with the CCPA. “It is disingenuous for the trade panel to claim the policy is a ‘disguised restriction on trade’ simply because it may affect imports of U.S. or Canadian corn. But doing so conveniently allowed the panel to sidestep Mexico’s strong defence of the GM corn restrictions based on environmental and Indigenous Peoples’ rights exceptions in CUSMA.” 

Canada does not export any corn to Mexico. In explaining its decision to back the U.S. complaint, the government of Canada stated that, to secure a future for genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in Canada and to prevent trade disruptions due to illegal GMO contamination, product developers need access to all markets.

Mexico is regarded as the birthplace of modern corn. It will continue to prohibit planting of GM corn because it may contaminate native strains of the grain. 

Mexico is the top foreign buyer of U.S.-grown yellow corn, nearly all of which is genetically modified. Half of the corn consumed in Mexico today is imported from the United States. The imports are mostly of “yellow corn,” used for animal feed and industrial food production. “White corn” produced in Mexico is used for human consumption.

Mexico has more than 60 native varieties of corn (known as landraces), coming in a variety of colours and with distinct flavours.

In April 2024, CCPA provided an excellent background analysis of the GM corn dispute.

CBAN has joined with US and Mexican groups to issue a new call to action: Groups and individuals in Canada, the US and Mexico are asked to sign a trinational statement in solidarity.

Almost a decade later, truth still elusive in case of the 43 students in Guerrero, Mexico 

They’ve been gone for almost 10 years now, those 43 education students who were taken one night in Iguala, Guerrero. Hypotheses abound but despite promises and investigations, the crime is not solved. 

But there are new revelations about the cover-up orchestrated at the highest levels of the Mexican state in weeks after the disappearance (see below).

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known popularly as AMLO) has done many good things as he nears completion of his six-year term. But his failure to press finally for the full truth of the Mexican army’s involvement in the disappearance of the students who attended the Ayotzinapa teachers training school stains his record. 

“A decade of failure,” says a headline in the Mexico City daily newspaper, La Jornada. Students, teachers and family members say their struggle will continue.

During a march in Mexico City on Monday, Aug. 27, Luz María Telumbre, mother of one of the disappeared students, told a reporter that she would be among the parents who would meet the president again the following day. This time, she said, it will be to say: “’thanks for nothing’ because we’re still walking, shouting in the streets for justice and truth.”

Another mother, Joaquína García, said “it isn’t fair that we should be in the streets for 10 years seeking justice and we still don’t know anything about the boys.” She added that she wants to tell the next president, Claudia Sheinbaum, “that we will not stop struggling until we find them and that as a woman and mother, we hope she will understand us.”

On the night of Sept. 26, 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School were attacked in Iguala, Guerrero, after they had commandeered buses to travel onward to Mexico City for a protest over the Oct. 2, 1968, massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco plaza in Mexico City.

In Iguala, six people—including three students—were killed in the assault, 25 were injured and 43 students were abducted and presumably murdered later. Leading suspects are members of the Mexican army who worked alongside municipal officials and drug-traffickers who were trying to move opium gum (semi-processed heroin) on one of the buses that was taken.

What happened before?

One afternoon in the late 1990s, I accompanied a group of students from Canada and the United States to a meeting with rural teachers in the mountains near Tlapa in northeast Guerrero.

These teachers spoke for communities afflicted by poverty, military incursions and the drug war. They taught their students in Spanish as well as in Nahuatl or one of the other Indigenous languages spoken in the area. They dedicated their lives to strengthening rural communities through the education of children. They were convinced that people needed to be able to organize themselves and demand that their rights be respected so that things would begin to change.

“The rural teachers colleges are among the only means of social mobility within the reach of young people from campesino communities,” wrote Luis Hernández Navarro, opinion editor at La Jornada, back in 2011. “Through them, they have access to education, housing, food and later, with luck, a job they are qualified to do.” 

The first time I that I can recall hearing of the Ayotzinapa school was in January 2008, when Blanche Petrich, another La Jornada journalist, came to Toronto to support work by Canadian churches in defense of refugees from Mexico. She told us:

“To describe the panorama of repression in Guerrero, it’s enough to follow the route of the popular movement. ‘Wherever there is organization, protest, defense of human rights, mobilization of roadblocks, there is repression, irregular apprehensions and arrest warrants,’ we’re told by the [Tlachinollan] human rights organization in the La Montaña area, led by Abel Barrera. That is, the campesinos who oppose the taking of their lands for a dam in La Perota, close to Acapulco, the ecologists who resist cutting of trees in the Petatlán sierra, the laid-off workers of a government office in the state capital of Chipalcingo, the community leaders of Xochistlaguaca, the students at the normal school in Ayotzinapa: they all suffer persecution.”

And what’s new?

Through an access to information request, journalists obtained new information about the cover-up that was orchestrated after the abductions by high ranking authorities in the government during meetings presided over by then-President Enrique Peña Nieto and attended by then-Attorney General Jesús Murillo Karam and other officials. Their “historic truth” version—since proven false—contended that local police turned the students over to a drug gang which murdered them, burned the bodies at a garbage dump, and put the remains into a river.

AP photo and story (left) about revelations by a former senior official; a tweet by the Fábrica de Periodismo about the cover-up led by high officials of the previous Mexican government.

Tomás Zerón, former head of investigations for Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office, is now a fugitive hiding in Israel, beyond the reach of the Mexican justice system. But in 2022, he answered questions posed in writing by Alejandro Encinas, then Mexico’s Interior Undersecretary for Human Rights.

Appointed by AMLO’s government, Encinas chaired the Commission for Truth and Access to Justice in the Ayotzinapa Case (COVAJ). The commission included family members and their advisors. Their report, published in August 2022, said federal, state and municipal politicians, along with the armed forces and local police, knew what had happened. 

But that report and a subsequent one in September 2023 have been undermined by the refusal of President López Obrador to accept its conclusions and his accusations against the human rights groups that accompany the families, including Tlachinollan and the Jesuit-backed Miguel Augustín Pro Human Rights Centre.

Left: La Jornada story Tuesday with headlines (adding my own details): federal prosecutors may call former president Ernesto Peña Nieto to testify about Ayotzinapa; AMLO: “I don’t protect anybody.” Below the photo, the text says that AMLO has also called on Zerón “to clarify his position because he is accused of coordinating the torturers.” Right: story today about the last of the parents’ meetings with AMLO.

After a meeting Tuesday (Aug. 27) with the president, the parents said it was the last one they would hold with him before he leaves office Oct. 1. 

“We ended badly,” said their lawyer, Vidulfo Rosales of Tlachinollan. He added that while in the first three years of this government, they saw clear good will to get to the truth, in 2022, the situation changed. “This is when we touched the sensitive fibres of the Mexican Army; we could advance no further. There was a break, a crisis, including in the relationship, the dialogue.”

“This government, unfortunately, could not give us truth and justice,” he added.

Mexico celebrates Presidenta Sheinbaum

by Jim Hodgson

For the first time, Mexicans have chosen a woman to be their president. She is Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a climate scientist who previously served as mayor of Mexico City. 

“The transformation continues!” A campaign billboard promotes the campaign of Claudia Sheinbaum in the southern state of Chiapas. The slogan refers to the ‘Fourth Transformation‘ of Mexican political institutions and the economy begun by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

That a woman is president is no minor detail. It was only in the middle of the last century that women in Mexico won the rights to vote and to run for public office. Even now, only 14 of 193 nations have women in power as presidents or prime ministers.

Sheinbaum can be expected to continue the generally progressive approaches taken by her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as AMLO). Her leading opponent was businesswoman and former senator Xóchitl Gálvez, candidate of a centre-right coalition. 

A CBC News report days earlier said that neither Sheinbaum nor Gálvez actually committed themselves to “real change for women” on issues such as pay equity, reproductive rights, or violence against women. 

One of Mexico’s leading journalists, Blanche Petrich, wrote that three women (Michelle Bachelet in Chile, Cristina Fernández in Argentina, and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil) who were representative of the progressive “pink wave” governments in Latin America did not “leave a legacy that would definitively reverse gender inequality.” 

A CBC News report on the quality of feminism represented by Mexico’s two leading candidates, and Blanche Petrich’s review in La Jornada of past experiences of women as presidents in Latin America.

Bachelet, notes Petrich, once said: 

“What does it mean to be a woman in public office? Is it to be the same as a man, but with a skirt? No. When a woman arrives alone in politics, the woman changes. When many women arrive in politics, politics change. And clearly, one of the challenges and needs of our democracy is to improve the quality of politics.”

In the Mexican election, Sheinbaum and Gálvez tended to address issues of concern to women within a range of economic, social and criminal justice proposals. Framed this way, there were sharp differences between the two.

Sheinbaum will continue to give priority to social programs, pensions and scholarships that benefit the least advantaged, as well as concentrating on investment in infrastructure to support industries that create jobs. The approach by Gálvez was that of conservatives everywhere: keep taxes—and wages—low and let the market take care of the rest (though she did promise to maintain AMLO’s social programs).

At her victory celebration late Sunday night, Sheinbaum affirmed her movement’s commitment to democracy. “By conviction, we will never make an authoritarian or repressive government. We will also respect political, social, cultural and religious freedoms, and gender and sexual diversity.”

Regarding criminal justice issues (which media tend to subsume under the heading “security”), Mexico obviously has serious problems. At least 34 candidates were killed during the election period that included national as well as some state and municipal elections. 

There are still about 30,000 homicides per year, though the government says the number has been dropping by about five per cent per year. 

AMLO tried to turn back the violence unleashed by one of his predecessors. In 2006, then-President Felipe Calderón, with backing from the United States, launched a military-led offensive against the drug cartels to curb their violent turf wars. Instead, the violence became much worse. 

AMLO promoted an approach he called “abrazos no balazos”–hugs not bullets. It meant addressing the social roots of violence by giving people the education and other resources they need to avoid being drawn into the drug-trafficking cartels and their systems of power. Over the long term, the approach should lead to reduced levels of violence.

But it has been controversial and is subject to manipulation, even in mainstream media like The New York Times, and has led to threats of military intervention from various U.S. politicians, including the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump. 

Even within the AMLO-Sheinbaum coalition, there is agitation. When Eduardo Ramírez–a former AMLO opponent who, like too many others, opportunistically shifted loyalties–celebrated his victory as governor of Chiapas Sunday night, he said: “There will be hugs, but no impunity.”