The world according to Monsanto : pollution, corruption, and

246 the world according to monsantostarted, especially when there’s a camera.” When I looked incredulous, hewent on: “You want proof? Come with me.” We drove to the top of a hilloverlooking San Francisco Bay. As we walked toward the lookout point, wesaw the same police car, which parked conspicuously at the side of the roadand stayed there throughout our conversation.“How did you find out that Mexican corn was contaminated?” I asked,rather disturbed.“I worked for fifteen years with the Indian communities in Oaxaca teachingthem to analyze their environment,” answered the Mexican-born biologist,who had worked for the Swiss company Sandoz (which becameNovartis, and then Syngenta) for several years. “David Quist, one of my students,went there to run a workshop on GMOs. To explain the principles ofbiotechnology, he suggested that they compare the DNA of transgenic corn,from a can of corn he brought from the United States, with that of a criollovariety meant to serve as a control, because we thought it was the purest inthe world. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the samples of traditionalcorn contained transgenic DNA. We then decided to conduct astudy, which confirmed the contamination of criollo corn.”To conduct their research, the two scientists took ears of corn from twolocalities in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca. They found that four samples hadtraces of 35S promoter, derived from the cauliflower mosaic virus; two samplesrevealed the presence of a fragment from the bacterium Agrobacteriumtumefaciens; and another the trace of a Bt gene. 3 “As soon as we got the results,we alerted the Mexican government, which conducted its own studythat confirmed the contamination.”On September 18, 2001, the Mexican environment minister announcedthat his experts had done tests in twenty-two farming communities andfound contaminated corn in thirteen of them, with a level of contaminationbetween 3 and 10 percent. 4 Oddly, this announcement went practically unnoticed,but a few months later Ignacio Chapela and David Quist became afocus of attention, probably because of the reputation of Nature, which publishedtheir article in late November. When they’d submitted the article tothe journal eight months earlier, the two scientists had received complimentson the quality of their study, and the peer review process followed itsnormal course: the article was sent to four reviewers, who approved it. Butas a local paper, the East Bay Express, pointed out in May 2002: “No one