Residents of Las Vegas are borrowing a page from Costa Rica’s ongoing fight against agro-industrial leviathan Monsanto. Earlier this year, activists in Las Vegas staged one of the largest anti-Monsanto demonstrations seen in the United States, drawing 3,000 supporters and compromising traffic on the world-famous Las Vegas strip.

Sin City may seem like an odd place for Monsanto to target, but no place is dry enough or hot enough for the world’s largest hawker of pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) to set its sights on. The people of Las Vegas are known to be resilient, and they have been growing food in the desert for a long time. This is why Monsanto wants to take a gamble and make its GMO business happen in Vegas -so that it can stay in Vegas.

In Costa Rica, pressure from farmers and other Ticos concerned about the potential harmful effects of GMO seeds such as YieldGard MON 810 and MON 863 managed to convince Monsanto that opening an office here was not worth their effort. The company left in 2004, although it surreptitiously tried to play an underhanded game of shell companies to obtain approval for one of their transgenic seeds in Costa Rica earlier this year.

Although Monsanto tried to court the administration of former President Abel Pacheco and opposition politicians from the powerhouse National Liberation Party (PLN) in the early 21^st century, pressure from ecological and social advocacy organizations was enough to convince them to leave Costa Rica -at least for the time being. Sensing that Monsanto is like a weed that not even their popular Roundup herbicides can completely eliminate, several towns in Costa Rica took the law into their own hands and enacted municipal laws that have effectively made them transgenic-free territories.

Fighting With Legislation And Money

The Silver State has a farm bill that the U.S. Congress passed in March to worry about, which includes a provision that has become known as the “Monsanto Protection Act.” This portion of the law would actually prevent a judge in the U.S. from ruling against the use of GMOs. Just like Costa Rica used the law to protect herself against Monsanto, so can that company manipulate the law to protect its own interests.

Las Vegas denizens realize that they must fight a tough fight against Monsanto; after all, the U.S. is practically an agricultural flagship nation for the company’s GMO products. Nevada, however, is not called the Battle-Born State for nothing, and Las Vegas -like Costa Rica- is using resources they are familiar with: Money and the law.

The leader of the anti-Monsanto troops in Las Vegas is a 30-year old Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan, and she is as pretty as she is dedicated to keeping her beloved city free from GMOs. Angie Morelli is the main organizer behind GMO Free Vegas, and her call to action is certainly clever:

So what are we going to do about GMOs? Well, to begin, we advocate the labeling of genetically engineered food (or food with “GMOs”). Regardless of how you feel about the GMO issue, we can all agree that we should at least have a choice of being informed about what we put into our bodies. We won’t have a choice until these foods are properly labeled.

First, we are going to challenge the corporations. In 1965 a labor dispute between a union called the United Farm Workers and the growers of table grapes in California exploded. A young Cesar Chavez proposed at a church meeting to support the Filipino [and Mexican] farm workers by instituting a boycott of grapes. At its height, this protest of grapes, that weren’t even poisonous, was supported by over 13 MILLION Americans. Guess what? We are going to do better than that. Starting RIGHT NOW, we are going to boycott GMO corn. That is all you have to do, don’t buy corn. Corn on the cob, corn in a can, corn in a mix at a restaurant, any visible kernels of corn. All we are asking people to do right now is BOYCOTT GMO CORN.

Mrs. Morelli has a pretty good grasp about how politics and high-level horse trading work. According to Joe Schoenman of Las Vegas Weekly, Mrs. Morelli is urging her supporters to:

“slip a single dollar [bill] into an envelope addressed to their congressman, adding a note that the cash is to buy his or her vote against the Monsanto Protection Act.

“Our dollars,” Morelli says, “will speak volumes.”

Money is the official language of Las Vegas, and it is one that politicians are very familiar with. In the beginning of Monsanto’s attempted crusade in Costa Rica, money was the most powerful weapon in its arsenal, but the company eventually ran into the will of the people and later against the law. Thanks to Mrs. Morelli’s efforts in Las Vegas, Monsanto could soon see its comfortable position in the U.S. become compromised.

Learn more about GMO Vegas on their website, which interestingly enough lists a GMO-free bakery and bistro named Pura Vida Las Vegas as one of their favorites. Coincidence?