Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says that Mexico will take legal action against Google if the map shown to US-based users continues to label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America across the entire body of water.
During a press conference on Monday, Sheinbaum argued that U.S. President Donald Trump’s order to rename the body of water only applies to part of the continental shelf under U.S. control.
“What Google is doing here is changing the name of the continental shelf of Mexico and Cuba, which has nothing to do with Trump’s decree, which applied only to the U.S. continental shelf,” Sheinbaum said. “We do not agree with this, and the Foreign Minister has sent a new letter addressing the issue.”
She says Mexico is awaiting a new response from Google to its request that the tech company fully restore the name Gulf of Mexico to its Google Maps service before filing a lawsuit.
Sheinbaum shared a letter addressed to her government from Cris Turner, Google’s vice president of government affairs and public policy, which said that Google will not change the policy it outlined after Trump declared the body of water the Gulf of America.
“We will wait for Google’s response and if not, we will proceed to court,” Sheinbaum said Monday during a morning press briefing.
As it stands, the gulf appears in Google Maps as “Gulf of America” within the United States, as “Gulf of Mexico” within Mexico and “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in Canada and elsewhere. In his letter, Turner said the company was using Gulf of America to follow “longstanding maps policies impartially and consistently across all regions” and that the company was willing to meet in person with the Mexican government.
“While international treaties and conventions are not intended to regulate how private mapping providers represent geographic features, it is our consistent policy to consult multiple authoritative sources to provide the most up to date and accurate representation of the world,” he wrote.
In response to Google’s letter, Mexican authorities said they would take legal action, writing that “under no circumstance will Mexico accept the renaming of a geographic zone within its own territory and under its jurisdiction.”
Sheinbaum previously said that Mexico could file a civil lawsuit against Google.
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She has repeatedly decried the move, arguing the “Gulf of Mexico” name has long been recognized internationally. On Feb. 13, she said Google had not resolved Mexico’s earlier complaints.
“If necessary, we will file a civil suit,” she said. “Even President Trump isn’t proposing that the entire Gulf of Mexico be called the ‘Gulf of America,’ but only their continental shelf. So Google is wrong.”
She urged Google to review the decree from the White House, arguing “the only place it was effective was where (the U.S.) has sovereignty, or up to 22 nautical miles from the coast.”
Along with the legal threat to Google, the Mexican president also announced Monday that Mexico and the U.S. would hold high-level meetings this week on trade and security in an effort to maintain a “long-term plan of collaboration” between the two countries.
It’s the latest round of talks between the two countries in which Mexico hopes to hold off a larger geopolitical crisis.
Last week, Sheinbaum threatened U.S. gunmakers with legal action if Trump’s administration goes through with its intentions of declaring Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“If they declare these organized crime groups as terrorists, we will have no option than to extend our lawsuits against the U.S., because as the Justice Department has already confessed, 74 per cent of all firearms in possession of drug cartels come from the U.S.,” Sheinbaum said.
“So, where do the armories stand after the designation?” she added.
During her press conference on Feb. 14, she said that a new charge could include alleged “complicity” of gunmakers with terror groups.
On Feb. 13, the New York Times reported that the U.S. State Department plans to classify criminal groups from Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador and Venezuela as “terrorist organizations.”
“The executive order called for the designations, saying the cartels ‘constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime’ and that the United States would ‘ensure the total elimination’ of the groups,” The Times reported.
The report added that the criminal groups and their members “could be labeled foreign terrorist organizations or specially designated global terrorists” and “the designations mean the U.S. government can impose broad economic sanctions on the groups and on people or entities linked to them.”
The Times also reported that the cartels targeted in Mexico are the Sinaloa cartel, United cartel, the Michoacana family, the Northeast cartel and the Jalisco New Generation cartel.
Last August, a U.S. judge dismissed a $10 billion lawsuit brought by the Mexican government against six U.S. gun manufacturers. Mexico had argued the companies knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to cash in on that market.
However, the judge ruled that Mexico had not provided concrete evidence that any of the six companies’ activities in Massachusetts were connected to any suffering caused in Mexico by guns.
Earlier this month, Sheinbaum accused the U.S. of harbouring drug cartels, and claimed American citizens are working with organized crime groups in Mexico after Trump’s “slanderous” claims that Mexico had joined forces with drug traffickers.
“There is also organized crime in the United States and there are American people who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference on Feb. 13. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl in the cities of the United States?”
Sheinbaum was responding to a reporter from the Animal Político news outlet, who mentioned an investigation they published this week that found more than 2,600 U.S. citizens have been arrested in Mexico for offences related to organized crime, including smuggling drugs and firearms, since Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador took office in December 2018.
“The issue isn’t just that drugs go from Mexico to the United States,” she added.
Sheinbaum said that Mexico is willing to work with the U.S. government on security issues in Mexico, but she stressed that the U.S. government also has to “do its work” to “avoid the trafficking of drugs in their country.”
“In the United States, they also have to act,” she said.
— With files from The Associated Press
