Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum says that Mexico will take legal motion against Google if the map shown to US-based users continues to label the Gulf of Mexico because the Gulf of America across the whole 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 a 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 don’t agree with this, and the Foreign Minister has sent a brand new letter addressing the difficulty.”
She says Mexico is awaiting a brand 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 vp of presidency affairs and public policy, which said that Google is not going to change the policy it outlined after Trump declared the body of water the Gulf of America.
“We’ll wait for Google’s response and if not, we are going to proceed to court,” Sheinbaum said Monday during a morning press briefing.
Because it stands, the gulf appears in Google Maps as “Gulf of America” inside america, as “Gulf of Mexico” inside Mexico and “Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)” in Canada and elsewhere. In his letter, Turner said the corporate was using Gulf of America to follow “longstanding maps policies impartially and consistently across all regions” and that the corporate was willing to fulfill in person with the Mexican government.
“While international treaties and conventions usually are not intended to control how private mapping providers represent geographic features, it’s our consistent policy to seek the advice of multiple authoritative sources to offer essentially the most up to this point and accurate representation of the world,” he wrote.
In response to Google’s letter, Mexican authorities said they’d take legal motion, writing that “under no circumstance will Mexico accept the renaming of a geographic zone inside 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 vital, we are going to file a civil suit,” she said. “Even President Trump isn’t proposing that the whole Gulf of Mexico be called the ‘Gulf of America,’ but only their continental shelf. So Google is fallacious.”
She urged Google to review the decree from the White House, arguing “the one place it was effective was where (the U.S.) has sovereignty, or as much as 22 nautical miles from the coast.”
Together 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 keep up a “long-term plan of collaboration” between the 2 countries.
It’s the most recent round of talks between the 2 countries during which Mexico hopes to carry off a bigger geopolitical crisis.
Last week, Sheinbaum threatened U.S. gunmakers with legal motion if Trump’s administration goes through with its intentions of declaring Mexican drug cartels as terrorist organizations.
“In the event that they declare these organized crime groups as terrorists, we could have no option than to increase our lawsuits against the U.S., because because 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 brand new charge could include alleged “complicity” of gunmakers with terror groups.
On Feb. 13, the Latest 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 chief order called for the designations, saying the cartels ‘constitute a national-security threat beyond that posed by traditional organized crime’ and that america would ‘ensure the entire elimination’ of the groups,” The Times reported.
The report added that the criminal groups and their members “could possibly 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 Latest 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 businesses knew weapons were being sold to traffickers who smuggled them into Mexico and decided to money in on that market.
Nevertheless, the judge ruled that Mexico had not provided concrete evidence that any of the six corporations’ 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 Americans are working with organized crime groups in Mexico after Trump’s “slanderous” claims that Mexico had joined forces with drug traffickers.
“There may be also organized crime in america and there are American individuals who come to Mexico with these illegal activities,” Sheinbaum said during a press conference on Feb. 13. “Otherwise who would distribute fentanyl within the cities of america?”
Sheinbaum was responding to a reporter from the Animal Político news outlet, who mentioned an investigation they published this week that found greater than 2,600 U.S. residents 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 difficulty isn’t just that drugs go from Mexico to america,” 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 medicine of their country.”
“In america, additionally they need to act,” she said.
— With files from The Associated Press
