MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday said Google is wrong to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico on its Google Maps platform after U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the body of water be renamed the “Gulf of America.”
Sheinbaum presented a letter addressed to Google in which her government argues the U.S. cannot unilaterally change the name of a body of water which it shares with Cuba and Mexico.
The move comes after Google said on Monday that Google Maps will change the name of the “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America” for U.S. users once it is officially updated in the U.S. Geographic Names System.
The change will be visible in the U.S., but the name will remain “Gulf of Mexico” in Mexico. Outside of the two countries, users will see both names on Google Maps.
Sheinbaum and Trump have sparred over the name change, with the Mexican president previously joking that if the countries were starting to rename things then perhaps North America should be called “Mexican America” after a map of the region from 1607.
According to Mexico, the U.S. cannot legally change the Gulf’s name because the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea dictates that an individual country’s sovereign territory only extends up to 12 nautical miles (about 22 kilometers) out from the coastline.
“[The name change] could only correspond to the 12 nautical miles away from the coastlines of the United States of America,” Sheinbaum said as she read the letter in her regular morning press conference.
Sheinbaum added that Mexico had asked Google to prominently display the map of Mexican America.
“We ask that when you put Mexican America in the search engine, the map appears that we presented.”
(Reporting by Stephen Eisenhammer and Cassandra Garrison)
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