Mexico urges Google not to rename Gulf of Mexico
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum has written to Google and told them not to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.
Donald Trump signed an executive order demanding the name change within hours of taking office.
Google said on Monday that Google Maps will change the name to ‘Gulf of America’ for US users once it is officially updated in the US Geographic Names System.
But Sheinbaum argued in her letter that the US cannot unilaterally change the name of a body of water which it shares with Cuba and Mexico.
The change will reportedly be visible to users in the US but the name will remain ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in Mexico. Users outside of the two countries will see both names on Google Maps.
There is no international organisation responsible for the naming of bodies of water.
But according to Mexico, the US 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.
In a statement on social media on Monday Google said: ‘We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources.’
‘When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name,’ it said.
Google also confirmed they would be changing the name of Mount Denali to Mount McKinley in the US, following another executive order from Trump.
Sheinbaum criticised Google’s decision and said the firm should not respond to ‘the mandate of a country’ to change the name of ‘an international sea’.
But she also joked that should the change take place, that Google also rename the US to ‘Mexican America’ for users in Mexico.
‘He says that he will call it the Gulf of America on its continental shelf,’ Sheinbaum previously said when Trump signed the executive order.
‘For us it is still the Gulf of Mexico, and for the entire world it is still the Gulf of Mexico.’