Havana/In recent months, the United States has maintained an aerial surveillance presence off Mexico’s Atlantic coast, an activity that a Mexican maritime intelligence company considers “unusual.” According to their interpretation, these flights track ships likely to break the oil blockade imposed on Cuba by Washington.
The firm is Ehrlich Maritime Security (EMS) and analyzes it in its monthly report Mexico’s Maritime Domain Dispatch (M2D2). According to the reportlast month was the ninth consecutive month in which US surveillance flights were recorded off the Yucatan Peninsula. The text indicates that the Bay of Campeche and the Yucatán Channel do not constitute one of the main maritime drug trafficking routes and therefore considers the reiteration of this type of operations in the area to be “anomalous.”
According to the analysis, signed by Christian J. Ehrlichdirector of the firm, the missions could be aimed, at least in part, at locating and following specific cargo ships and oil tankers suspected of participating in irregular activities or that could seek to evade US sanctions. Although he clarifies that this has not been confirmed by the Mexican Navy Secretariat or the US armed forces.
Analysts emphasize that this type of military operations is usually part of joint security tasks between the two countries.
Among the aircraft detected are the Boeing P-8 Poseidon and the drone MQ-4C Tritonused by the US Navy for maritime patrol, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions. Analysts emphasize that this type of military operations are usually part of joint security tasks between the two countries, and are normally coordinated with the armed forces. However, in this case that was not the case. The report cites a documented precedent that may explain the reason for these flights.
Last January, the Reuters agency and the magazine Political revealed that at least a dozen drone missions MQ-4C Triton They had flown routes that coincided with those of Mexican oil tankers heading to Cuba, just when the White House was pressuring Mexico to cut off those shipments. A Mexican official quoted by Reuters said then that the drone activity was impossible to read as anything other than a warning.
He last mexican ship to dock on the Island was, on January 9, the Ocean Marinerwith 80,000 barrels of crude oil, and since then it has only sent humanitarian shipments without fuel.
Ehrlich Maritime Security insists that these flights do not fit with conventional anti-drug patrol: maritime drug trafficking activity is concentrated off Chiapas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Michoacán, in the Pacific, not in the Gulf; and the flight routes documented since last December are concentrated on the coast where the oil export infrastructure is located and the Yucatan Canal, instead of extending towards the Caribbean, where the bulk of the US anti-drug operation known as Operation Southern Spear is concentrated.
The report also records the rescue, August 20of the Cuban boat that had been adrift for nine days after leaving Pinar del Río heading to Yucatán. The Ninth Naval Zone of the Mexican Navy rescued 16 people: 12 adults and four children.
The authors of the analysis link this increase in emigration with the deterioration of conditions on the Island, and anticipate that this type of rescue will continue to be common in the area for the rest of the year.
