The Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on November 10, 2026 that the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf of the United Nations confirmed the outer limits proposed by Mexico for its extended continental shelf in the Eastern Polygon of the Gulf of Mexico. According to the Foreign Ministry, those limits become definitive and binding under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Aristegui Noticias reported.
The process began on December 19, 2011, when Mexico submitted the technical documentation to set the outer limits beyond 200 nautical miles in that area of the Gulf. The subcommission that reviewed the file adopted its recommendations on February 26, 2026, and the Commission approved them with modifications on July 10; four months later, the Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea published the summary. The practical effect is legal certainty: in that area Mexico exercises exclusive sovereign rights for the exploration and exploitation of the natural resources of the seabed and its subsoil, a point with direct weight for energy policy and for attracting investment in deep waters. Infobae specified that the recognition does not alter the maritime borders previously negotiated with the United States and Cuba.
The technical file has a precise anatomy. The Commission recommended using 100 fixed geographic points to trace the outer edge of the Mexican continental margin and determined that the outer limits are defined by 10 points connected by straight lines that do not exceed 60 nautical miles. In the documentation submitted, Mexico maintained that there were no disputes over maritime boundary delimitation in the Eastern Polygon and reported the agreements reached with Cuba and with the United States, whose treaty signed on January 18, 2017 had not yet entered into force at the time of submitting the modification of the request, in June 2025. The technical and legal work was carried out by the Legal Counsel of the Foreign Ministry, with the participation of Inegi, the Secretariat of the Navy, the Mexican Geological Service and Pemex.
The next step is the deposit before the UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, of the charts and geodetic data that permanently describe the outer limits, so that they are given international publicity. With that registration, Mexican marine cartography gains a formal reference for concessions and exploration permits in the Gulf.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.