Crimp in the Shrimp

Dragging for the fat shrimp which wriggle along the warm Mexican gulf coast, fishermen from Mexico, Cuba and the U.S. make long, profitable runs. But the business also has its hazards. One pink-streaked dawn last week, off the coast at Soto la Marina, a Mexican gunboat steamed up beside seven trawlers flying the U.S. flag and trained its guns on them. "You are fishing illegally in Mexican territorial waters!" bawled the skipper. "Follow me into Tampico under arrest."

Two of the trawlers made a run for it and got away, but the remaining five chugged into Tampico and became the center of a sticky quarrel. Nub of the trouble was that the U.S. and Mexico had never been able to agree on a definition of territorial waters. To. the Mexicans, it means nine miles out from the shoreline; to the U.S., three miles.*

The Mexican coast guard changed the shrimpers with poaching in Mexican territorial waters five miles out, and fined each skipper 5,000 pesos ($580). The shrimpers protested the fine and insisted that they were at least ten miles offshore. The Mexicans said that they had no intention of keeping Americans from fishing off their coast, but wished only to keep foreign shrimp boats under license and control.

Last week, U.S. Ambassador Walter Thurston asked the Mexican foreign ministry for a full report on the arrests and at the same time announced: "The U.S. upholds the legal right of its fishermen to operate on the free high seas up to within three miles of the coast of Mexico." He got quick backing in Washington, where angry U.S. Congressmen spoke up. Growled Washington State's Representative Thor Tollefson: "If these shrimp boats were seized ten miles at sea, it is definitely a case of piracy on the high seas."

In sweltering Tampico, where the shrimp boats idled while their crewmen roamed about freely ashore, the U.S. skippers huddled with their lawyers and U.S. consular officials, trying to make up their minds whether to pay the fines under protest or post bail pending an appeal and decision of their cases. The time was ripe for both countries to stop trading such words as "poacher" or "pirate" and settle on a legal definition of territorial limits.

* The U.S., like most countries, restricts its territorial jurisdiction to three miles but reserves the right in some instances to control foreign ships "hovering" offshore. During Prohibition, Coast Guard vessels enforced a 12-mile limit against rumrunners.

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