Warning to seafarers and the energy industry

Pirates are not only active in the Horn of Africa and the Gulf of Guinea. Right on the doorstep of the United States, in the southern Gulf of Mexico, attacks on the oil industry are reported time and again.

Sidney E. Dean

Globally, maritime robbery has been on the decline since 2011, but the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) has been recording an increase in activity for the past two years. This trend can also be seen in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The US Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) has recorded more than 60 attacks in this region since the beginning of 2018 and assumes that the number of unreported cases is even higher. The Mexican Navy is also aware of several dozen pirate attacks and other maritime theft offences in recent years. "According to [Mexican] officials, there have been sixteen [attacks] so far this year, although some estimates put the numbers much higher," explained the Mexican television station Univision in a special report on 23 August. April 2020 was a particularly active month, with six recorded incidents. At the end of July, there were even three attacks within just five days. Pirates in rubber dinghies even "landed" in the city of Ciudad del Carmen to attack a branch of the state oil company Pemex.
This development led to the US Department of Transportation issuing an official warning to civilian shipping in the southern Gulf of Mexico in June 2020. The governments of the flag states of Panama and Mauritius also called on ship crews to exercise extreme caution in the region in June.