The Mystery of Isla Bermeja

An 1846 map showing "Isla Bermeja". [Wikipedia]

The Red Island (La Isla Bermeja or something like the Reddish island) was not much more than a rocky cliff located one hundred kilometers north of penísula de Yucatan, the Gulf of Mexico. 

Sailors and cartographers of the called Epoch of Great Navigations had the knowledge of its location. The Google Earth maps came to register their existence but, currently, exploratory expeditions have searched in vain by the mysterious island. The Isla Bermeja became a ghost Island.

GULF OF MEXICO. It was there. It always had been there!Was marked in the old maps of sixteenth century, in the years of 1500. Until recently appeared on Google Earth. But, now - disappeared. That piece of land surrounded by sea that belonged to Mexico, nowadays, is a U.S. property. And nobody knows what happened to La Isla Bermeja.

Polemic Treaty

The disappearance of Isla Bermeja began to attract attention at the end of last century, when Mexican President Ernesto Zedilo was negotiating with the President Bill Clinton a treaty on the delimitation of the continental shelf. 

Mexico was in diplomatic convesações, in the UN, to ensure control of the domain of La Hoya de la Dona(La Dona Bay) and the reference point of the Mexicans was the Isla Bermeja. But in 1997, it turned out, simply that there was no island in the place marked on maps.

Perplexed, the Mexican government appointed a military mission to locate the island. A Navy ship, the Onjuku - sailed to the latitude indicated on the mapsto confirm the existence of the island. But arriving on the scene, nothing was found and the sonars did not detect any sign of the rock formation.

On November 28, 2000, Zedilo and Clinton signed the agreement and the entire area now belongs to Americans. The estimatives are that that there is a reserve of about 22 billion barrels of oil that Mexico lost in the transaction.

Conspiracy

But the matter was not closed. Many began to talk of conspiracy. It was inexplicable the disappearance of the piece of land so often mentioned by sailors. 

The first historical mention dates back to 1570 and was still cited in official publications still in 1946. Some Mexican senators demanded an official investigation.

The most common suspected is that the CIA would have blasted the island with the connivance of Mexican negotiators. A technical and scientific inquiry concluded that there was no possibility of a natural phenomenon, like a sinking - a submersion.

The scientist Jaime Urruta, of the Geophysical Institute of the Autonomous University of Mexico suggested that a hydrogen bomb could have disintegrated the island. 

Still, he said, the hypothesis was unlikely. Other experts suggested that small islands may disappear by the action of erosion produced by sea waves.

In 2009, the universitary vessel Justo Sierra repeated the journey of the Onjuku. The conclusions were the same and detailed: in the place there is no trace of existence - in the past, of an island.

Although information and mapping of a great rock cliff in the middle of the sea was a thing of vital importance to the navigators of the time, now - the scientific conclusion is that nothing exist there, the sea in the region is described as a plain, eliminating the possibility of a submersion or even of a natural erosion. 

Thus, we determined that the Reddish Island never existed and the belief in its reality was just a mapping error perpetuated over the centuries

SOURCE: 

OLMO, Guilhermo D. El misterio de la Isla Bermeja: ¿nunca existió o la hundió la CIA?

ABC/Espanha, published in 22/02/2012

[http://www.abc.es/20120222/internacional/abci-misterio-isla-bermeja-201202211249.html]