The contiguous zone is all that territory belonging to a nation that is constituted by maritime extension, where which the sovereign state still has the right to exercise its laws; This area is mainly made up of the nearby sea (where the islands adjacent to the country are located) and the open sea, this of course has a defined delimitation for each region that is equivalent to 24 miles after the islands of each country. Determining which portion of the water belonged to each state was a major problem, because there were two dilemmas that had to be clarified: what laws apply to the maritime extension and in fact to where it belonged to each population.
If described from the legal point of view, the contiguous zone is nothing more than the product or the portion of the sea declared by the state as its own, where they may exercise non-transferable functions of navigation security (both natural persons and those belonging to the militia), protection and assurance of all the wealth that this extension possesses, as well as the surveillance by the fiscal customs that occupy functions in each port of the country. This then allows us to differentiate between the territorial sea and the contiguous area, because only one is an area where surveillance must be carried out. (for cases of piracy and being a drug trafficking vehicle) and the other belongs legally and reliably to the state, respectively.
As mentioned above, the contiguous zone will not have the capacity to conform to a territory beyond 24 miles, these are counted from the line that belongs to the width of the territorial sea. This law was determined in 1982 in the convention on the law of the sea, carried out to define this end; However, this concept was expanded further in another conference known as the “codification conference in the international law of each country”, held approximately in 1990.
Previous years would have already restricted the shipment of certain substances considered harmful to the inhabitant of a state, among which are: tobacco, alcoholic beverages and psychotropic substances of any kind (marijuana, cocaine, etc.).
