Court Lifts Ban on Mexican Tuna : Environment: The issue was protecting dolphins. The Mexicans say they have made major strides.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Thursday overturned a ban on importing Mexican yellowfin tuna caught in ways that could harm dolphins.

Although the embargo affected relatively small amounts of tuna reaching U.S. markets, it put a strain on U.S.-Mexican relations at a time when the Bush Administration is pursuing a broad free trade agreement with Mexico.

Environmentalists had won the embargo in a San Francisco federal court last month as part of a long campaign to stop fishing practices that can drown or crush dolphins swimming above schools of tuna in the Eastern Tropical Pacific.

Administration officials, including Commerce Secretary Robert A. Mosbacher, submitted affidavits to the appeals court, also in San Francisco.

The Mexican fleet, largest of any fishing in the Eastern Tropical Pacific, “has made truly remarkable progress” in curtailing dolphin deaths connected with tuna, Mosbacher wrote.

Also filing affidavits were, among others, John D. Negroponte, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, and William W. Fox, administrator of the Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service.

“Gamesmanship,” said Joshua R. Floum, a San Francisco attorney representing Earth Island Institute and the Marine Mammal Fund.

The environmental groups are locked in a lawsuit with the Commerce Department and the American Tunaboat Assn., the U.S. tuna fleet trade group, over interpretation of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act. Congress has amended the act in recent years to strictly limit fishing techniques that endanger dolphin.

The issue turns on a fine point: Can the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its National Marine Fisheries Service use less than a year’s worth of dolphin-kill data to judge whether Mexico is complying with the law? Government lawyers and NOAA officials say the law allows this. Environmentalists insist that NOAA must wait a full year, until 1991, leaving the embargo in place until then.

Fisheries Service officials “have refused to implement (the Act) from the beginning,” said Floum, “and have spent all of their time . . . going to Washington and trying to get the act changed. We expect that Congress will be very upset at the way the agency has continued to ignore its wishes.”

“If you’re asking us if we were feeling the hot breath of the Administration,” said Roddy Moscoso, public affairs officer for the Fisheries Service, “there was certainly reason to try to solve this as quickly as possible. But we certainly had no control over when Earth Island filed suit and when the judge ruled on the case.”

“Mexico was fully entitled to the action we took in lifting the embargo,” insisted Jay S. Johnson, NOAA deputy general counsel. “They have reduced their kill rate dramatically.”

Mexico had formally requested intervention from the Bush Administration, and Mexican Commerce Secretary Jaime Serra Puche pressed the issue during a joint press conference with Mosbacher last month in Houston.

At that time, both commerce secretaries carefully avoided saying that the tuna embargo could cause problems in the upcoming free trade talks between the two countries. However, Mexican officials and fishermen clearly considered the embargo an irritant.

“It is really a boycott,” said a former Mexican government official, because its purpose was to coerce Mexico into changing its tuna fishing practices.

Mexicans have defended their fishing techniques with the claim that they have reduced the dolphin kill 70% in recent years.