Carlos Barria photo at Reuters. Caption: “U.S. President Donald Trump meets Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto during the their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany July 7, 2017.”

  • U.S. Southern Command’s Special Forces component will be holding its annual “Fuerzas Comando” military exercise next week. This year’s exercise will take place in Paraguay. It is a contest: teams of elite troops from several countries compete in a series of events. Colombia usually wins.
  • Mexico’s Army and Marines hosted U.S. Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly on a visit to the embattled state of Guerrero. In the state’s impoverished highlands, they demonstrated eradication of poppy, the plant used to make heroin. They used manual eradication and aerial spraying. (Mexico is the only country in Latin America that uses aircraft to spray herbicides on drug crops. Colombia stopped the practice in 2015. The annual amount of spraying is much smaller than Colombia’s was.)
  • The next day in Hamburg, Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and U.S. President Donald Trump met on the sidelines of the G–20 meeting. Reuters reports: “In response to a shouted question from a reporter about whether he still wants Mexico to pay for the border wall, which aims to keep out illegal immigrants, Trump said, ‘Absolutely.’”
  • The governor of Florida, Rick Scott (R), wants to pass a law prohibiting the state government, including its retirement fund, from doing business with any organization that does business with Venezuela’s regime. “The proposal could force the state to stop doing business with Goldman Sachs,” notes the Tampa Bay Times.