While in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit, President Trump met with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, for the first time since the start of the American leader’s term. Nieto’s foreign minister, Luis Videgaray, predicted that NAFTA talks with begin August 16.
“We’re negotiating NAFTA and some other things with Mexico and we’ll see how it all turns out, but I think that we’ve made very good progress,” Trump said after the meeting, according to Reuters.
In response to a shouted question, Trump said he “absolutely” still wants Mexico to pay for a border wall. Mexico has repeatedly said it will not, but nonetheless Nieto, “whom Trump called his ‘friend,’ said the meeting (in Hamburg) would ‘help us continue a very strong dialogue’ on NAFTA, while his aides emphasized that they had not discussed the wall,” says Reuters. The two leaders also discussed the possibility of a guest-worker program for agricultural workers and the need to “modernize” NAFTA.
The U.S. is expected to publish its negotiation objectives for the trade deal, which “underpins $1 trillion worth of trilateral trade between the United States, Mexico and Canada,” on or around July 16, says Reuters.