☀ Domingo Brief — Canadian-Mexican Pipeline Collaboration?

Welcome back to the Domingo Brief! This week, we’re keeping up with Bolivia’s coca leaf requests to the WHO, Panama and Venezuela’s consular reconciliation, and more.

Trivia of the Week 🎯

About a third of you correctly guessed Luque as the location for the headquarters of CONMEBOL, South America’s governing body of professional football within FIFA. CONMEBOL is the oldest continental confederation in the world. In July 1916, the first edition of what became the Copa América was contested in Argentina to commemorate the centenary of Argentina’s Declaration of Independence, with the participating associations of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay founding CONMEBOL to facilitate the tournament’s organization. In 1998, the governing body moved its headquarters from Buenos Aires to Luque due to several reasons, including Paraguay’s neutral, central location in South America and diplomatic-style legal immunity granted by the Paraguayan government.

Each week, tune back in for the answer to the previous week’s trivia question. No cheating!

🇧🇴 Bolivia has submitted a request to the World Health Organization to remove coca leaves from its schedule of controlled substances, triggering a review expected to conclude with a decision in October of this year. Bolivia is one of the few markets with a legal market for coca, which is commonly chewed as a mild stimulant and packaged for sale in myriad ways, and which has played a unique role in Andean cultures for millennia. Currently, coca leaves are listed as a Schedule I substance, controlled with the same stringency as cocaine and heroin, but it may soon be bumped down to Schedule II or removed from the list altogether, with ancillary controls to prevent its use in the production of cocaine.

🇧🇷 BYD, China’s top producer of electric and hybrid vehicles, deployed the world’s largest car-carrying ship (with an equivalent of 20 football fields worth of vehicles), which just docked in Brazil’s Itajai port. The company is offering Brazilian car shoppers with a bevvy of low-priced options in a green-car market still in its infancy, triggering backlash from auto-industry officials and labor leaders worried about the reverberations for domestic production and jobs. In fact, Brazil has become BYD’s top target for its overseas sales expansion, with four of the carmaker’s cargo ships bringing close to 22K cars to the country just in 2025.

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