Americans, when they think of Mexico, see it as a pleasant place for midwinter holidays, a rich source of (perhaps authentic) pre-Columbian treasures, an accommodating provider of divorces, or a more or less permanent refuge from the demands of 20th-century industrial life. However, Mexico presents no problems, and therefore Americans do not think about it very much. But for Mexicans, the United States is the big problem and they think about it all the time. They have been doing so with renewed intensity during the current administration of President Luis Echeverria, a proud, ambitious man in a proud, small country.

Mexican relations with the United States have long been founded on humiliation and dependence. Mexicans know that the United States is usually strong enough to work its will - whether conquering all the land from Texas to California or invading in pursuit of bandits or closing the border to punish Mexico for lax drug enforcement. All this is seen by Mexicans as a reflection of their weakness as much as American strength. It is not an easy assessment for them to accept. No matter how urbane he may seem, a Mexican official has trouble keeping resentment out of his feelings when he deals with the United States.

This resentment, however, has its ups and downs. Since World War II, the United States has enjoyed an era of relatively good feeling with Mexico. For three decades, Mexico has sought American capital and tourism, and middle- and upper-class Mexicans have tried to emulate the life style of the United States. American culture and organization and products have set the standards for modern Mexicans. The emulation has tended to obscure or even hold back the resentment.

This era of comparatively good feeling seems to be coming to an end. Partly, this stems from policies of President Echeverria that attempt to lessen Mexican dependence on the United States and push Mexico out of its American embrace and into the rest of the world. To the annoyance of U.S. policy makers, Echeverria has become a spokesman for the Third World; it is said that when his present term expires he would like to succeed to Kurt Waldheim's post at the U.N.

American insensitivity has made the problem worse. Displaying little tact, American officials have made clear their testiness over Echeverria's talk, and the U.S. Government, has not hesitated to show and use its enormous power. Even private Americans have not hesitated to use their  power against Mexico. In the last session of the General Assembly, Mexico voted for the resolution that equated Zionism with racism. Its vote was motivated less by any analysis of Israeli policies than by Echeverria's desire to show Third World governments that Mexico was aligned with them. The vote provoked a boycott by American Jewish groups of tourism to Mexico, a punishment which hurt so badly that Foreign Minister Emilio O. Rabasa rushed to Israel and President Echeverria invited American Jewish leaders to Mexico City in humiliating attempts to make amends. In the end, Rabasa became the scapegoat and lost his post. The vote was obviously foolish foreign policy, but American Jews punished no other country for its vote, for no other country was so vulnerable.

In the last few years, there has been an increasing incidence of irritating statements, foolishness and unpleasantness on both sides. The most recent manifestation came during the recent Pan-American Games when Mexican crowds jeered and manhandled American athletes. Mexican paranoia can be surprising. In late 1974, after the Mexican Government reported a huge oil discovery in the states of Chiapas and Tabasco, the Mexican press began fretting over the possibility that the United States would take the oil away. Abraham Lopez Lara, a columnist for Excelsior, Mexico's most distinguished daily newspaper, warned that American oil companies might bring their "powerful machines of suction and extraction" to neighboring Guatemala which, he said, seemed to have an extension of the Mexican fields. According to Lopez Lara, the Americans, with their machinery, could suck out the Mexican oil. This might sound silly to American ears; but Lopez Lara was not joking, and his alarm sounded plausible to his readers.

While Mexicans, contemplating the United States, often show their weakness and fear, Americans, facing Mexico, often do the opposite. In October 1974, after President Ford and President Echeverria met in Magdalena de Kino, a White House press assistant fell into a panic because he could not find the bus set aside to take him and a pool of American newsmen to the airport. Since the American press is obsessed about keeping up with the President, the White House aide and the newsmen scrambled aboard another bus, set aside for the Mexican press.

The White House aide ordered the bus driver to start up, but a young Mexican woman, an assistant to President Echeverria's press secretary, politely told him that the bus had to wait for a large number of Mexican newsmen. This drove the White House aide into a rage. He screamed and cursed and waved his arms frantically. "Bullshit, bullshit," he shouted at the Mexican woman. His behavior became so offensive that the incident almost turned even more ugly, as several Mexican journalists arose from their seats. But the White House aide finally gave up, jumped off the bus with his newsmen, and hunted for other transportation. To be sure, that was just one ill-mannered American, but it is also true that the incident could have happened in very few other countries.

Mexico is a special case, and it is special because it is weak. No other country is so dependent on the United States or so vulnerable to American whims. A few statistics make this clear. In 1974, Mexico bought 62 per cent of its imports from the United States and sold 58 per cent of its exports there. The purchases from America accounted for 70 per cent of Mexico’s trade deficit of $3.2 billion. That imbalance was diminished somewhat in 1974 by other earnings from the United States - which, however, only deepened the dependence. American spending in frontier towns amounted to 23 per cent of all foreign exchange brought into Mexico; tourism, mostly American, accounted for another 14 per cent; American in-bond plants, which assemble U.S. goods with cheap Mexican labor, accounted for 7 per cent. In all, Mexico earned more than 65 per cent of its foreign exchange in 1974 from the United States. According to a study prepared recently for the Senate Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, American corporations have provided 80 per cent of the $3 billion foreign investment in Mexico. A recent Mexican study concluded that foreigners, mostly Americans, control or have controlling influence over 36 per cent of the capital of Mexico’s 311 largest corporations.

In view of this dependence, Mexican officials believe their country is entitled to special consideration in American trade policies. But the U.S. Government has usually ignored Mexico when setting such policy. In August 1971, for example, President Nixon, while devaluing the dollar, imposed a 10 per cent surcharge on all imports to the United States. The Mexicans, who were neither consulted nor warned, protested angrily. The surcharge was removed for all countries four months later, before much damage could be done to the Mexican economy, but the lesson about Mexico's vulnerability was not lost on President Echeverria, then in the first year of his Presidency.

The problem of drugs provides a good example of how economic dependence makes Mexico susceptible to American badgering. Almost all the marijuana and a good deal of the heroin used in the United States has traditionally come from Mexico. It has been an open secret for years that local Mexican officials and police in the states of Sinaloa, Durango, Sonora, Nayarit and Chihuahua, where opium poppies are grown, and in the cities of Guadalajara and Culiacan, where they are processed into heroin, have been involved in the lucrative trade. American drug officials have never hesitated to make their annoyance known.

The attitude of top Mexican officials - admittedly, not an entirely lucid one - is that their country is being badgered because of an American problem. The most serious drug problem within Mexico is the sniffing of glue, paint thinner and other solvents. Mexicans grow opium poppies because Americans take heroin. “Your government,” a spokesman for the Mexican Government told me in 1974, “is paying too much attention to growing here and not enough to distribution in the United States. If you dealt with the distribution, you would have no problem.”

In September 1969, the Nixon administration decided to teach Mexico a lesson. It launched Operation Intercept. For three weeks, U.S. Border Patrol and Customs agents thoroughly searched every person and car crossing the border from Mexico. The interminable delays disrupted border commerce and held up Mexican workers with jobs in the United States. American tourists were dissuaded from making trips to Mexico.

Mexico, facing a severe economic loss, got the idea. As a U.S. Embassy official put it later, “The United States mechanized its leverage in Operation Intercept, and this sensitized the Mexicans to the problem.” The Mexican Government agreed to join the U.S. Government in Operation Cooperation - a joint program to crack down on the drug traffic crossing the border. It was not an entirely cynical decision; a number of policy makers in the new Echeverria administration believed it made sense for Mexico to deal with the American drug problem before it contaminated Mexico.

Under Operation Cooperation, Mexico significantly increased its destruction of poppy fields and heroin laboratories and its arrests of traffickers and smugglers. Its most significant and perhaps ironic record, however, came in the arrest of Americans. Before Operation Cooperation, there were perhaps 100 Americans in Mexican jails, mostly for failing to pay hotel bills. By the end of 1974, the figure was 441. This large number has led to many extended articles in American newspapers about the plight of the Americans in noisome confinement. Those arrested have been subjected to an alien, often cruel judicial system; almost all were forced to sign confessions written in a language they did not understand. Some were beaten and otherwise abused by police during interrogation. Many of their parents were bilked for tens of thousands of dollars by - unscrupulous Mexican lawyers. Most were sent to prisons where they had to pay extortion to survive.

The bad publicity about Americans in jail has been accompanied by bad publicity about the effects of Operation Cooperation. Much of its period coincided with a Turkish Government ban on the cultivation of poppies in Turkey. As a result, the main source of heroin shifted to Mexico. Despite Operation Cooperation the percentage of heroin in the United States coming from Mexico increased from 15 per cent in 1970 to 60 per cent in 1974. Frustrated U.S. agents fed this news to American newspapers. As top officials of the Mexican Government now see the situation, Mexico was forced, by a blatant act of economic aggression in 1969, to comply with American demands on drug enforcement and, for its pain, received a black name in the American press.

For years, American and Mexican diplomats insisted that the biggest problem between the two countries was caused by migrant Mexican workers known as braceros, the Spanish word for laborers. But the issue, on the surface, seems quiescent now. Mexico, until late 1974, continually asked the U.S. Government to return to its old program and admit 300,000 Mexican migrant workers every year for temporary employment. But in October 1974, after meeting with President Ford, President Echeverria told newsmen in Arizona that he had informed Ford that Mexico “had definitely desisted from thinking of a new treaty.” A few days later, Echeverria told a rally of farmers in northern Mexico, “We cannot compromise ourselves in order to have a quota of workers every year. The problem must resolve itself in Mexico.” But the problem is not likely to resolve itself soon.

Given the weakness of the Mexican economy compared to the American economy and the extraordinary growth in Mexican population, it is obvious that both sides of the issue - a demand for legal entry into the United States and an attempt to halt legal immigration - will fester for some time and, in fact, get worse. The Mexican population, only 35 million in 1960, is almost 60 million now and is expected to reach 100 million in 1990 and 135 million ten years later. The pressures for work will become enormous. But it is an issue on which the Mexicans have no leverage, nothing to offer the United States in exchange for taking excess labor off their hands. The Mexicans must depend on the fluctuating demands of the American labor market and on the continued, relative tolerance of the U.S. Government to illegal immigration.

It is hardly surprising, then, that President Echeverria, who took office in 1970, should try to diminish Mexican dependence on the United States. He has been less than successful. He did impose regulations that limited the percentage of foreign investment in certain enterprises, but there has been no noticeable decline in American investment or Mexican hunger for American capital. Echeverria and Lopez Portillo, who is slated to succeed him, also have proposed policies to revitalize the rural areas, but thus far they are more a promise than a program, and there has been no appreciable slowing of Mexican industrialization or of Mexican need for American machinery and equipment.

In the search for new markets and a new international role for the country, Echeverria has become the most traveled President in Mexican history. Until 1956, no Mexican President had met any chief of state or government other than the President of the United States. In five years, Echeverria had visited thirty countries and talked with sixty-four heads of state and government. But he has not reduced Mexican dependence on American trade. From 1970 through 1974, in fact, Mexican trade with the United States increased 25 times and the American share of the Mexican trade deficit rose from 66 per cent to 70 per cent. It is easier to visit Tanzania, for example, than to figure out a way to make Tanzania a market for Mexican goods.

Echeverria has been most successful in creating a new image for Mexico as a leader of the Third World. This was comparatively easy to do, for it involved rhetoric and United Nations politicking rather than solutions to current U.S.-Mexican issues. In 1972, Echeverria proposed that the United Nations adopt a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. Despite the negative votes of the United States and five industrialized countries and the abstentions of ten others, the General Assembly approved the charter in December 1974. It is a blueprint detailing what the Third World wants in a new international economic order.

In a sense, the charter took on a life of its own. Third World countries working on it in the U.N. probably made it stronger than Echeverria had originally intended. But it was his charter, Mexico’s expression of psychological independence, and the President traveled throughout the world in its support. Despite this, there is strong evidence that Echeverria did not intend to antagonize the United States with the charter. In fact, he hoped and probably expected that the United States would vote for it at the U.N. The hope and expectation were an example of Mexican ambivalence toward the United States.

After the day of meetings between the two Presidents on the Arizona-Sonora border in October 1974, Ford told Echeverria at a news conference that the charter “has very great merit and very great support, and I compliment you for it.” Echeverria then said that the most important result of their meetings was the way that Ford “underlined to me...  the importance that he gives the charter.”

In less than two months, however, the United States voted against the charter at the U.N. American officials could not accept two clauses. One gave every state the right to expropriate foreign property by paying only the compensation deemed adequate by its own laws; the other gave states the right to organize associations of producers of primary products like the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. American opposition to such policies was well-known and long-standing, but, in view of the public statements made by Ford and Echeverria, the Mexicans were disappointed. Rabasa told newsmen, “The vote of the United States caused a great disillusion in me.”

There is no doubt that a bit more realism and less rhetoric from the Mexican side would probably help relations at this time. Nevertheless, the rhetoric would be less irritating if the United States recognized it for what it is - a generalized striving for an image of independence rather than an attack on the United States.

American officials will probably find Echeverria’s successor more congenial. Although, under the Mexican system, little is known about a President‘s policies until he takes office, Lopez Portillo, former Secretary of the Treasury, strikes outsiders as a leader less concerned with Latin rhetoric than with good sense. But, even so, it would be foolish to expect him to alter the general trend of Echeverria’s policy of trying to diminish Mexican dependence on the United States.

Relations between a powerful country and its weak neighbor are always difficult; if Mexico is touchy, the United States is obtuse. Only insensitivity and lack of concern can account for Ford’s having left with Echeverria the false impression that the United States would vote for the charter. It is obvious that the relationship needs, from the American side, more understanding of the Mexican position.

A high-ranking Mexican Government official told me not long ago that Echeverria is trying to erase the great economic and social problem of Mexico - the unjust distribution of wealth - in a peaceful, reformist way, before it is too late to avert a radical solution. This was to the advantage of the United States, the official said, yet only a few people in the U.S. Government understood Echeverria and his policies.

Stanley Meisler is a correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, now stationed in Mexico.