MEXICO CITY, Feb. 6 — These are busy days in Mexico City. Last month Pope John Paul II made his way here through the smog, to the applause of millions. Next week, President Carter will arrive for a state visit, and be will be followed by President Giscard d'Estaing of France.
This tells us something about the growing influence of Mexico, particularly since it became an oil‐exporting country. But it also reminds us of the many unresolved problems that threaten to divide the United States and Mexico unless they adjust to the startling new facts on what the Pope called “the continent of hope.”
Mr. Carter is not coming here to • deal with the price of Mexican gas though that is an immediate and divisive problem — but to deal with the price of neglect. After years of preoccupation with issues on other continents, Washington is finally paying more attention to the neighbors on its own continent — to the threat of separation by Quebec in Canada and the emergence of a wholly different Mexico across the Rio Grande.
Mexico is now the most populous Spanish‐speaking country in the world, and the second most populous country in Latin America. Brazil is first. According to the local joke, “Brazil is a nation of the future — and always will be.” Mexico makes no claims to. be number one in Latin America, but it is moving up and demanding to be heard.
It is now the United States's leading market in Latin America and our fourth best customer in the world. According to the latest estimates (made by Texas technicians to assure the support of world bankers), Mexico has proven oil resources of 40 billion barrels, and a potential production of 200 billion barrels (Saudi Arabia had proven capacity of 150 billion). But only 10 to 15 percent of Mexico's territory has been explored for oil so far.Continue reading the main story
Mexico's main problem is that its production of oil is a theory while its production of children is a fact. Its population, less than 20 million in 1945, is now about 64 million. The rate of unemployment is almost 25 percent and of underemployment almost double that. And even on the Government's most optimistic estimates of its birth‐control campaign, the population of Mexico will be around 110 million at the turn of the century.
These are the larger questions President Lopez Portillo wants to discuss with President Carter. He believes the problem of the illegal Mexican aliens in the United States is only one important part of many larger issues of trade, financing, exchange relations, monetary problems, and U.S. contraband trade into Mexico.
“The first thing,” he told me “is to to state the problem within its proper framework and dimension. Then there's the possibility of solving it. Mexico does not wish to export workers, it wishes to export goods.”
There is a lot of anti‐Yankee feeling in this country — much more than is realized in the United States. What we call the Mexican War is taught in the schools to this day here as “the unfair war” that deprived Mexico of half its territory. And the discovery of oil and gas seems to have increased Mexican resentment of U.S. domination.
This is apparent in the press here, but Mr. Lopez Portillo, a scholar, novelist and former Minister of Finance, is very careful to avoid inflaming these popular anti‐Yanqui sentiments. He hears all the speculations and controversies about the price of gas, about the flight of young Mexicans to the United States, about abortion and the church and the state.
Give us time, he says. Let us talk, yes, about the immediate critical problems, but also about the middleand long‐range problems. “Everything has a solution,” he says. “A problem stated in its proper terms always finds a solution ... No surprise, no abuse, no imbalance, no situation that is not dignified. If we do have such a climate, then everything can be solved.”
On the immediate U.S.‐Mexican controversy over the price of Mexican gas, Washington's position is that:
(1 Mexican gas at an appropriate price is a desirable source of supplemental U.S. energy supply;
The price of distillate fuel oil in New York Harbor is not an appropriate price for Mexican gas.
41 The residual fuel oil price is the highest possible competitive price because it is the substitute fuel for Mexican gas in U.S. and Mexican markets.
41 The higher the Mexican price, the greater the transfer of residual gas consumer price benefits to Mexican gas producers.
gl Finally, in the U.S. Government's view, premature gas sales at disadvantageous prices in the United States will not be in the long‐term interest of relations between the two countries.
But in spite of Washington's preoccupation with all these technicalities, President Lopez Portillo, as I hear him, wants to leave all these questions to the technicians and talk to President Carter about the history and philosophy of the two nations, even about the possibility of a North American customs union or common market, and what can be done to establish a better means of working out common problems.
“Let's not be in too much of hurry,” he says. “Then things don't go
too well. Napoleon once said to his valet: ‘Please help me to dress slowly because I'm in a hurry.-Continue reading the main story