Echeverria: "Forming A New Nation"

Luis Echeverria Alvarez, 53, is Mexico's first reformist President in 30 years. Since his election in 1970, he has committed his administration to closing the economic gap between the poor and lagging rural population and the well-to-do urban classes. It is a race against time. Uncorrected, these inequities could plunge Mexico into a revolution potentially as traumatic as the bloody 1910 revolution that took over a million lives.

Echeverria's ambitious reform program, which includes modernizing governmental machinery, fighting corruption, uplifting the rural sector, and tax and banking reforms, has been opposed by businessmen and conservatives within his own party, the P.R.I. (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), not to mention Mexico's political bureaucracy. The President spends much time traveling round the country on what he calls giras de trabajo (working tours), during which he spends hours listening to the problems of campesinos and calling on the people to support his liberal reforms. He has also traveled more widely abroad than his predecessors, having visited 21 countries during four years in office.

In recent years, the U.S. has tended to take its southern neighbor pretty much for granted. That day may be over. The discovery of large oil reserves late last year has already enabled Mexico to become an important exporter of oil. But Mexico says it has no intention of joining OPEC, and Echeverria is on record as saying Mexico will sell its oil to whoever wishes to buy it.

Time Inc. Editor in Chief Hedley Donovan and Mexico City Bureau Chief Bernard Diederich interviewed Echeverria at Los Pinos, his official residence in wooded Chapultepec Park in the heart of Mexico City. "No longer is the President's residence a show place of expensive imported European furnishings as it has been in the past," cabled Diederich. "Instead, each of the public rooms is a permanent exhibition of folk art and crafts from all of Mexico's 31 states and territories. It is a fitting setting, for these days bare-legged Tarahumara Indians from the Sierra Madre or huarache-wearing campesinos from the state of Sonora in the north are just as likely to be found with Mexico's chief executive as local and foreign notables." Excerpts from the interview:

ON HIS ADMINISTRATION'S GOALS: The essential theme of this administration has been its policy of dialogue, of being open to the aspirations of all sectors --the campesinos, the workers, the students, the entrepreneurs--to say to them that the President must be a coordinator within the limits of freedom. We are engaged in the formation of a new nation. I've been only moderately reformist, unfortunately. I would have liked to have had more capabilities to stimulate the economy.

ON RELATIONS WITH THE U.S.: They are very good. But in daily economic relations--the problems of prices, imports and exports, possible investment, the conditions of acquiring technology--we in Latin America and particularly Mexico are confronted with a dilemma. We either open up to the economic investments, life-style and psychological attitudes, all for the economic development of the U.S.--in which case we are favoring a process of colonization--or we try to exploit our natural resources and seek alliances in our own self-interest.

I think that [Washington's] understanding of Mexico and the rest of Latin America has improved much in recent years, but the U.S. Government must consider the interests of the big American companies, and that creates a problem. I think we should say to them: "Look, seek out ways of cooperation with each country in a worldwide program of development." I have expanded our diplomatic relations and commercial exchanges [with countries other than the U.S.] in order not only to follow the model of development of the powerful American economy, but also to search for forms of [social] orchestration more in harmony with a poor people. We are looking for new markets outside the U.S.--in Western Europe, Japan, the People's Republic of China and other socialist countries.

ON OIL AND THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT: Mexico has taken no specific position on the Middle East conflict nor on the question of the sale of oil by Arab countries, although we benefit from the prices established by OPEC. However, we espouse the thesis of the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States [which Mexico sponsored in the United Nations].* This is really a proposition for a world of cooperation, a pacifist document to establish cooperation between the big industrial countries and the nonindustrialized ones.

ON MEXICO'S FUTURE: In the remaining two years of my term [he cannot by law succeed himself], I'm hoping to achieve more effective development of rural areas. That is our fundamental problem. But when there is a feeling that there are ways to deal with problems, there is the capacity to wait and a spirit of sacrifice, which is essential.

I would like to have as my successor a person who would continue with the reforms I have begun and carry them much further.

* The charter, which recognizes every nation's sovereignty over its natural resources and economic activities, was approved by the General Assembly in December by a vote of 120 to 6.

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