The Shadow of El Norte; The country is now so inextricably intertwined with the United States that whoever wins the tight election will find his actions constrained.("So Far From God: Modern Mexico in the Shadow of the United States")

Byline: Joseph Contreras (This story is adapted from the book "Tan Lejos de Dios: El México Moderno a la Sombra de Estados Unidos" ("So Far From God: Modern Mexico in the Shadow of the United States"), published last month in Spanish by Grijalbo.)

This year's presidential race in Mexico is starting to look a lot like the star-crossed U.S. election of 2000. Former Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, once so sure of his eventual victory that he skipped the first of two televised debates, has seen his lead in the polls vanish. Rival Felipe Calderon of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) has clawed back into the race with a series of negative TV ads bashing Lopez Obrador as a populist and a lackey of Venezuelan President Hugo ChAvez's. At the end of an inconclusive second debate last week, Lopez Obrador struck back by accusing Calderon of having steered contracts to his brother-in-law while serving as Energy minister from September 2003 to May 2004. Calderon has hotly denied the charges; polls show the two candidates in a statistical dead heat as the campaign enters the homestretch. The July 2 vote could well produce the same sort of photo finish that ushered in weeks of legal wrangling north of the border before George W. Bush was proclaimed president--and like Bush, the Mexican winner will likely inherit a deeply polarized Congress and citizenry.

And that is only one of the ways in which Mexico resembles its neighbor to the north, for good or ill. The next president will inherit a nation so inextricably tied to the United States as to be a de facto economic colony. Mexican exports to El Norte account for more than 90 percent of its overall international trade, and the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994 unleashed a flood of American capital into Mexico. Annual direct U.S. investment swelled from nearly $5 billion in 1994 to more than $21 billion by 2001. The dominance of American companies is epitomized by Citigroup, which owns what was once Mexico's largest bank, and Wal-Mart, which ranks as the country's largest private-sector employer, with upwards of 140,000 Mexicans on its payroll.

Against that backdrop the successes or failures of any future Mexican president hinge in good measure on the economic well-being of the United States and the policies of the administration in Washington. Calde-ron, 43, a Harvard-educated champion of the free-trade policies that successive Mexican governments have embraced since the dawn of the NAFTA era, has tried to spin that fact to his advantage, implying that he would have the best chance of smoothing relations with the Great Colossus to Mexico's advantage. But even Lopez Obrador, 52, will be constrained from baiting his counterpart in the White House in the chest-thumping manner of ChAvez. The fact is that Mexico may not be the 51st state--but its fate is now linked to America's like no other nation in the world.

From top to bottom, the country is becoming ever more Americanized in its society, media, lifestyle and even appearance. The principal engine driving that process has been the influx of U.S. investment, which has introduced dozens of retail chains and thousands of new products in recent years. Mexico's consumers now regularly shop at Home Depot and Costco, many of its top-drawer corporate executives boast M.B.A.s from elite U.S. graduate business schools, and its Yuppies pepper their conversations with words like "bye" and "wanna-bes," and increasingly settle for a Big Mac or a Subway Veggie Delite instead of the traditional three-hour Mexican lunch. "I enjoy American sitcoms more than Mexican ones," admits Mary Carmen Mendez, a 24-year-old university student from the city of Puebla. "Nearly all the movies we see are from over there, there's a tendency to work ever-longer hours and I feel slightly invaded. Yet it seems there's no way of stopping it."

Some of the social ills typically associated with the United States have also infected modern Mexico. Its citizens have the world's second highest rate of obesity, and more and more of its teenagers get wasted on crack, ecstasy, crystal methamphetamine and ...