During President Echeverría's sexenio [term of office], Mexico took a leading role in demands for a new international economic order.

During the 1970s, Mexico challenged the United States position in Central America and led a concerted regional effort that excluded the United States to bring a peaceful end to regional conflicts.

During the 1980s, Mexico was highly critical of United States policy in El Salvador and, along with the French government, called for formal recognition of the Salvadoran guerrillas in the peace process.

Of course, the huge disparity between individual per-capita income of the two countries has also led to many pressures between the nations, particularly the lightning-rod issues of immigration and NAFTA. I'm not going to discuss those here, because these are the two topics most Americans are familiar with when thinking about Mexico.

Making relations more of a challenge, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans residing in the United States have long had to suffer discrimination, social status challenges, stereotyping, racial profiling, and even lynchings. In "How Immigration is Rousing the Zealots" in TIME Magazine, Jeffrey Ressner reports a 33% increase in American hate groups in the U.S., largely due to anti-immigration sentiment.

Mexican security and high-level access to technology skills
Mexico also operates a powerful security agency, similar to our CIA. Throughout much of its history, the Centro de Investigación y Seguridad Nacional (or CISEN) had a somewhat shady reputation, according to Ricardo Sandoval in the Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service:

In the alphabet soup of the world's intelligence services, Mexico's CISEN is best known as a secretive espionage arm used by presidents and political strongmen to intimidate opponents, watch over the media and maintain power.

CISEN has far to go before it sheds its dark past: It was formed in the mid-1980s from the ashes of the despised Federal Security Department. That secret police agency was implicated in everything from the "dirty war" against opponents of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the assassination of Enrique "Kiki" Camarena of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Many of those secret agents passed into the CISEN ranks and sowed the seeds for Mexicans' fear and contempt of the agency. There are critics who suspect CISEN has targeted journalists and intellectuals for intimidation.

Speaking of shady pasts, the current President of Mexico, Felipe de Jesús Calderón Hinojosa has an unfortunate parallel in his career with that of U.S. President George W. Bush: a disputed election with results too close to call. The dispute with Calderón's election was possibly more problematic than even our own. Apparently, Calderón's brother-in-law, Diego Zavala, founded a software company named Hildebrando.