FLAP OVER DRUG WAR DIVIDING MEXICO, U.S.

Byline: Sam Dillon The New York Times

The furor over Mexico's troubled anti-drug efforts and President Clinton's endorsement of them has driven a wedge between the two countries in recent days, forcing Clinton and President Ernesto Zedillo to balance their quest for cordial relations against the need to satisfy disgruntled domestic backers.

The abrasive debate is grinding down the two leaders' freedom to maneuver. Clinton, who faces a rebellion in Congress, has been compelled to press Mexico to step up its drug war and allow a heightened U.S. involvement in it. But Zedillo cannot sign off on the Clinton administration requests without incurring the wrath of increasingly assertive Mexican nationalists.

This excruciating dynamic became clear after a House committee voted by a wide margin Thursday to override Clinton's full certification of Mexico's drug efforts. The vote came after a tumultuous debate in which lawmakers attacked Mexico's drug program and even Zedillo's governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, and set the stage for more fireworks next week.

Zedillo, visibly irritated, responded with unusually stern language in a speech hours later, vowing to ``act with all necessary energy to defend the dignity and sovereignty of the Mexicans.''

Zedillo was not specific about how Mexico might react if Congress makes good on its threat to reverse the certification. But Zedillo's tough statement and the heated congressional language in Washington underlined the explosive tensions that are developing between the two countries five weeks before Clinton is to make his first state visit to Mexico.

Clinton obviously would like that trip to be a triumphant parade focused on Mexico's newly robust economy, partly because of the $20 billion bailout loan he arranged in 1995, which Mexico has repaid.

Instead, the narcotics threat is threatening to dominate the two-day visit. And after the stunning arrest of Mexico's top drug official last month for collaboration with traffickers, White House aides have got to be concerned about the trip's potential for unpleasant surprises.

On Wednesday, senior White House advisers including Samuel Berger, Clinton's national security adviser, visited Zedillo here. Both governments have insisted that their agenda focused on logistical details of the president's tour. But Berger's visit was seen here as a new attempt to squeeze concessions from Zedillo, concessions that are viewed in dramatically different ways north and south of the border.

For instance, U.S. officials want Mexico to extradite Mexican citizens indicted on trafficking charges in the United States. Americans view Mexican resistance as little more than protecting criminals by subterfuge. But Mexican law prohibits the extradition of citizens except in ``special circumstances.''

The Clinton administration has also pressed Mexico to permit American drug agents here to carry firearms for self-protection. Mexicans view the request as an attempt to turn the agents, whose role here is limited to information gathering, into an elite foreign police force.

Perhaps most of all, American officials have pressed the Zedillo government to arrest the country's major traffickers. On Thursday, more than 200 soldiers invaded a Guadalajara hotel, apparently in hopes of seizing Amado Carrillo Fuentes, perhaps the most powerful trafficker. Five unidentified men were detained, but not Carrillo Fuentes.

That makes it appear that Clinton has been unable to win any clear concessions, and Congress is accusing him of being soft on Mexico.

During the debate Thursday in Congress, one administration official warned lawmakers that the threat to reverse the administration's full certification could backfire by cutting off the possibility of ``working with our friends in Mexico.''

``You have the wrong friends down there,'' shot back Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C. ``The only way that I know of having the correct friends is to provoke a crisis there, because until you get rid of the PRI, until you get democracy, you'll never get rid of the corruption.''