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MEXICO CITY — Just after Vicente Fox won the Mexican presidency in 2000, relations between the United States and Mexico were never cozier. Months later, President Bush flew to Fox's Guanajuato ranch on his first foreign trip in 2001 and the two new presidents talked about cowboy boots and trade.

But the 9/11 terror attacks focused Bush's attention on the Middle East, and a long-anticipated immigration accord was derailed. Even as relations between their governments have become prickly at times, Bush administration officials say Fox's government has been the closest to the United States in the history of the two countries.

The future tenor of the U.S.-Mexican relationship will depend on the July 2 Mexican presidential election to replace Fox.

The two front-runners, conservative Felipe Calderon and leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, bring starkly different attitudes toward the United States and the Bush administration.

Most recent polls have put the pair in a tie, Reuters reported. Roberto Madrazo, of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was in third.

The Harvard-educated Calderon, 43, candidate of Fox's National Action Party (an ideological kin to the U.S. Republicans), promises a continuation of Fox's free-trade and business-friendly policies.

Like Fox, he is unlikely to rock the boat too much when it comes to promoting immigration reform in the United States.

Former Mexico City Mayor Lopez Obrador, 52, a former civil-rights activist for Mexico's indigenous people, is much more of a wild card.

"Mexico will not be anyone's puppet!" he thundered during a recent debate.

Lopez Obrador of the Revolutionary Democratic Party has the reputation of a hard-left populist. Should he win, his victory would be seen by many analysts as yet another in a wave of anti-U.S. leaders sweeping to power in Latin America.

His critics say he'll be an incendiary figure much like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, but whose country borders the United States.

"The perception is exaggerated," said Roderic Camp, Mexico expert at Claremont McKenna College in California.

The truth is that Lopez Obrador, instead of stirring up a hornets' nest of anti-U.S. sentiment in Mexico, has largely made nice with the United States on the campaign trail.

"We aspire to a relationship of mutual respect and collaboration with the United States," Lopez Obrador said recently in an oft-repeated and most un-Chavez-like refrain.

Analysts say that even if Lopez Obrador wanted to disengage from the United States, the realities of the relationship make it impossible.

Mexico is simply too tied to the United States to snub its powerful neighbor — linked by a common border, millions of Mexican immigrants and their descendants living in the United States and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"(Lopez Obrador) knows that Mexico's most important relationship in the international arena is with the United States," said Rossana Fuentes, managing editor of the Spanish-language edition of Foreign Affairs magazine. "He will not be as dumb as to say things to make him look like a radical vis-à-vis the United States."

But while Lopez Obrador or Calderon would likely continue a close relationship with the United States — Calderon because he wants to, Lopez Obrador out of necessity — the leftist candidate is more likely to pursue a closer relationship with the rest of Latin America, experts say.

"Lopez Obrador is far more comfortable looking south than looking north," Fuentes said.

When it comes to migration issues, Calderon and Lopez Obrador have similar postures.

Both decry a potential wall along the border and call instead for greater investment in areas of Mexico that send the most migrants north. Both say they will create more jobs to stem the tide. And both are likely to be as impotent as Fox has been in influencing the debate in the United States.

Publicly at least, U.S. officials have taken a neutral stance on the election, but most experts believe the Bush administration and U.S. investment community would be far more comfortable with Calderon, who has made pursuing foreign investment a pillar of his campaign.

Ford Motor Co. reportedly considered announcing a major investment in Mexico before the election in hopes of giving Calderon a boost at the polls.

But Lopez Obrador, even with a platform of heavy social spending and state intervention in the economy, hasn't sent foreign capital running for cover.

Lopez Obrador is often criticized, much as Bush was when he took office, for being naive and incurious when it comes to world affairs.

If elected, Lopez Obrador would break a long tradition of U.S.-educated Mexican presidents, and he has made only a handful of trips outside Mexico. He raised eyebrows earlier this month on Mexican MTV when he almost proudly declared that he does not speak English.

"What he's telling us is that he really doesn't care that much about foreign policy," said Jorge Schiavon, professor of international relations at Mexico City's Economic Research and Teaching Center.

George Grayson, government professor at the College of William and Mary who recently published a biography of Lopez Obrador, says Lopez Obrador "paints the world in black and white."

"He's representing the forces of good and he's fighting the forces of evil, epitomized by neo-liberal economics and globalization," Grayson said. "He doesn't just simply represent poor people, he incarnates their struggle."