The Relationship Through Their Eyes.

• Author: Wilkinson, Ted
• Position: 'U.S. Ambassadors to Mexico: The Relationship Through Their Eyes' - Book review

Dolia Estevez, U.S. Ambassadors to Mexico: The Relationship Through Their Eyes, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2013, ISBN: 978-1-938027-09-3, 152 pp., Download Free of Charge at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/Estevez_Amb_to_Mex.pdf

Shortly before my assignment in Mexico City thirty-some years ago, I met with an Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, who said that part of his job was to get annual approval from Secretary Vance of a list of key issues, on which he would prepare talking points for the Department's principals. The list went up with the usual: SALT, Middle East peace negotiations, the Cold War, etc. The list came back from the Secretary with only one notation: "Add Mexico."

The Assistant Secretary didn't have to look far to find the specific Mexican burrs under the Secretary's saddle. There was always something: drug-smuggling and extradition issues, oil supply and pricing, Mexico's refusal to turn its back on Castro, Mexico's vote for the "Zionism equals racism" resolution in the UNGA, constant needling from everywhere about regularizing the status of undocumented Mexicans in the U.S., etc.

Given our complex agenda with Mexico, loaded with irritants, one might have thought that there would be a careful and institutionalized process for selecting ambassadors, with a long period of preparation. To the contrary, Dolia Estevez's study of the last nine US ambassadors to Mexico, all living, shows how disparate their backgrounds were, how little preparation some of them had, and how short-term political considerations motivated the appointments of several of them. Her study also shows the growing challenges over the years from 1977 to 2011 of managing the largest or next-to-largest U.S. diplomatic mission in any foreign country while a host of US agencies increasingly pursued their own bilateral agendas with their counterparts in Mexico.

The author herself conducted interviews with eight of the nine living former US ambassadors. (Only James Pilliod was not up to being interviewed.) After covering US-Mexico relations for twenty years, and having drawn frequently on Embassy cables, Dolia Estevez wanted to get the ambassadors' personal reflections on the issues in the cables. The interviews are short and focused, and in some cases elicited remarkably frank answers. The result is a refreshingly straightforward survey of 30 years of US-Mexican relations.

One theme runs through all the...