The Foreign Service Journal, September 2004

B OOKS Mexican Memories The U.S. and Mexico: The Bear and the Porcupine Jeffrey Davidow, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2004, $24.95, paper- back, 254 pages. R EVIEWED BY T ED W ILKINSON Every few years, American read- ers can reasonably expect to see a first-rate book by an old hand with expertise in U.S.-Mexican relations. Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors (1986) immediately comes to mind, along with Sydney Weintraub’s Marriage of Convenience (1991), Andres Oppenheimer’s Bordering on Chaos (1998), and Clint Smith’s Inevitable Partnership (2000). Jeff Davidow’s The U.S. and Mexico: The Bear and the Porcupine sets a new, even higher standard. The most recent of seven career FSOs to serve as chief of mission in Mexico City during the past half-cen- tury (including John Negroponte), Davidow has given us an engrossing, revealing, vivid and, at times, hilarious account of four historic years (1998- 2002) that spanned two Mexican pres- idencies — the last two-and-a-half years of Ernesto Zedillo and the first year-and-a-half of Vicente Fox. (President Bush had observed Davidow at work from his office in Austin while still governor, and while visiting Fox’s ranch in Guanajuato early in his administration, asked him to stay on for what turned into a four- year term. When Davidow left Mexico in the summer of 2002, he was the longest-serving ambassador in a U.S. diplomatic post.) It was a tenure replete with both triumphs (such as PAN candidate Vicente Fox’s election to the presi- dency in 2000, ending more than 70 years of continuous PRI rule) and tragedies (such as the 9/11 attacks’ disastrous impact on Mexico’s agen- da with the U.S.). Davidow deftly takes us through the last years of the Zedillo adminis- tration, the dramatic 2000 election, and his own efforts to avoid feeding Mexican paranoia about real or sup- posed U.S. intervention. But the highlight of the book comes when Fox takes office, raising hopes of a transformed bilateral relationship. Both leaders were former state gov- ernors, businessmen in cowboy boots, and Christian conservatives, who could sit down without inter- preters and level with each other about real problems on the ground. Indeed, at their first meeting, Bush and Fox quickly reached an agree- ment in principle on Fox’s top agen- da item, setting up a task force to deal with the spectrum of Mexican immigration issues. In return, Fox agreed to make up the shortfalls in Rio Grande water allocations to Texas, a burning issue on Bush’s home ground. So what went wrong? Certainly the 9/11 attacks made everything much more difficult, but Davidow believes the problem began earlier. Both leaders were naïve, and thought they could deliver far more than they could. As he ruefully observes, “Important and powerful political forces did not favor change. They rarely do.” The Mexican side in the bilateral talks, led by Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda, a charm- ing political maverick, didn’t make things any easier by insisting on “the whole enchilada” of migration reforms at one time. Similarly, Fox’s efforts to fulfill his promise to deliv- er Rio Grande Treaty-mandated allotments of water came to naught when the relevant northern state governors found ways to ignore them. Davidow actually begins his account in the distant past, describ- ing an apocryphal Aztec codex that tells how the porcupine became the Davidow offers a far-reaching, non-partisan action program for improving U.S.- Mexican relations that would serve us well no matter which party wins in November. S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 87