Mexican Memories, American Schemes : ...

No country affects the United States as much as Mexico. No other country is more pervasively influenced by the United States, in turn. Few bilateral relationships in the world are more complex, or more difficult to manage.

Millions of persons engage in an intricate web of transactions between Mexico and the United States, most of them legal, but many not. U.S. corporations and banks have invested billions of dollars in Mexico; Mexicans have stashed billions in U.S. bank accounts and real estate; and Mexican workers in the United States send $2 billion a year to relatives at home. While thousands of Mexicans produce cars for the U.S. market, hundreds more take part in a massive trade in stolen vehicles. U.S. citizens cross into Mexico to obtain inexpensive medical care and legal medicines, but the trade in illegal narcotics is many times larger and more lucrative.

The two governments deal with each other constantly on a host of issues--clashing or cooperating on matters ranging from the price of gas to the size of tomatoes, trading rules to oil spills, ground water to sewage disposal. Domestic policy choices in each country--on budgets, taxes, welfare, labor, education and immigration--significantly affect its neighbor.

The intermestic (combining inter national and do mestic ) quality of U.S.-Mexico relations is nowhere more evident than in Southern California: the primary destination of Mexican immigrants and tourists, the main source of investments in Mexico’s assembly ( maquiladora ) industries, the key beneficiary of Mexican flight capital, the largest market for illegal drugs from Mexico. Spanish-speaking students, most of them of Mexican origin, are a majority in the public schools of Los Angeles County.

A “silent integration” is taking place on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico frontier. The economics, politics, and culture--even the cuisine--of the border region is becoming homogeneous, and different from the rest of the two countries. But while this interpenetration proceeds apace, conflicts between the two governments have also been multiplying. Bilateral tensions in the 1980s have been sharper than at any time since the 1920s. Frictions have intensified over immigration, drugs, debt, trade, investment and foreign policy differences, especially in Central America.

In “Limits to Friendship” two accomplished scholar-practitioners of U.S.-Mexico relations analyze why the relationship is so often frustrating and conflictive. Forty-one-year-old Robert A. Pastor, a Harvard-trained political scientist, was the Latin America specialist on the National Security Council during the Carter years; Jorge G. Castaneda, 35, the son of a former Mexican foreign minister, a graduate of Princeton and the University of Paris, is already Mexico’s best-known commentator on international affairs.

Precociously well-established, the two self-confident, astute, and exceptionally articulate interlocutors are well-matched in this book. Writing alternate and reciprocal chapters, they vividly illustrate that Mexico and the United States are divided not only by vast asymmetries of power but also by a shared history each nation understands and remembers very differently.

Each author personifies predominant national characteristics that are at the heart of the relationship. Pastor, an energetic problem-solver, argues that history need not be a barrier to U.S.-Mexico relations. He sees mutual advantage in closer economic relations and tells Mexicans that they have little to fear from foreign investment because, after all, foreign investment in the United States now accounts for a larger share of the U.S. economy than U.S. investment does in Mexico’s.

Castaneda asserts that “Pastor’s chapters underestimate the strength and currency of Mexican nationalism particularly in its anti-American bent.” Castaneda twice expresses his concern about threats to Mexico’s “national soul,” a concept and phrase far from Pastor’s discourse.

Castaneda reveals a deeply felt distrust of the United States. He derides the U.S. tendency to push Mexico to do “for its own good” what the United States sees as in its best interest. He regards the maquiladora industries not as an outward-looking sector of the American economy, but as “an extension of the American economy on Mexican soil.” He fears that privatization of the Mexican economy, forced by greater integration with the world economy, “may well turn out to be an Americanization.”

Castaneda’s telling criticisms of Pastor’s chapters effectively show why it is difficult to reconcile the Mexican and U.S. perspectives. But Castaneda is much less effective--and thus perhaps most illuminating--at conveying a coherent policy prescription of his own. Emotionally, he resists greater economic ties between Mexico and the United States, but analytically he appears to see them as inevitable. He notes that “ties between the two nations, while manageable, are not really improvable,”--but he joins Pastor in a final chapter of recommendations aimed precisely at improving these relations. Castaneda dances elegantly up to and around, but never quite addresses, the central question he himself poses: “Should Mexico resist integration? Or should it manage, govern, and administer that integration, with full awareness of its inevitability?”

Perhaps because Castaneda is unable to resolve his own ambivalence--or because he reflects a fundamental national division of opinion--the joint policy conclusions Pastor and Castaneda offer are not particularly original or exciting. By far the most arresting of their proposals is confined to two paragraphs and is not well-developed; almost as a throwaway line, they assert that “the moment is ripe to consider a package deal that would involve many concessions and demands by both nations in trade, energy, intelligence and security, debt, capital flight and immigration.” But this bold and tantalizing suggestion is not further developed, and is undercut by much of Castaneda’s argument.

Whereas Pastor and Castaneda sought primarily to illumine the differences between Mexico and the United States, the Bilateral Commission on the Future of United States-Mexican relations worked hard to overcome the differences.

The commission’s report, “The Challenge of Interdependence,” is an impressive product, given the familiar limits of consensual reports, as compounded by the particular difficulties of the U.S.-Mexico relationship. On most issues--economics, migration, drugs, and education--the commission was able to agree on a shared analysis, no small accomplishment.

As is common in commission reports, many of the recommendations are calls for yet more study--and some of the prose is ponderously prudent and balanced to a fault. But the report is surprisingly forthright in recommending that Mexico’s debt-service obligations be limited to levels consistent with the country’s growth; in proposing a two-step approach toward expanded free trade; in urging Mexico to adopt a more open and consistent policy to attract foreign investment; and in favoring a bilateral accord on migration that would both increase the legal Mexican migration to the United States and provide a long-term temporary workers program.

“The Challenge of Interdependence,” the first such effort by U.S. and Mexican nongovernmental leaders to seek joint responses to shared problems, suggests by its very existence that a corner is being turned in relations between the two countries. U.S. Because U.S.-Mexico relations are in such great flux, neither “Limits to Friendship” nor “The Challenge of Interdependence” is likely to be the last word on this topic. The two books, however, represent a major advance over anything written before. No one interested in our most challenging international tie should be without either volume.