Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico.

Limits to Friendship: The United States and Mexico, by Robert A. Pastor and Jorge G. Castaneda (Knopf, 415 pp., $24.95)

EVERY NEWLY ELECTED U.S. President since Polk has announced after his inauguration that he intends to establish friendlier relations with Mexico. And in that effort every U.S. President has failed. Relations have varied slightly over time, but the range only extends from frosty to downright frigid. Even when the United States is rushing a multi-billion-dollar rescue package to snatch Mexico from the brink of financial collapse, as in 1982, Mexico remains, in Alan Riding's apt phrase, a "distant neighbor." And its rulers, as the authors make plain, intend to keep it that way. The reasons and emotions behind that attitude are foremost among the many fascinating aspects of U.S.-Mexican relations described in Limits to Friendship. The authors know both cultures intimately. Pastor was a Latin American expert in the Carter Administration. Castaiieda is a brilliant young writer with top-level contacts in the Mexican government. The two write alternating chapters covering such topics as foreign policy, economic relations, and the social influences now moving the two countries toward uneasy convergence. Mexico's pro-Communist activities continually baffle, and often exasperate, the United States, but the authors explain why anti-Yanquismo is one of the three foundation stones of Mexican foreign policy. (The other two are non-intervention and self-determination.) Each of those principles is selectively applied. Mexico professes horror when the United States intervenes briefly in the Dominican Republic or Grenada, for example, but eagerly gives financial and moral support to Communist guerrillas fighting to overthrow the honestly elected government of El Salvador. At present, the United States' main interest in Mexico is to help it avoid collapse. It may come as a surprise to Americans, therefore, to learn that Mexico even now regards the U.S. as a greater threat to its independence than the Soviet Union, which continues to send shiploads of sophisticated weapons to its Latin American satellites. Limits to Friendship should be of interest to scholars on both sides of the border, and of especial value to business executives and editors who need to understand Mexico's current struggle to break out of its obsolete one-party political mold without violent revolution.