American Diplomacy, 3/21/2013
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 Estévez’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 Estévez 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.