The Last Good Neighbor

With The Last Good Neighbor Eric Zolov considers Mexican foreign policy at the broadest level during the “global sixties.” The book begins in 1958 with a push to reclaim geopolitical relevance and a “resurrection” of Lázaro Cárdenas. The ensuing seven chapters examine a foreign policy aimed at diminishing US power by diversifying global relationships, a foreign policy forged within and with influence over domestic politics that rose under Adolfo López Mateos and declined under Gustavo Díaz Ordaz. While Zolov finds this policy, as do other scholars, Janus-faced, he differs on the theme of Mexican diplomacy's efficacy and function. For Zolov, Mexican foreign policy was not primarily a mechanism for reconciling the opposing pressures of a domestic Left and a neighboring international Right. It was instead a “global pivot,” a “grand strategy aimed at counterbalancing—though not dislodging—the preponderant influence of the United States” (p. 3). This pivot worked, according to Zolov: Mexico ended up “elevated . . . into being a nation of consequence” (p. 3).In terms of international relations, this successful outcome is a difficult argument to make; Mexico had been a more significant player in the past. It got away with expropriating US land and oil, volubly opposed both fascists in Spain and communists in Finland, and lodged a major government-in-exile. After World War II Mexicans parlayed alliance with the winners into chairing a commission at Bretton Woods responsible for writing development as a goal into the United Nations (UN) Charter and for achieving veto power for smaller countries in the International Monetary Fund (IMF). By contrast, Mexico achieved little substantial in the 1950s and 1960s. Having lost the main battles for structuring international relations—the big powers ran the World Bank, the IMF, and the UN Security Council—Mexico's one avenue for true global clout, formal membership in the Non-Aligned Movement, was closed by the United States through financial blackmail. It is hard to see Mexico as “a de facto leader within the Non-Aligned Movement” when the government abstained from sending official delegations to meetings and denied being “impartial or neutral” (pp. 251, 161). When the chips were down, Mexico was with the United States.But the United States did surprisingly little for Mexico. As Zolov notes, the economics of the bilateral relationship were unimpressive: while the (admittedly US-led) World Bank extended sizable loans, the Alliance for Progress delivered paltry sums in aid. After identifying the Bracero Program as central to Mexican development, the United States ended it in 1964. Mexico's quest to diversify trade relationships, founded on the “double-edged anchor” of living next door to the United States, failed (p. 239). Mexicans' South-South relationships rarely prospered, and visits by Tito and Charles de Gaulle were feel-good exercises without policy results. Mexico spent over 30 years without a seat on the Security Council. Mexican visibility and soft power flourished, spanning film exports, art, tourism, and the start of an impressive run of international gatherings. Hard power did not.On the domestic front, Zolov's extensive research underpins two important arguments concerning the influence of geopolitics on 1960s Mexico. First, there is more to the period than Cuba and Tlatelolco, and alongside the violence central to Anglophone historiography, “aspiration” needs full credit in explaining regime endurance (p. 1). The leftist Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, often seen as a Cuban-inspired threat to the government, functioned more to contain opposition than to confront the state. At the peak of Mexico's activist foreign policy the same applied to internationalist intellectuals. The revolutionary Old Left epitomized by Vicente Lombardo Toledano might have been limping toward the sunset, but the New Left challenging it shared some of its ambiguities regarding the realities and potential of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). It is difficult to understand foreign policy as a sop to the Left when López Mateos's activism peaked just as the Left fragmented. (In the seventies the story was different.) Simultaneously hostile and useful to the government, intellectuals like Carlos Fuentes constituted a Gramscian civil society: critical but in the final analysis a bulwark of the state.Second, Cárdenas was self-consciously central to this constrained opposition. Zolov does a great deal to link the private chats with presidents and foreign leaders, public statements, and overseas tours through which the ex-president influenced both the government and the Left. In international events such as the 1961 Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace he held an increasingly radical Left in peaceful coexistence with the ruling party. When that Left, on either domestic or international levels, moved beyond the bounds of the priísta possible, he withdrew. Unlike Plutarco Elías Calles, Cárdenas could not make big things happen in his postpresidential career, but he could stop big things from happening, and he did so to sustained effect.The upshot is a history that convincingly shows the influence of foreign affairs on Mexico but is less convincing in terms of Mexico's influence on foreign affairs. López Mateos was no Tito, Nehru, Sukarno, or Nyerere. And yet returns from the United States for this last-ditch moderation were not that great. The first Good Neighbors did quite well out of that doctrine; the last Good Neighbor did not

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