"Mexico Under Zedillo" is an excellent update toward the present of recent changes in Mexico for someone with a deep interest in Mexico and U.S.-Mexican relations. Quoting from the book's preface, "Mexico is a very different country from the Mexico of only a generation ago." The book provides a short but excellent overview of what has been happening in Mexican government, politics, economics and U.S.-Mexico relations over the last generation, but particularly over the last ten years. However, the book is not for someone without some previous knowledge of the history and politics of Mexico in this century.

Although the book's title is "Mexico Under Zedillo", it was written in 1997, and so only discusses the first three years of Ernesto Zedillo's six year term as President. His term ends with the election of a new President in July 2000.

The four chapters, each written by a different author, in this 122-page book are: Coping with Political Change; Crisis and Economic Change in Mexico; Political Dilemmas of Welfare Reform, and The New U.S.-Mexico Relationship. The first and last chapters on political change and the new U.S.-Mexico relationship are the best, because each presents a well-organized overview of their topic, and are readily understood by a non-specialist.

The book identifies many of the important changes taking place in Mexico including: increased political turmoil; reduced power of the Presidency; increased strength of the media; creation of an export oriented economy; diffusion of power to the states and to political parties other than the PRI; unequal economic development among Mexico's states; an increasing economic gap among classes; and "evidence of the penetration of drug interests into the political fabric" of the nation.

Two themes of Mexican change the book emphasizes are the closer and more complicated relations between the U.S. and Mexico because of NAFTA, and Mexico's overriding need to develop the "rule of law" to "ensure stability." Mexico is in a "transition" during Zedillo's Presidency, but at the moment no one knows to what.

This book is, above all, an eulogy made by a group of American academics with a conservative frame of mind of Cardoso's first term of government and his policies of privatization, de-regulamentation, social psending budget-cuts, and all other such pieces of IMF-favoured economic orthodoxy. Given the fact that: (1) just after the book was published, the Brazilian economy was hit by an speculative attack on the Real that sent it lingering during 1999;(2) despite the quick recovery attained, Brazil managed to increse her per capita income during Cardoso's rule at a smaller rate then during the already crisis-ridden 80s;(3) that the major ills of the Brazilian society (land and income concentration, deep destitution, rampant urban crime) remain untouched after Cardoso's 5 years in office - perhaps the authors should allow me not to be as positively impressed as they are (or were). This book is, however, a fine subject of study as a piece of ideological thinking.