Offering often-surprising insights into American foreign policy, this book is the first comprehensive analysis of the U.S. Government's public statements and actions regarding democracy in Mexico. Spanning the years from the Central American crisis of the Reagan administration through the 1995 Mexican peso crisis, Mazza uses revealing interviews with many of the leading U.S. policy officials to probe beneath the surface of American foreign policy toward Mexico and question the set of aging, unexamined assumptions under which it operates. By chronicling and analyzing how the United States has treated democracy in Mexico, she adds a new understanding to United States-Mexico relations and to the nature of U.S. policy-making on democracy.