The next book collected in Waugh Abroad was Robbery Under Law, subtitled "The Mexican Object-Lesson." Waugh did travel to Mexico for a few months in 1938 and wrote this book immediately thereafter, it is true. But this, sadly, is not a travel book. It's a tedious, tendentious screed that is probably only of interest as an example of what the kind of right-wing people who thought fascists were really good at building roads and keeping the lesser races down but still were going too far in the whole government-controlling-the-economy-thing considered important in 1938.
Mexico, at the time, had been through a century or more of turmoil since independence, and had had a sequence of corrupt and/or incompetent leaders, who each in turn stole what they could and either fled or the country, or, more often, were murdered by their successors. In 1938, they were officially Marxist and had suppressed the Catholic Church, two aspects of their society that Waugh, of course, hated with every fiber of his being. So, being a professional writer, he therefore spent over two hundred tightly-set pages writing against those things at great and deeply boring length. Let me be clear: it seems like Mexico was a horrible place, run by thieves and charlatans for their own benefit, and had been (with slightly different fools and charlatans, each in their turn) for decades at that point. But the things Waugh was most annoyed about are the nationalization of the oil business and the breaking up of the large estates of the rural aristocracy. And one is hard-pressed, a hundred years later, to care about either of those things if one has anything like a modern political sensibility - even a very right-wing modern political sensibility.
I was hoping for stories of Waugh traveling through another corrupt, odd country and telling the reader about it. There is a quick list of sketched moments in one chapter here: all of the rest is argumentation. And, again, unless you're the kind of interwar Anglo-Catholic Waugh was - not necessarily deeply racist, but satisfied with the hierarchies of the world, since he's near the top of them, and sure that democracy is good for the right kind of peoples, the ones with mostly pale skins - you are not going to agree with a lot of what he says.
In fact, when he tries to cover the expected objections to his position, he inadvertently implies that things were pretty horrible. Oh, sure, he says, some bishops probably abused their power, especially far from the capital - how could it be otherwise? - and, of course, the upper ranks of the priesthood was mostly made up of aristocratic younger sons, who are used to living in riches and splendor, so you can't be surprised that they continued to amass great wealth and spend it on themselves, even once they were in religious orders. This goes on in several directions, throughout the book, and the astute reader gets a good sense of what Waugh would be happy with: the stable, organized world in which people like him are firmly on top and the Indians - he says, magnanimously, that they're not necessarily mentally inferior to "the white races," that Mexicans as a "race" have interbred between the Spanish and the "Indians" quite a lot (and he doesn't even more than very slightly hint that might be the source of their ongoing political problems), and some of those not-purely-Spanish chappies have even become quite good priests! - know their place down at the bottom of the heap.
It's too bad, because clearly Mexico was a horrible place in 1938. Waugh, though, is not the one who can describe those horrors in a way that anyone to the left of Roderick Spode will agree with. I would only recommend reading this if you've already gotten through all of the good Waugh, and probably some of the other all-too-Catholic pieces as well. Or, of course, if you are a fanatically right-wing Anglo-Catholic with fascist tendencies: it'll be right up your street.
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