NEW YORK - Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski carried on a seven-year correspondence with a Mexican farmhand he had never met during his isolated life in the Montana woods, The New York Times reported today.

The farmhand, Juan Sanchez of Ojinaga in the Mexican state of Chihuahua, showed the Times copies of two of some 50 letters he said Kaczynski had sent him since 1988. Sanchez said he had thrown away or misplaced the rest.

The Times said Kaczynski used formal and precise Spanish as he wrote of his fascination with the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa and described how he scraped by in his mountain cabin with little money or food.

''I am fine here,'' ''Teodoro'' Kaczynski wrote on Nov. 28, 1995. ''I am poorer than ever, but I am in very good health, and that is more important than anything. As to my poverty, I have $53.01 exactly, barely enough to stave off hunger this winter without hunting rabbits for their meat.''

The Times said the correspondence is the first evidence that Kaczynski maintained any sustained relationships after he retreated to his Montana cabin, where federal agents say he continued to engage in the bombing campaign he began in 1978.

Kaczynski, 53, began writing to Sanchez, 68, after learning of him from his brother, David Kaczynski. David had met Sanchez in the early 1980s after buying property in the nearby Chalk Mountains of West Texas.

Sanchez told the Times that the letters never reflected an anarchist's hatred for a society shaped by high technology € the theme of the Unabomber's 35,000-word manifesto published last year by the Times and The Washington Post.

Nor did Kaczynski mention the 1990 suicide of his father or any trips away from Montana.