[NV Greens] Fwd: Mexico: the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq

[Paul Etxeberri]

>
>"You Could See the Fear in Their Eyes"
>Mexico: the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq
>
>By  JOHN ROSS
>
>Counter Punch
>http://www.counterpunch.org/ross02212005.html
>February 21, 2005
>
>Mexico, which unlike its Central American  neighbors
>was never a member of George Bush's "Coalition  of the
>Willing", now has the largest contingent of any Latin
>nation fighting on the ground in Iraq--8000 Mexican and
>Mexican-descent  troops who voluntarily joined the U.S.
>armed forces.
>
>All Central American contingents  save for Salvador,
>which also has a considerable number of security  and
>construction personnel on the ground, have been
>withdrawn  from Iraq by their governments.
>
>Mexico's bellicose national  anthem speaks glowingly
>of "a soldier in each son of God"  and Mexico's sons
>have been marching off to wars--albeit U.S.  wars--
>since Pearl Harbor. Bush's doomed aggression in Iraq is
>no exception.
>
>50 miles north of Zacatecas  city, in a region that has
>been the traditional headwaters of  the great flood of
>"indocumentados" who have made it  to El Norte, the
>shrine to the Santo Nino de Atocha ("Holy Child of
>Atocha") is crowded with migrant families asking
>protection for their loved ones in this dangerous
>journey to  "the other side", with "plegarias"
>(prayers)  stamped on ornamental tin sheets or simply
>written out in long  hand on a sheet of school notebook
>paper.
>
>In every U.S. war that the  sons and now the daughters
>of Mexico have gone off to fight,  families have come
>here to the shrine to hang portraits of handsome  young
>men in U.S. dress military uniforms and ask the Santo
>Nino for his protection. Now, Iraq is much in evidence
>on the walls  here. Like many, the Medina Maldonado
>family has come to ask the Holy Child to keep their
>Jaime out of harm's way "especially  now that he is
>being sent to Iraq." The family of Jesus  Gutierrez
>Mercado asks "the favor" that he be brought home "sano
>y salvo" ('safe and sound') from  the American war.
>
>Just about half of the 110,000  Latinos (Puerto Ricans,
>Dominicans, Central Americans, Ecuadorians,  Mexicans)
>in the U.S. military are of Mexican descent, and 22,000
>out of the 37,000 non-citizens serving in anticipation
>of obtaining  U.S. citizenship, are similarly of the
>Mexican persuasion--most  of them smuggled into the
>U.S. as kids without legal documents.
>
>Because Latino troop numbers  (two thirds of all
>Latinos are Mexican) still do not match general
>population proportions, Mexican descent youth are
>pursued assiduously  by high school recruiters--the
>U.S. Marine Corps is particularly  aggressive and
>Mexicans now form 13% of that branch of service.
>
>Because Marine units from Camp  Pendleton in San Diego,
>which have high numbers of Mexican recruits,  led the
>initial invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and later were
>brought back to level Fallujah in November, the
>casualty rates  have come home painfully to Mexican
>communities on both sides  of the border.
>
>Of the first 1000 U.S. deaths  recorded in Iraq,
>almost all of them the lowest-ranked, poorest-paid,
>and worst trained troops, 122 were Latinos, about 70 of
>them  of Mexican descent. Their deaths in a war that
>most Mexicans strongly oppose have triggered
>complicated reactions north and  south. Three recent
>deaths in particular are informed by such
>contradiction.
>
>* This past January 12th, infantryman  Sergio Diaz
>Varela who fell in Ramadi in the deadly Sunni triangle
>December 24th, was buried with full military honors in
>Guadalajara.  Nine armed troops from Fort Hood, Texas
>led by General Ken Keene accompanied the young soldier
>to his final resting place, and U.S. ambassador Tony
>Garza commended the boy's soul to God. The funeral, the
>second of a Mexican-born soldier on Mexican  soil, came
>off without a hitch.
>
>* Last July, a U.S. honor guard  accompanying the body
>of another young soldier, Juan Lopez Rangel,  to a
>country graveyard in San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato was
>disarmed and detained by elements of the Mexican army
>for violating national firearms laws. With many more
>such funerals in the pipeline--a third Mexican youth,
>Jesus Fonseca, was buried in the altos of Jalisco state
>at the beginning of February - the Fox government is
>moving to ease the diplomatic pain.
>
>* Lance Corporeal Andres Raya  did not fall fighting
>the enemy in Iraq. A humvee driver pushing  unprotected
>vehicles in and out of Fallujah for seven months,  Raya
>was exposed to attacks by the resistance and roadside
>bombs  every day he served on Iraqi soil. Home on
>holiday in the California  central valley farming town
>of Ceres and haunted by rumors that  his unit would
>soon be sent back to Iraq, Raya, 19, snapped, provoking
>a three hour running gun battle with back-ups from four
>different California police departments.
>
>Leaping over backyard fences  and dashing down dirt
>alleys in the town where he grew up as  an undocumented
>field worker's son, Raya assured neighbors they  were
>not in harm's way if they were "innocent civilians."
>Reportedly shaken by Michael Moore's anti-Bush
>documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11", Raya stopped to ask one
>witness if he had voted for Bush,
>
>Finally cornered after killing  one officer and
>gravely wounding another with an outlaw assault  rifle,
>the young Marine was cut down by 18 rounds when he
>charged  a police barricade. "Andres Raya died like a
>true Mexican standing on his feet" a neighbor, Hilda
>Mercado, shouted out at a tension-packed reconciliation
>meeting a few days later.  "Andy was a casualty of
>war," Lalo Mercado who grew  up with the dead Marine
>told the New York Times.
>
>Raya's rampage tripwired brown-white  rage in Ceres.
>Andres had grown up in a migrant labor camp here  and
>as a teenager, was often rousted by the local police--
>as  recently as a week before his rampage, he was
>stopped despite  being in uniform. When friends sought
>to build an altar to Raya  in the alleyway where he
>died, police repeatedly tore it down  and indignant
>graffiti was quickly painted out near the crime scene.
>
>Ratcheting up tensions to lynch-mob  levels, police
>cited Raya's tattoos as proof that he was a gang
>banger--the tattoos were symbols of Mexican pride, his
>farm worker  father affirmed. Police later displayed a
>video of Raya purportedly  smoking marijuana and
>throwing down supposed gang signs while  surrounded by
>ripped-up swatches of a U.S. flag arranged to spell
>out "Fuck Bush!"
>
>Despite the three medals Raya  won while in Iraq (among
>them "The Global War On Terrorism  Expeditionary
>Service Award"), the U.S. Marine Corps refused  the
>family all military honors. In the days before his
>death,  friends say Raya vehemently counseled his
>"homies"  not to follow his example and join up. Marine
>recruiting is  in crisis with the service failing to
>fill its monthly quota  in January for the first time
>since 1995.
>
>Although he is alive to tell  about it, death in Iraq
>has also claimed a piece of the life  of Army Sergeant
>Jonatan Cardenas Alban of Carson, California,  an
>overwhelmingly black and Mexican suburb of Los Angeles.
>Last  August 18th while on patrol in an inflamed Sadr
>City, Sergeant Cardenas, a nine year vet (the military
>refers to him merely  as "Cardenas Alban"), saw a box
>drop off a truck he  was following and "lit up" the
>vehicle, killing seven  civilians who had been out
>scavenging garbage. When 16 year-old  Qasam Hasan ran
>from the exploding truck, Alban gunned him down.  What
>happened next remains clouded but when Alban and other
>soldiers gathered around the boy who was barely
>clinging to life,  an argument broke out and the
>Sergeant turned his assault rifle  on Hasan, finishing
>him off in what Cardenas would tell authorities  was "a
>mercy killing."
>
>The third member of a unit  out of Fort Reilly, Kansas
>to be charged with murdering Iraqi  civilians (one
>allegedly killed a member of the Iraqi National Guard
>after forcing him to have sex), Jonatan Cardenas Alban
>was sentenced in November to a minimum year in prison
>and stripped  of all rank, and thus earned the
>unenviable distinction of becoming  the first U.S.
>soldier of Mexican descent to be convicted of a war
>crime in Iraq.
>
>For more than 70 families of  Mexicans who served in
>Iraq, prayers to the Santo Nino de Atocha  or any other
>protective deity or talisman, have not been answered.
>When the military came to inform the family of Isela
>Rubacalva  in a downtrodden colony of Ciudad Juarez
>that she had been killed  in action in the same tank
>that made Jesica Lynch famous, all  her father could
>think to ask was "what for?" And  when Marine guards
>drove up to the Los Angeles home of Carlos  Arredondo,
>a Costa Rican immigrant, to tell him that his son  had
>been taken in the holy city of Najef, the distraught
>father  grabbed a can of gasoline, doused it on the
>Marines' van, climbed inside, and set the vehicle on
>fire, suffering critical burns  on over 70% of his
>body.
>
>Fernando Suarez del Solar has  pursued a distinct path,
>turning his grief into social action  ever since the
>Marines knocked on his San Diego door to inform him
>that his son Jesus had fallen during the first weeks of
>the  invasion. Posthumously eligible to receive U.S.
>citizenship,  Fernando turned down the Marines' offer--
>Jesus, raised in Tijuana,  had been a "conchero" dancer
>and liked to think of  himself as an Aztec warrior.
>
>Now Fernando Suarez has created  the Guerrero Azteca
>Project to campaign against the Bush war  in Iraq.
>Suarez has taken on the San Diego school board over
>the issue of Marine recruiters in the high schools and
>led a  march on the local Titan Corporation, which
>provided "interrogators"  to Abu Ghraib prison. Last
>summer, Fernando was a prominent  participant in anti-
>war demonstrations at both major political  conventions
>and his wife Rosa was recently part of a delegation
>that brought material aid to Iraqis driven out of their
>homes  in Fallujah by the U.S. military.
>
>Suarez himself journeyed to  Iraq soon after Jesus was
>killed to see where he had fallen and  to talk to
>Latino troops serving over there. "You could  see the
>fear in their eyes" he wrote in a recent e-mail. Today,
>the Guerrero Azteca Project dedicates itself to
>supporting young Latino soldiers who reject the war,
>such as Sergeant Camilo Mejia, convicted of desertion
>after he refused a second term  in Iraq.
>
>Sergeant Mejia is a Nicaraguan  and the son of Carlos
>Mejia Godoy, author of the Sandanista anthem  ("we
>fight against the Yanquis, the enemies of mankind")
>who joined the Yanqui army soon after arriving in Miami
>following the U.S.-sponsored Sandanista defeat in 1991.
>
>---------
>John Ross has just been awarded the 2005 Upton
>Sinclair Award (an "Uppie") by the San Pedro California
>chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union for his
>latest  cult classic "Murdered  By Capitalism--A Memoir
>of 150 Years of Life & Death on the  U.S. Left".
>
>==============
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>
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-- 
Paul Etxeberri

"Forests precede civilizations and deserts follow"   ---Chateaubriand