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.
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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...
