The 10,000-plus Mexicans, Chicanos and Latinos marching through the streets of Ontario, California June 13 sent a powerful message to the Bush administration – the raids and deportations carried out by immigration enforcement will not be accepted or tolerated. This powerful display of resistance followed raids where immigration agents targeted undocumented workers at bus stops, markets and homes.

On the same day that George W. Bush declared, “I have earned political capital in the campaign, and I intend to spend it,” high-ranking administration officials said that Bush’s second term would bring a refocusing of energies on Latin America. In the first year of his second term, Bush hopes to pass the U.S.-Dominican Republic-Central America Free Trade Agreement, or DR-CAFTA, in an effort to gain passage of the full Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by 2006.

Less than a week after the U.S. elections, labor leader Gilberto Soto was assassinated in Usulutan, El Salvador. Soto, a Salvadoran who emigrated to the U.S. in 1975, was a Teamster organizer in New Jersey, an activist with CISPES – the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador – and a long-time member of the FMLN, El Salvador’s left political party. The FMLN has actively opposed the Central American Free Trade Agreement, both in the legislature, where they hold a plurality of the seats, and in the streets, where they have led tens of thousands of people marching against CAFTA and against the war in Iraq.