During El Salvador’s 2003–04 presidential campaign season, ads appeared on Salvadoran televisions featuring U.S. Republican congressional representatives. Praising the right-wing ARENA party candidate Tony Saca, who eventually won the election, the U.S. officials warned Salvadoran voters that a victory by the left-wing opposition party, the FMLN, would result in their U.S.-based relatives being deported and their remittances being cut off. In light of the 2004 experience, an L.A.-based group founded in 1999 by Salvadoran American labor and immigrant rights leaders, decided not only to participate as electoral observers in El Salvador’s 2009 presidential election but also to pressure the U.S. government to remain neutral. This article originally appeared in the November/December 2010 edition of NACLA Report on the Americas.