processor because it correctly believed that growers would not agree to raise wages unless Mount Olive agreed to pay more for cucumbers. The organizing campaign was a difficult one. Four FLOC organizers were arrested on August 12, 1998 after visiting workers at a tobacco farm in Nash County, North Carolina. A local judge threw out the charges, saying the organizers had broken no laws. The union's five-year boycott of Mount Olive Pickle was ultimately successful. A highlight of the organizing drive was a four-day, 70-mile march from Mount Olive, North Carolina, to Raleigh. On September 16, 2004, FLOC signed a collective bargaining agreement with Mount Olive and the growers. More than 6,000 of the state's 10,000 guest workers joined FLOC, boosting the union's membership to more than 23,000. The Association covered a number of cash crops, such as Christmas trees and tobacco, in addition to cucumbers. The Mount Olive agreement marked the first time an American labor union represented guest workers. FLOC quickly established a program to bring guest workers into the United States under the H-2A temporary guest worker visa program. FLOC kept the pressure going in North Carolina even after the contract was ratified. In 2001, working with the United Farm Workers, FLOC had sued the United States Department of Labor for failing to force cucumber growers to raise wages for more than 30,000 guest workers. In 2005, the union won its lawsuit. Employers were forced to pay $1.4 million lawsuit to North Carolina workers who had deductions illegally taken from their pay. A federal district court judge ruled that growers belonging to the North Carolina Growers Association had to pay guest workers' visa and transportation fees. The ruling saved guest workers nearly $2 million a year. FLOC announced a second major organizing drive throughout the Deep South at its triennial convention in September 2006. Cruz assassination in Mexico On April 10, 2007, FLOC organizer Santiago Rafael Cruz was found bound and beaten to death in the group's office in Monterrey, Mexico. FLOC had opened an office next to the U.S. consulate in the city in 2005 to help guest workers process their visas and to organize these incoming guest workers into the union. However, when Mexican police announced that a suspect had been arrested in Cruz's death, they stated "he died for failing to deliver on a shady $4,500 promise to provide visas for the friends of