"Area Salvadorans look back with hope; Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front rallies US immigrants" by Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff | July 13, 2009
Two decades ago, Anabella Portillo was a leftist rebel in El Salvador, carrying an AK-47 in the middle of a bloody civil war.
Last week, she was handing out fliers in East Boston’s Maverick Square, trying to make Salvadoran immigrants more comfortable with the new leftist government in El Salvador.
Giddy from its first-ever victory in a presidential election, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front - the political party that sprung from the guerrilla movement after the 1992 peace accord - is on a “victory tour’’ of the United States. They are courting immigrants who are vital to the Central American nation’s economy and hoping to convince immigrants who fled their homeland that they are serious about change and that the war is long behind them.
“We want people to stop being afraid. The guerrillas were from long ago,’’ said Portillo, who came to the United States in 1999 to work because she couldn’t afford to finish law school in El Salvador. “We want to be organized. We want to open doors.’’
On June 1, President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador took office, marking a major shift for a nation that had been ruled for years by the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance. Funes, a former journalist who covered the war, casts himself as a moderate. It is a stance Salvadorans are watching carefully after last month’s military coup against the Honduran president, who was criticized for his relationship with Venezuela’s leftist leader, Hugo Chávez.
Salvadorans in the United States cannot vote unless they return home, but their opinion is strongly influential. More than 700,000 Salvadorans live in the United States, including thousands in Massachusetts, according to the most recent census. More than one-fifth of El Salvador’s families survive on the $3.8 billion that relatives send home every year, according to the US State Department.
Related: Reason Number One Why No One Reads the Boston Globe Anymore
Many still bear the physical and emotional scars of the 12-year war, in which more than 75,000 people died, including Portillo’s brother....
Of course, NOTHING about the U.S. ROLE in FOMENTING the war!
Jocelyn Viterna, assistant professor of sociology at Harvard, said she did not expect El Salvador to take the same path as Honduras, where the liberal president’s alliance with Chávez in Venezuela, among other issues, backfired last month.
WTF?
So the GLOBE has ACCEPTED the COUP as the legit government now, huh??
“There’s this shared sense that the extreme inequality and extreme poverty in El Salvador is bad for the nation and bad for individuals,’’ said Viterna. “There is a commitment to the institutions, there is a commitment to the democracy in El Salvador, among the people and among the military.’’
FMLN leaders say are mindful of the tensions - and their limited power. They do not control the Legislative Assembly, midterm elections are in two years, and the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance is a fierce critic....
Those are OUR GUYS, folks! So the TOOLS are IN PLACE!
