Area Salvadorans look back with hope

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. 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.

In Maverick Square, immigrants’ hopes and anxieties played out as Portillo handed out fliers inviting them to an informational session with a visiting party official yesterday in Chelsea, to be followed by trips to New York and Washington, D.C., according to David Grosser of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, which cosponsored the event.

Some immigrants stopped and read the fliers, brows furrowed. A few ignored Portillo.

“I don’t know anything about politics. I go home only for vacation,’’ Mercedes Marroquin, a 38-year-old housecleaner who has lived here for 14 years, said as she rushed to catch her bus to Revere. “I don’t care who wins. If you work, you eat. You don’t eat from politics.’’

A few stopped to chat with Portillo.

“Let’s see how it goes,’’ said a cautious Berta Cruz, a 70-year old mother of nine who fled the war in the 1980s to protect her children. “Look at what’s happening in Honduras.’’

Portillo, now a legal resident and a homeowner in Chelsea, smiled and said, “We’re different.’’

Then Cruz tugged on her arm and whispered that she heard that gangs back home were shaking down people for money, especially the dollars immigrants send to their families. “They should get rid of that,’’ Cruz told Portillo.

She also warned that El Salvador should avoid what is happening in Honduras. “Don’t let Chávez get involved,’’ Cruz said. “Then all will be good.’’

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.

“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.

In the 2004 elections, for instance, opponents of the FMLN ran a campaign ad suggesting that families would lose remittances if the FMLN won, and a US government official also voiced concerns about the party, according to news reports. This year, the Obama administration said it would work with the democratically elected government and the FMLN narrowly won.

Daniel Navas, the Massachusetts coordinator of FMLN, said the party also knows that immigrants want concrete signs of progress.

“Everything that happens there affects what is happening here,’’ he said. “If the price of electricity goes up and the cost of water goes up or the cost of education goes up, then I have to send more money home.’’

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti@globe.com.