The Powers That Would Be

They are shadowy and elusive figures, most of them content to remain in the background while others argue their cause in public. For security reasons, they often do not even use their own names. Despite their current unity, they have resorted to murder to settle factional disputes in the past. The five guerrilla commanders who make up the general command of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) are the real powers behind the Salvadoran insurgency. If the guerrillas ever took power, these men would control El Salvador. The quintet:

Salvador Cayetano Carpio, 62. Slightly built, bespectacled and grandfatherly in appearance, Carpio is known as the grand old man of the Salvadoran guerrilla movement. But despite his disarming looks, there is no mistaking the ruthlessness and tenacity of the man who heads the largest of El Salvador's five major guerrilla organizations, the Popular Forces of Liberation (F.P.L.). In 1980, British Author Graham Greene was impressed by Carpio when they met in Panama. The novelist pleaded unsuccessfully with the insurgent to spare the life of Archibald Gardner Dunn, the South African Ambassador to El Salvador, whom the guerrillas had kidnaped. Said Greene of Carpio: "His eyes, they are hard."

That hardness was forged by a life of jailings, torture and clandestine activity that began long before many of Carpio's revolutionary colleagues were even born. The son of a shoemaker, Carpio became a school dropout at the age of 13. He first tried and failed to become apprenticed in his father's trade, then learned to be a baker. In 1943, at the age of 24, he joined the El Salvador Federated Bakery Workers' Society, a trade union. With Carpio's help, the group built a powerful union that in 1944 staged a successful strike, a rare occurrence in El Salvador at the time. After a second strike in 1945 and the threat of another, Salvadoran authorities arrested Carpio.

When he was released a year later, he immediately joined the Salvadoran left-wing underground. By 1947 he was a member of the illegal Salvadoran Communist Party. A year later, he became secretary of organization for the party's central committee and displayed a talent for recruiting disaffected workers. In 1949 Carpio was arrested again, was deported to Nicaragua and ended up in Mexico. There he made an important friend, Bias Roca Calderio, then secretary-general of the Cuban Socialist Party, now a high-ranking member of the central committee of the Cuban Communist Party. In 1950 Bias Roca invited Carpio to Cuba to see how the Communist Party operated.

Two years later, Carpio was arrested again in El Salvador. He has described how he was tortured during his nine-month imprisonment: his feet were beaten with iron bars; whippings severely damaged his left eye; and a hood was tied around his head to cause temporary smothering. In 1954 the Salvadoran Communist Party sent Carpio to the Soviet Union for several months. He returned to El Salvador to continue organizing workers. In 1959, inspired by the triumph of the Cuban revolution, Carpio formed the United Front of Revolutionary Action to train workers, students and peasants for armed rebellion.

During the 1960s, the Salvadoran Communist Party followed a political strategy of nonviolence, a policy that Carpio increasingly opposed. In 1970 he finally broke with the party over the issue of armed action, and began creating the F.P.L. Among the guerrilla commanders, Carpio is now considered to be the principal exponent of "prolonged popular warfare," the Latin American version of Maoist guerrilla strategy that calls for a sustained period of rural guerrilla warfare as the best road to revolutionary victory.

Carpio has lived to a ripe old age for a Salvadoran revolutionary mainly because of a fanatical obsession with security. Until recently, he and his closest lieutenants always wore hoods at meetings to hide their real identities even from one another. Carpio was known only by his nom de guerre, Marcial. His daughter Guadalupe, also a Communist organizer, was killed during a political demonstration in El Salvador in 1980. The guerrillas' campaign in El Salvador, Carpio says, "has been a struggle of twelve years. Twelve years of spilling the blood of very valuable comrades, hundreds of the most valuable of the people, in this prolonged war."

There are signs that Carpio has not overcome his ingrained suspicions of the other top commanders of the F.M.L.N. He was probably the last of the leaders to agree to the current guerrilla strategy of combining warfare with an offer to negotiate with the Salvadoran government for a share of power. Significantly, the F.P.L. maintains its own underground radio station, Radio Farabundo Marti, separate from the guerrillas' joint propaganda station, Radio Venceremos.

Shaf ick Jorge Handal, 51. Currently secretary-general of the Salvadoran Communist Party, Handal long resisted the insurrectionist ideas that led Carpio to break away from the party. But in April 1979, even the Moscow-lining Communists decided to join the fighting. They formed the Armed Forces of Liberation, one of the smallest of the guerrilla groups, which Handal commands.

The son of Palestinian immigrants to El Salvador, Handal began his revolutionary career in 1949, when he became involved in student politics while studying law. In 1950 he joined the Communist Party. In 1952 he was exiled, first to Honduras and then to Chile, returning to El Salvador only after a government amnesty for political offenders. In 1960 he was exiled again to Guatemala. In 1961 he returned to El Salvador as a member of the Communist underground. He organized the Unitary Front for Revolutionary Action, attached to the illegal Communist Party, and became the Communist Party's secretary-general in 1972.

According to the U.S. State Department, Handal has close links with the Soviet Union and Cuba, and often travels to both countries, as well as to other East bloc members. He also has ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in particular to its leader, Yasser Arafat. Handal has been active in the purchase of arms for the Salvadoran guerrillas. Richard Araujo, a Latin American expert at the Heritage Foundation, says of Handal: "He'd like to be the Latin American Arafat."

Joaquin Villalobos, 30. Commander of the People's Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), the second largest guerrilla organization and the one that is probably the least doctrinaire, Villalobos has been described in some leftist publications as a "militarist," meaning that he denigrates theory in favor of action. Unlike some of the other groups, Villalobos' E.R.P. did not stem from the Communist Party; its original members were largely radicalized Roman Catholics who resorted to kidnaping and urban terrorism.

A would-be economist turned university dropout, Villalobos was a left-wing student leader. In 1971 he began to form clandestine groups to foster "armed struggle" in El Salvador. In 1973 he officially declared the existence of the E.R.P. and led it underground.

In 1974, Villalobos caused a sizable scandal in Latin American leftist circles when he personally executed a well-known Communist poet, Roque Dalton Garcia, on trumped-up charges of being an agent of the CIA. In reality, Dalton was Villalobos' chief political rival. The killing led to bitter factional fights within the E.R.P. and to a breakaway movement. Villalobos' chief gestures of conciliation, on the other hand, have been toward his erstwhile enemy, the Salvadoran army. While some extremists want to purge the whole force in the event of a guerrilla victory, Villalobos has said that "those army sectors that take a progressive position and patriotic and revolutionary viewpoints have an important role to play."

Eduardo Sancho Castaneda, 35. Better known as Ferman Cienfuegos, Sancho commands the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN), a group that split from the E.R.P. over internal political differences. At times it seemed as if the two terrorist organizations were spending as much time shooting at each other as at their common enemy, the Salvadoran military. FARN was the only guerrilla group to break with the guerrillas' united front after it was formed in early 1980, at the insistence of Fidel Castro. FARN rejoined the others, however, within a few months, after one of its commanders, Ernesto Jovel, died in a mysterious airplane crash.

Sancho, who was born in Costa Rica, was also a student radical in San Salvador. In the late 1960s, he began to organize workers, peasants and students into clandestine armed cells in the department of San Vicente. He worked aboveground as a professor of art history for the Salvadoran Ministry of Education. In 1970, Sancho formed "The Group," a political-military organization that brought together radical students and radical Christians. Like the other organizations, FARN bankrolled itself through kidnapings; Sancho is accused of responsibility for the 1978 kidnaping-assassination of Japanese Industrialist Fujio Matsumoto, among others. By one estimate, FARN had amassed $60 million through kidnapings by 1979.

Sancho admits that the guerrilla high command is Marxist, but "it is a Marxism that is 100% Salvadoran. We know we have to act with great realism and seek a policy of coexistence between our little peoples of Central America and the U.S."

Roberto Roca, 34. Head of the Central American Workers' Revolutionary Party (P.R.T.C.), a onetime student strike leader, he was the last to bring his organization under the F.M.L.N. umbrella. Roca is one of the least known of the guerrilla commanders, and his organization is probably the smallest.

Like the other, younger guerrilla leaders, Roca began to organize secret armed groups in 1971, and formed the P.R.T.C. in 1975. Like the other commanders, Roca says that he is willing to negotiate with the current Salvadoran government. But he is just as willing to spread violence further in the beleaguered country. Says he:

"We will make the war felt at all levels everywhere."

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