The Rebels’ Disunited Front

They claim to control one-fifth of El Salvador’s national territory. Their fighting strength continues to grow, from 8,000 combatants in 1982 to 10,000 today. In the past year they have killed some 1,800 members of the Salvadoran army and security forces, knocked out key bridges and caused more than $100 million worth of economic damage. On the basis of their destructive activity alone, the five guerrilla organizations that make up El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) have shown that they are a potent national force.

Behind a showing of unity and strength, however, the Marxist-led F.M.L.N. has been troubled by periods of factionalism and by a jockeying for leadership that has occasionally resulted in murder. The guerrilla groups are still recovering from their latest crisis, which briefly laid bare their organization’s internal workings and the personalities of its chieftains.

The guerrilla movement was not united until 1980, when its leaders met repeatedly in Havana at the invitation of Fidel Castro. In exchange for Cuban promises of increased military aid, the guerrillas formed three organizations: 1) the Democratic Revolutionary Front (F.D.R.), an amalgam of revolutionaries and representatives of alienated left-wing Salvadoran political parties, whose job is to plead the guerrilla case abroad; 2) the Unified Revolutionary Directorate, a 15-member war council of the top guerrilla commandantes; and 3) the F.M.L.N. itself, a coordinating body for the guerrilla groups.

That pact was intended to bring an end to years of bickering. Instead, it created a new crisis around the leadership of the two most powerful rebel organizations: the 3,000-member Popular Liberation Forces (F.P.L.), led by Salvador Cayetano Carpio, and the 4,000-member People’s Revolutionary Army (E.R.P.), headed by Joaquín Villalobos. The guerrillas insist that the struggle has been resolved. So, in a way, it has: Carpio died under mysterious circumstances last year at 63, and his group has suffered a splintering of its forces. Villalobos, 32, has emerged as first among equals in the revolutionary hierarchy.

Slight, bespectacled and grandfatherly in appearance, Cayetano Carpio was often called the Ho Chi Minh of the Salvadoran revolutionary movement. By 1947 he had joined the illegal Salvadoran Communist Party, eventually becoming its general secretary. In 1970 he broke with the party. Fanatically secretive, he was the chief exponent of “prolonged popular warfare,” a hard-line strategy that would in his view probably culminate in direct confrontation with the U.S. Increasingly, it also conflicted with the view officially espoused by the other F.M.L.N. members, that the revolutionaries should negotiate a vague power-sharing agreement with the Salvadoran government.

Villalobos has long been the leading guerrilla exponent of such a strategy. As a teen-age student leader, he began in 1971 to form clandestine left-wing groups to foster his own version of “armed struggle”; the units eventually specialized in kidnaping and urban terror. Villalobos created a major scandal in revolutionary circles in 1975 when he ordered the execution of a well-known Communist poet, Roque Dalton García, on trumped-up charges of being an agent of both the CIA and Cuba. In reality, Dalton was Villalobos’ chief political rival. The killing led to bitter internal fights and schisms.

Villalobos’ brand of revolutionary pragmatism has appealed to younger Salvadoran rebels, who have flocked to his banner in larger numbers than to Carpio’s FPL. It also won acceptance from Cayetano Carpio’s junior commanders, led by his deputy, Melida Anaya Montes, 52. At a meeting in January 1983, Cayetano Carpio’s own comrades finally rejected his intransigent stance in favor of increasing cooperation with Villalobos’ E.R.P. and the rest of the F.M.L.N.

Less than three months after that parley, Anaya Montes was brutally stabbed to death in the Nicaraguan capital of Managua. Her Sandinista hosts at first blamed her death on a “CIA plot.” Then Nicaraguan security police arrested six of Cayetano Carpio’s closest adherents for the murder, and shortly afterward, the Nicaraguans announced that Cayetano Carpio had shot himself to death in Managua out of s grief at the actions of his colleagues.

Soon a different story emerged. Following a clandestine meeting of its Central Committee last December, the F.P.L. accused its deceased founder of “grave political, ideological and moral deformations,” and of ordering Anaya Monies’ murder. As a sign of its new, “moderate” direction, it named as Cayetano Carpio’s successor Leonel González, 39, a former schoolteacher whose revolutionary specialty is underground organizing. The F.P.L. also acknowledged the breakaway of a more violence-prone splinter faction, the Salvador Cayetano Carpio Revolutionary Workers’ Movement.

The relative stature of the three other F.M.L.N. chieftains remains a matter of speculation. There is Shafik Jorge Handal, 53, general secretary of the Salvadoran Communist Party and commander of its armed wing, the 1,500-member Armed Forces of Liberation. The son of Palestinian immigrants, Handal has been the F.M.L.N.’s main go-between with the Soviet Union and Cuba. He first led the Communists into armed action in 1979. Because of his standing in Moscow, Handal’s influence in guerrilla councils may be out of proportion to the size of his forces.

Next comes Eduardo Sancho Castañeda, 37, leader of the 2,000-member Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN). (He is better known by his nom de guerre, Fermán Cienfuegos.) A founding member of Villalobos’ group, Sancho broke away after the Dalton murder in 1975. Ideologically, FARN is believed to be the most conciliatory and nationalistic of the guerrilla organizations, and the most hostile to Soviet and Cuban influence. Least influential is Roberto Roca, 36, head of the 300-member armed faction of the Central American Workers’ Revolutionary Party.

F.M.L.N. unity is greatest on the propaganda front. The guerrillas run two newspapers, Venceremos and Señal de Libertad, and three radio stations that broadcast out of Managua and Mexico City. Salpress, a guerrilla news service started in 1980, has correspondents in nine countries and distributes weekly news summaries and features to newspapers as far away as Sweden and Mozambique. In the U.S., 347 “solidarity committees” funnel money to the movement.

The guerrillas have even hired a U.S. public relations firm with offices in Manhattan and Washington to plead their case. Whatever their internal divisions and rivalries, the guerrillas have learned very well that the best place to put up a united front is in public. —By George Russell