Word: carpio
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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...
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' 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...