Word: carpio
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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...
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...
...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...
...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...
There is even some question whether the guerrillas in El Salvador could keep bargains made in good faith. The rebel collective is an uneasy lashing-together of at least five factions with conflicting programs. The most radical, the Popular Liberation Forces, led by Salvador Cayetano Carpio, believe in the traditional Marxist guerra prolongada, a war sustained until ultimate, total victory. Neither negotiations nor elections would necessarily stop this group from fighting...