Word: salvadoran
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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...
...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...
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 Martí, separate from the guerrillas' joint propaganda station, Radio Venceremos...