Overcoming Antagonisms

A short, leathery-looking baker turned Communist organizer. A graying law professor who was once the country's moderate Vice President-elect. An attractive, dark-haired ex-medical student turned fierce guerrilla fighter.

The leadership of El Salvador's revolutionary left is a diverse, sometimes unlikely group, as varied in its personalities and ideologies as the alphabet soup of its political parties, grass-roots organizations and guerrilla armies. It is only within the past year that the leftists have tried to overcome their old antagonisms and unite under the umbrella of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (F.M.L.N.) for a "final offensive" toward their common objective: the overthrow of the civilian-military junta and the installation of a revolutionary regime.

The senior revolutionary leader of the F.M.L.N., the joint military command of the five major antigovernment guerrilla groups, is Salvador Cayetano Carpio, 61, who rose through trade union ranks to become secretary-general of the Salvadoran Communist Party. In 1970 he broke away to pursue armed revolution. He formed the Forces of Popular Liberation, the largest guerrilla army operating under the F.M.L.N. umbrella. Cayetano owes his survival to his emphasis on security. Before their amalgamation with the other groups a year ago, Cayetano and his subordinates wore hoods so that they were not known even to each other. Cayetano himself was known only by his nom de guerre, Marcial. British Author Graham Greene, who pleaded unsuccessfully with Cayetano last summer to spare the life of a kidnaped. South African diplomat, said of him: "His eyes, they are hard. I wouldn't like to be his prisoner."

Early this month, reports TIME Correspondent James Willwerth, the F.M.L.N. and its political counterpart, the Democratic Revolutionary Front, formed a seven-member "commission" to operate as the political wing of the movement. The commission's head is former Law Professor Guillermo Ungo, 49, a prominent Social Democrat who served for three months on the original junta that was installed after the overthrow of the military regime in October 1979. In the 1972 elections Ungo was the vice-presidential running mate of centrist Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte. A member of the Socialist International, alongside such respected Social Democrats as Willy Brandt, Ungo is said to be planning to tour foreign capitals in an attempt to muster broader democratic support for the revolution.

Another key member of the commission is Ana Guadalupe Martinez, a hardening revolutionary who became El Salvador's best-known guerrilla commandante after she posed for a propaganda poster with a rifle cocked on her hip. The diminutive, 28-year-old former medical student left school in 1972 to join the People's Revolutionary Army, El Salvador's second largest guerrilla group. In 1976 she was captured by national police, raped and tortured during nine months in a secret prison.

Other members represent conflicting leftist isms ranging from Trotskyism to orthodox Marxist-Leninism to "Christian Socialism." Differences about strategy and tactics have also contributed to the revolution's fragmentation. The moderates, like Ungo, for instance, may one day choose the route of political compromise with the government if--and when--their military campaign is finally and decisively defeated. The diehard Marxist-Leninists like Cayetano, on the other hand, are likely to fight on indefinitely for what they regard as a class struggle to the death.

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