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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 of the people, in this prolonged war."
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.
Shaf ick Jorge Handal, 51. Currently secretary-general of the Salvadoran Communist Party, Handal long resisted the insurrectionist ideas that led Carpio to break away from the party. But in April 1979, even the Moscow-lining Communists decided to join the fighting. They formed the Armed Forces of Liberation, one of the smallest of the guerrilla groups, which Handal commands.
The son of Palestinian immigrants to El Salvador, Handal began his revolutionary career in 1949, when he became involved in student politics while studying law. In 1950 he joined the Communist Party. In 1952 he was exiled, first to Honduras and then to Chile, returning to El Salvador only after a government amnesty for political offenders. In 1960 he was exiled again to Guatemala. In 1961 he returned to El Salvador as a member of the Communist underground. He organized the Unitary Front for Revolutionary Action, attached to the illegal Communist Party, and became the Communist Party's secretary-general in 1972.
According to the U.S. State Department, Handal has close links with the Soviet Union and Cuba, and often travels to both countries, as well as to other East bloc members. He also has ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, and in particular to its leader, Yasser Arafat. Handal has been active in the purchase of arms for the Salvadoran guerrillas. Richard Araujo, a Latin American expert at the Heritage Foundation, says of Handal: "He'd like to be the Latin American Arafat."