One a Key Guerrilla Leader, the Other a Repatriated Leftist : In El Salvador, Twin Brothers Still Torn by War

Joaquin Samayoa is one of the many leftist exiles who have quietly come back to El Salvador in the past year to test the political waters.

Like the others, Samayoa is careful. He moves uncertainly between home and work, casting frequent glances over his shoulder. He seldom ventures out at night.

But while all returning exiles are at risk, Joaquin’s is a singular predicament. He is the identical twin of guerrilla leader Salvador Samayoa, spokesman for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

“The greatest danger for me is that someone will mistake me for my brother,” Joaquin said recently.

Even at 38, the Samayoa brothers still look remarkably alike. They are tall and slender, fair skinned with brown curly hair. Both wear a mustache, and both are nearsighted and smoke cigarettes.

Their divergent lives have left subtle marks. Because of his stints in the mountains, Salvador has aged more quickly than Joaquin. Stanford University’s graduate school has made Joaquin softer than his brother.

Joaquin, a psychology professor at the University of Central America, raised his voice over the din of a passing army helicopter to explain that he returned to El Salvador for two reasons: to work peacefully for social change in his country and to regain control over his own life.

But after nearly a year back home, he is still not sure that he will be able to do either. Since Joaquin’s return, the government has passed from the centrist Christian Democrats to the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, which believes it needs tougher laws to crack down on opposition groups it considers terrorist fronts.

The Farabundo Marti guerrillas, meanwhile, have stepped up their sabotage and military attacks in the capital. They have killed a former attorney general, a right-wing businessman and a defector from the rebel ranks. The guerrillas say they were not responsible for the assassinations of President Alfredo Cristiani’s chief Cabinet aide and a rightist ideologue, Edgar Chacon.

The civilian killings have created a sense of confusion in the capital and a fear of retaliation against leftists and the families of known guerrillas.

“I really don’t know if there is space for me in this country,” Joaquin said. “I could have to leave again. Or the price for staying could be too high--the inability to express myself in anything political.”

It was his brother Salvador’s decision to join the guerrillas that forced Joaquin to flee the country in the first place.

Joaquin says he knew little about national politics when Salvador agreed to serve as minister of education in the civilian-military government that took power after a coup in October, 1979. At the time, Joaquin, with a master’s degree from New York’s Columbia University, was adjusting to a teaching career and thinking he should look for a wife and settle down to a middle-class life.

Then Salvador broke the news. Along with civilian junta member Guillermo Ungo and most of the rest of the Cabinet, he resigned from the government on Jan. 2, 1980, to protest military repression. Six days later, on a Wednesday afternoon, Salvador called a press conference to announce that he was joining the armed struggle.

Salvador had warned Joaquin days before and advised him to go into hiding. As Salvador made his dramatic announcement, Joaquin drove across the Guatemalan border into exile and a life he had never imagined. That night, in a hotel room in Guatemala City, he watched his brother’s press conference on television.

“From that moment, I felt I had lost the possibility of control over my own life,” Joaquin said. “I didn’t understand a lot of what was happening, but I respected my brother and his capacity for analysis. I knew there had to be a good reason for what he was doing, and I gave him my vote of confidence.”

Many viewed Salvador’s decision as courageous. Others called it irresponsible, and still others called it treason. For his parents, it was devastating.

“The day before the press conference,” Joaquin said, “I told my father. He said not to tell our mother, that he would do it. He was very calm and he did not react, but you could see in his face how worried he was.”

Salvador and Joaquin had spent much of their lives studying at Jesuit schools, from Catholic grammar school to the Jesuit-run University of Central America. At a loss as to what he should do, Joaquin made his way to a Jesuit community in Nicaragua, a country that had just undergone its own revolution.

“I thought Nicaragua was a good place to start trying to understand what my brother was fighting for,” Joaquin said.

He found work for a time at the Nicaraguan Ministry of Education and began to study Salvadoran politics in his spare time. After a falling-out on the job, he moved to Costa Rica to look for work there.

Salvador, meanwhile, was in a safehouse in the capital and working in the urban underground of the Popular Liberation Forces, one of five groups that now make up the Farabundo Marti Front.

Dream Became Reality

Joaquin said the only time he has ever had an intuitive experience involving his brother--something often described by twins, especially those who are close--was when he dreamed that Salvador had been captured. In fact, Salvador had been arrested that afternoon.

A police assault on a clandestine rebel headquarters led officials to the address where Salvador was hiding. Dozens of police descended on the house, breaking down the doors and arresting Salvador along with an American woman who lived in the house.

Blindfolded, in the basement of the National Police building, Salvador was interrogated for 30 hours. Police put a gun to his head and told him he had two choices--to tell what he knew about other guerrillas and their hide-outs, or to die.

“No,” he recalls telling them, “I said I had a third choice. To live and not to talk.”

The Samayoa family--the twins’ parents, an older brother and a sister--were ostracized after Salvador joined the rebels. Their friends abandoned them and their house was bombed and machine-gunned. Salvador’s arrest was another blow.

Searched for Son

As soon as the father heard of the arrest, he went from police agency to police agency in search of Salvador. The U.S. Embassy pressed for the release of the American woman. And the Popular Liberation Forces threatened to kill every member of the Supreme Court if Salvador was not released.

“My father couldn’t find a lawyer to defend Salvador,” Joaquin said. “He was a lawyer himself, and these were his friends denying him help. He had to take the case himself, even though he was not a criminal lawyer.”

Two weeks later, Salvador was taken from jail blindfolded in the middle of the night, “the way they do when they are going to ‘disappear’ you,” he said. But rather than killing him, the police took him to another police headquarters and, eventually, to the airport with his father.

They were flown to Costa Rica and were to continue on to Spain, where Salvador was to be given asylum. But when they touched ground in Costa Rica, Salvador told his father he would not go with him. He would return to the guerrilla movement.

“It was the only time in my life I ever saw him cry,” Salvador said in a recent interview. “But although his suffering destroyed me, I couldn’t leave. These were my principles, my ideals and my loyalties. If I had withdrawn, it would have implied a deal with the security forces.”

Joaquin saw Salvador briefly in Costa Rica before he was whisked away by his comrades. Joaquin stayed behind with his father.

“He had aged several years in just a few months,” Joaquin said. “His hair was white, he was thin. But despite his suffering, I never heard him pass judgment on my brother’s decision.”

Joaquin moved on to Mexico. He had decided he was not cut out for the discipline of a clandestine army or leftist political party. He chose not to join either. But he supported the rebels’ revolutionary goals. Over the next two years he worked briefly with a Salvadoran news agency organized abroad to counter government propaganda. He occasionally helped solidarity groups in Mexico and the United States, and he denounced the killings attributed to the government and paramilitary forces.

Lacking a steady job, Joaquin decided to go back to school. In 1984, he enrolled at Stanford to study for a doctorate in political science. It was in Palo Alto, Calif., that he cemented his political ideas.

“The first time I ever read Marx was at Stanford,” he said. “I studied political theory and the history of El Salvador. I came to understand the economic structure and that there was no way to resolve things other than through profound economic change. I understood that revolution was necessary but that revolution was not an end in itself. There can be unreachable goals, and there can be convergent paths that are not revolutionary.

“There are areas in which I can collaborate, not with the FMLN (the guerrillas) and the FDR (their civilian allies, the Revolutionary Democratic Front) but with their cause, which I feel is just. . . . My commitment transcends any organization, to the point that if I am ever convinced that the FMLN is not working for peace with justice, they would lose all my sympathies.”

Joaquin said he was itching to move back to El Salvador but felt that the strain would be too much for his father. The elder Samayoa was living with an ear glued to the radio, listening for news of his son Salvador. He hated to take vacations for fear that Salvador might need him in the country, as he did after his arrest.

In December, 1987, Joaquin made his first trip home, to attend his father’s funeral. The elder Samoyoa had died, at 70, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Joaquin believes that the hemorrhage was the result of pent-up fear and tension.

Last August, Joaquin moved back to El Salvador. He was stunned by the intolerance that had taken root in the years he was gone. He thought that nearly a decade of war would have made people anxious to negotiate, willing to make concessions for peace. He found just the opposite.

“Everything is more polarized, more inflexible,” he said. “People have lost all faith in the possibility of a solution to this. They don’t want to get involved at any level.”

Joaquin believes that what few political advances there have been in the country--the return of exiles and the opening of television to public debate--were won by the rebels.

‘Minimum Concessions’

“They are the minimum concessions the government had to make not to lose the war,” he said.

But he also believes that by leaving the country in the early 1980s the leftists conceded the political field to the right. He said they must now work for ways to end the war and bring about a peaceful revolution with respect for human rights, a working system of justice and basic services for the poor, such as medical care.

He criticizes the guerrilla assassinations and the way the rebels have brought the war to the capital, endangering civilian lives without making a political point. He believes that the left must work for “attitudes basic to a democratic system, such as respect, tolerance, flexibility.”

Joaquin has yet to become involved in politics himself. He is allowing time to pass, allowing the authorities and his colleagues to grow used to his presence in the country. With the music of Bach in the background, he is writing his doctoral dissertation on a computer at his university office--between power interruptions that knock out both his radio and computer.

Rather than approach old friends, he lets them come to him. And some of them have. He avoids movie theaters and restaurants, any place where he might be mistaken for his brother or where someone could pinpoint the time he would be leaving.

Joaquin has not received any threats, but in recent weeks plainclothes police officers have appeared outside his house and have questioned neighbors.

“They are making their presence felt,” he said. “They are warning me in case I am thinking of politics and telling the neighbors they are secure.”

Salvador is now the one who worries about Joaquin, about possible reprisals against his brother. But Joaquin says he is following his conscience, as Salvador did nearly a decade ago.

“I feel an obligation to work for peace,” Joaquin said. “I can never be at peace unless I do.”