Changing Lifestyles : Salvador Rebels Begin New Campaign : * With peace at hand, FMLN guerrillas are returning to the capital to boost their postwar political party.

Hours before the Salvadoran government and guerrillas announced their New Year’s Eve cease-fire agreement, rebel graffiti mysteriously appeared on walls throughout the capital: “The Front Is Coming,” advised the fresh red paint. “The Front Is Coming.”

The following day, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front banners billowed from the facade of the Metropolitan Cathedral as several thousand demonstrators cheered for peace. Among their ranks, another sign was raised: “The Front Is Already Here.”

Indeed, over the last two years the rebels have systematically moved forces back into the capital to lay the groundwork for a postwar political party, the Front for Democratic Change, that can compete in 1994 presidential and legislative elections.

The high rank of many rebels sent back to the city is a measure of the Farabundo Marti Front’s commitment to converting their military structure into a political organization. Several of those who have put down their weapons to undertake party work are what the rebels call “strategic cadre”--founding members of the guerrilla army and regional military commanders.

Some of the rebels originally were ordered to the capital to arrange logistics for the guerrillas’ massive urban offensive in November, 1989. The offensive’s failure to provoke a broad popular uprising convinced the rebels of the need for more political work and prompted the shift in strategy.

In April, 1990, the United Nations began to mediate peace talks between the guerrillas and government, offering the first real opportunity for a negotiated end to the stalemated war. Less than a year later, the rebels’ allies in the legal left won 9% of the vote in federal legislative elections--enough to persuade the guerrillas that elections were a viable option.

To varying degrees, the men and women who have returned to San Salvador from the mountains lead dual lives, with one foot set gingerly in the world of legal citizenship and another in the clandestine world of guerrillas. Some use pseudonyms, false documents and what they call “legends,” or made-up histories. Others have retaken their family names and returned home.

“This process of reinsertion assumes big risks,” said Sigifrido Reyes, a former combatant who uses his legal name. “They are much bigger than in clandestine work. You show your face. They know where you live. You present more flanks. But the trade-off is that if something happens, you have more rights with which to defend yourself.”

The transition that each of these former combatants is undergoing mirrors that which the entire Farabundo Marti front will have to make in converting from a coalition of five armed political parties to a single, democratically run leftist party.

“Military discipline has penetrated down to my bones,” said a former rebel commander who now uses the name Juan Carlos. “That is a problem in the face of democracy and participation in a political campaign, but it also can be a virtue. I am very demanding of myself and those around me.”

The candor with which the returning rebels spoke about the transition was something they could never afford when they were combatants. The difficulties and fears they have experienced are likely to be repeated by thousands of guerrillas who will be demobilized throughout the country in the next year.

Thousand Eyes Watching’

“When you first come back, you feel as if a thousand eyes are watching you,” recalled David. “After a few months you realize that no one is watching you. You’re just one more person.”

David was a San Salvador high school student in December, 1980, when he joined the People’s Revolutionary Army, one of the five groups in the Farabundo Marti front. He spent seven uninterrupted years patrolling the eastern provinces of Usulutan and Morazan before he emerged briefly in 1988 for a meeting of rebel commanders “in another country.”

“When I returned, I told the others that the world outside had changed, that it was super-computerized, a world of communications. The danger was that we would be left behind,” David said.

The following year, David was sent to San Salvador to prepare for the offensive. He found the capital changed too.

“I was walking around San Antonio Abad looking and looking for the plaza with the ceiba tree. Finally, I asked some man and he said, ‘Oh, you must be just back from the United States. The plaza isn’t there anymore. It’s a neighborhood now.’

“That was a month before the offensive. If only we’d known the city then like we know it now,” he said with a trace of nostalgia in his voice.

David returned again after the March, 1991, legislative elections.

“We saw a growing identification with the political program of the front. Many people wanted to work with the front, but the front appeared only as a military and guerrilla movement.

“I began working for a new political party for change. It was an open secret that this was the front’s party. You can’t create a political body with clandestine means or else people won’t lose their fear. Obviously, in a meeting, I never said ‘I’m former guerrilla so-and-so,’ but everybody realized I was new and that they didn’t know where I came from.”

David, 31, is slight and soft-spoken. He says he could not afford to work entirely in the open because the national police had an order for his arrest as a subversive. He goes by a pseudonym, at least until the cease-fire begins.

“We live publicly in terms of our work and activities with organizations, but in personal terms we are careful. It is a mixture of a legal political life with the security measures of an urban guerrilla. But we are never armed.”

He finds city life exhausting. In the mountains, rebels normally bed down by 7 p.m. Only the night owls stay up to watch the 9:30 p.m. news on portable televisions. Their day begins at 5 a.m.

“I felt safer and healthier in the mountains. Life in the city is longer hours, more hurried, and you’re walking among them . There’s more stress. At the front, I hiked every day and never got sick. When I first arrived, I ran every day, then three times a week, then once a month. Now I probably haven’t run in nine months. And everybody who comes back from the front brings with him a cumulative hunger that never ends.”

Because he is still clandestine, David is prohibited from visiting his family for fear of being captured. “The army believes that no matter how much conviction you have, eventually you will go home, and so they watch. Many of our people have been captured visiting family.”

A Man in the Mountains’

“The simple fact of walking about unarmed makes you insecure,” said Juan Carlos. “In the mountains, you have your gun and know that if you meet a soldier you are protected. Here, a gun is a danger, but psychologically you are still a man in the mountains.”

In the mountains, he was Comandante Pedro, a regional commander for the Armed Liberation Forces’ southeastern front in Usulutan province. He took up arms in April, 1981, and put them down in January, 1990, to become Juan Carlos in San Salvador.

“A few nights after I returned, there was a battle near my house with heavy shooting and bombs. I woke up and looked for my gun. When I couldn’t find it, I got confused and wondered where I was. A million thoughts went through my mind before I realized I was at home,” he said.

Juan Carlos, 43, is dark and strong. He was a construction worker before he became a guerrilla. In anticipation of his return, his wife moved the family to a new house and prepared the “legend”--that her husband was coming back from the United States where he had been working. Only the oldest of their three teen-agers knew where he really had been.

“My youngest son said that all he had remembered about me was that I wore a mustache. I was shaken,” Juan Carlos said.

“I began the experience of being a father. I told them that I didn’t know how to be a father but that I wanted them to know me and I want to know them. I felt insecure about my authority in the house.”

He was appalled that his children would watch popular soap operas; they resisted his interference. In the end, they compromised. The children could watch soap operas if they also would watch the news.

His children had never understood why he didn’t come home from the United States with money and presents like the other fathers. Their image of guerrillas had been formed by the right-wing government and media. Gradually, he told them the truth.

“At first they were afraid, but we had long conversations,” he said.

Telling neighbors that he was a salesman, he left home every day to work at building the structure of the new political party that would represent the interests of the poor and working classes.

“It is more difficult to design a political strategy than a military plan,” he said.

On Sept. 17, treasury police surprised him at home. He and his family were detained, although the teen-agers were released the same day and his wife in three days. Someone--an informant or deserter--had recognized Comandante Pedro from the mountains.

Juan Carlos was in jail for three months, accused of subversive activities and carrying false documents. A lawyer secured his release Dec. 20.

“The capture served to bring my family closer together. My children wrote me letters in jail giving me their support and telling me they were proud of what I do.”

Learning the Wavelengths

Shortly after he returned to San Salvador to run a small business, Ricardo’s girlfriend took him to a restaurant owned by a right-wing painter who sat down with them for drinks and declared his support for the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance party.

“Why did you take me there?” an irritated Ricardo asked her afterward.

“You will learn,” she said. “You cannot come back and cut off everyone who is not on your political wave-length.”

While working clandestinely for Farabundo Marti, they continued to frequent the restaurant. One Sunday the owner invited the couple to their home for lunch.

“He mentioned that he had known leftists in the 1970s through the art world and that he had liked them. Then his wife told a story about seeing a demonstration on television after the assassination of (Archbishop of San Salvador, Msgr. Oscar Arnulfo) Romero.

“She had been outraged not at the assassination, not that people were shot at his funeral, but that on television she had seen several people whom she knew and they had never told her they were leftists.

“She felt betrayed. They were people who had been to her house and she said to me, ‘Imagine, Ricardo. It’s as if I invited you to my house and tomorrow I see on television that you are FMLN!’ ”

We Started With Slingshots’

Santiago Flores, 32, says the guerrillas are prepared to open offices of their new party in 12 of the country’s 14 provinces, with representatives in 150 of the 262 municipalities. They have already collected the 3,000 signatures needed to legally register a new political party.

“These are the seeds we have planted,” said the former Popular Liberation Forces commander named Chico, who now pretends to be an accountant. “We went to war because they imposed it on us. The death squads were looking for me. They came to my house but I wasn’t there. They put my parents face-down on the floor.”

Few of the comrades who joined the rebel army with him in 1980 are still alive.

“Santiago, El Coyote , fell. Fabio, who I named my son after, fell. Another fell when we took El Paraiso in 1981. Another in 1982.

“You know, I never imagined I’d reach this point. We began with sticks and slingshots. When we took Cinquera in 1983, I never expected to take a town and see the National Guard run. In the offensive of 1989, I never expected to make it home.”

And he never expected to see peace. But on New Year’s Eve, when the cease-fire agreement was reached, he told his wife, “The war is over. We’re entering another period now.”