Regional Outlook : Leftists Deeply Split in Salvador and Nicaragua : After years of war, it’s peace that threatens the movements’ survival.

During the marathon hours of last month’s Sandinista party convention, Daniel Ortega and Sergio Ramirez sat in the seats of honor that their long tenure as president and vice president of Nicaragua had earned them.

But the two veteran Sandinistas barely spoke to each other.

By the time the convention ended, Ortega loyalists had unceremoniously dumped Ramirez, who heads a faction of moderates, from the party leadership.

An angry Ramirez stormed out of the convention hall, and his followers are considering leaving the party altogether.

In El Salvador, where 12 years of civil war finally came to an end and the leftist guerrillas formed a political party, the disintegration came even more swiftly.

On their first day in office last month, a group of rebels-turned-lawmakers broke with their leaders and sided with the ruling right-wing bloc in a vote on National Assembly officers.

The disobedient legislators have been suspended from their party posts, and they may eventually be expelled.

Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. government spent billions of dollars through proxy armies to try to destroy the two largest leftist movements in Central America: the Soviet-armed Sandinista National Liberation Front of Nicaragua, and El Salvador’s Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, or FMLN.

What the Americans failed to accomplish in war, however, now seems to be occurring in peace. The unity forged fighting a common enemy has dissolved, and the left in Central America has entered a profound crisis, one that threatens its survival.

“All political forces in the region are in crisis, especially those that defined themselves in the Cold War,” said Hector Dada, a political analyst who heads a liberal think tank in San Salvador.

“(The left) has the huge problem of having to pass from the use of weapons to conquer total power, to the use of elections, which does not give total power. How does the left define itself now? What does it mean to be a leftist? These are the difficulties that are being expressed.”

In interviews in Managua and San Salvador, several leftist leaders argued that the internal frictions are part of a natural evolution as the parties find their way in the new world order.

Still, the often bitter and unusually public disputes have crippled the FMLN and the Sandinista Front as effective opposition forces and sowed doubts about their political futures.

Both the fronts disagree on what their post-Cold War role should be.

Factions within each favor moving more quickly toward the political center to modernize their organizations into forces that can win elections and run governments.

Larger, opposing factions want to fight free-market economics and retain close ties to the traditional rank-and-file.

The more centrist factions accuse their opponents of remaining mired in their authoritarian past, and the opponents in turn accuse the centrists of betraying their parties’ revolutionary ideals.

“Today, in the (Sandinista Front) as well as in the FMLN, we are living a new period of ideological and political struggle, caused by our setbacks, failings and errors, and also by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,” Schafik Handal, secretary general of the FMLN and head of the Salvadoran Communist Party, told the Sandinista convention delegates in a keynote address.

“We are all in the same crisis of searching and debate.”

Both the Sandinista Front and the FMLN formed in the 1970s as a union of a variety of forces.

The Sandinista Front combined three basic tendencies, each with a different view on how to conduct revolution, but they eventually achieved a seemingly monolithic unity after ousting the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1979.

The Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua, while fighting U.S.-backed Contra rebels, throughout the 1980s, until finally losing elections in 1990 to conservatives led by President Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

At the behest of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, meanwhile, five leftist military-political organizations in El Salvador joined forces to become the FMLN and wage war on a series of U.S.-backed governments.

Unlike the Sandinista Front, the five factions of the FMLN maintained their distinct identities during the war. They ran separate clandestine radio stations and controlled separate pieces of territory.

As a result, many observers now see a split within the FMLN as inevitable, though few of them are ready to predict an immediate, formal division.

The fall of communism and the Soviet Empire--traditional backers of the FMLN and Sandinista Front--suddenly forced both groups to re-examine the backbone of their movements.

The disarray of the left has different consequences in each country.

In Nicaragua, a divided Sandinista Front could clear the way for a far-right candidate to win presidential elections in 1996.

A fragmented FMLN means that there will be few checks and balances in El Salvador on right-wing President Armando Calderon Sol.

The simmering discord within the Sandinista Front, which first became obvious after the Sandinistas’ 1990 electoral loss, bubbled over in the weeks leading up to the party’s second-ever convention last month.

Former Vice President Ramirez and his supporters held press conferences that the radio stations--controlled by ex-President Ortega and his supporters--refused to cover. The two factions traded insults: Ramirez and the moderates were accused of being pro-Yankee sellouts; Ortega and the hard-liners were labeled intransigent Stalinists.

Ultimately, Ortega’s faction won out--and won big. He was reelected as secretary general of the party, a post he has held for 15 years, and his allies received enough votes to dominate the 15-member National Directorate, or executive council.

With his victory, Ortega is a likely candidate for president in 1996, even though opinion polls have shown Ramirez to be the Sandinista who most appeals to the general public. If the party splits, however, the chance for victory in the elections seems even more remote.

Critics saw the results of the convention as a step to the hard left that allows little space for reformers.

The convention delegates, for example, voted to stick with the party anthem, which refers to Americans-- el yanqui --as the “enemies of humanity.”

“There are (members of the party) who still think it’s July 19, 1979,” Ramirez said, referring to the date Sandinistas marched triumphantly into Managua after the insurrection.

Ortega insisted that he is open to new ideas but pointed out that his election was the product of a “democratic process” that should be respected.

The dissident Sandinistas say they want to create a form of Sandinismo that is more democratic and flexible and that can attract the thousands of supporters who have abandoned the party out of disgust with corruption.

Many Sandinista militants became disenchanted in 1990 after the party and Ortega lost the election and their leaders proceeded to make off with businesses, homes and properties that had been confiscated by the Sandinista government. The episode became known as La Pinata. )

“We have to show the dissatisfied that there is another Sandinismo,” longtime party activist and political scientist Silvio Prado said. “We have to have a new relationship within the Front that is not submission and direction but cooperation. . . . If not, the party will get weaker and weaker by the day, until it disappears.”

In El Salvador, conflicts among the FMLN leaders were legendary, and they have become increasingly public since the U.N.-brokered peace accords.

Joaquin Villalobos, the guerrillas’ most successful military strategist, leads one faction, while Handal and the largest group within the FMLN, the Popular Liberation Forces, generally fall on the other side.

Participating in democratic elections for the first time last March, the FMLN won a handful of municipal posts and 21 seats in the legislative National Assembly.

It was on May 1, the day that the new legislators were sworn in, that the most recent conflict exploded.

The right-wing politicians who dominate the National Assembly had made changes in rules governing the officers of the assembly, enhancing the right’s power.

Handal said the FMLN agreed to protest by refusing to vote for National Assembly officers during inauguration of the congress. But, to the surprise of many, seven FMLN legislators broke ranks and voted for the new officers, including several from the right.

FMLN legislators Ana Guadalupe Martinez and Eduardo Sancho, who were among those who chose to vote, were also voted in as officers.

A furious Handal immediately announced that the seven dissident legislators, plus accused ringleader Villalobos, no longer represented the FMLN and had been suspended from their party leadership positions. They could face expulsion later this month.

“Let it be clear,” the bearded Handal intoned, “they do not represent us.”

In a flurry of television appearances, the chastised legislators responded that they were voting their convictions, and in a pluralistic political organization they should be allowed to do so.

“You have to ask the question, which is more important: mechanical unity, or a new identity that makes you electable?” Villalobos said.

“In El Salvador, all the powers are transforming. The right is changing, the army is changing, relations with the United States are changing. . . . If the left does not change, all of the other powers will consolidate, and the left will be left out of the picture.”