There’s no doubt that Lorena Peña has devoted her life to the struggle. Like other Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) militants of her generation, she’s fought for a democratic, egalitarian, and free El Salvador.

It’s come at great cost. All three of Peña’s siblings were killed in the war, along with her first husband and countless friends. She abandoned university to join the armed struggle, and even sacrificed raising her children, leaving them with their grandmother so she could return to the front. In her 2009 autobiography, Peña wrote: “I have had to recruit myself a thousand times to our humanist liberation struggle. I have asked myself the question of whether such effort was worth it.” After so much sacrifice, the answer could only be “yes.”

Peña is a formidable figure in Salvadoran politics. As a guerrilla commander during the civil war between the leftist FMLN and the US-backed military dictatorship, she helped negotiate an end to the brutal twelve-year conflict. As the FMLN was beginning its transition from insurgent army to political party in the early 1990s, Peña helped found and lead the Las Mélidas feminist organization and brought the fight against patriarchy into the FMLN itself. “We launched a huge political and ideological offensive in the ranks of the party,” she remembers proudly. “We were able to establish the Women’s Secretariat in that context, and an institutional gender policy.”