Manuel Marulanda Vélez was the nom-de-guerre of the Colombian guerrilla commander Pedro Antonio Marín. He was better known by his nickname, Tirofijo, or Crackshot, which he is said to have earned as a young man hunting for game in the mountains. He was reputed to be the oldest guerrilla fighter in the world.

He took up arms during the political warfare of the late 1940s, and never returned to “normal” life. He eventually became the overall commander of Colombia’s biggest and oldest guerrilla army, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Farc, holding that position for 18 years. Regular reports of his death during that time all turned out to be exaggerated, until the Farc released a video on May 25, in which they announced that “one of the most outstanding revolutionary leaders of all time” had died two months earlier. At the height of its powers, in the late 1990s, the Farc had more than 20,000 members, divided into 70-odd well-organised and armed columns or “fronts”, scattered across a country the size of western Europe, and exercising de facto control over large expanses of territory.

Marulanda formed a guerrilla unit with his 14 cousins in 1949, during the undeclared civil war, known simply as La Violencia, that followed the assassination of a leading populist politician, Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, in Bogotá in 1948. The murder brought a wave of violent protests, in the course of which army artillery shelled rebel strongholds in the capital, and soon spread to other parts of the country. In the rural areas rival armed bands professing allegiance to the traditional Liberal and Conservative parties settled old scores and turned villages into armed camps. About 200,000 people died in the mayhem of the next few years. Marulanda was a gaitanista Liberal, and his mobile guerrilla band was created as a defence against Conservative gunmen from neighbouring settlements in the central Andes.

When an army general, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, seized power in 1953 and initiated a “pacification” policy, most of the Liberal chieftains laid down their arms, but Marulanda did not. Nor did he surrender when the Liberals and Conservatives concluded a power-sharing agreement, known as the National Front, a few years later, after the departure of Rojas Pinilla. Marulanda at first supported the dissident Liberal offshoot known as the Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (MRL), founded by Alfonso López Michelsen, the rebellious son of a former Liberal president. But later he moved close to the Colombian Communist Party, which was calling on peasants expelled from their land by the political violence to form “self-defence” communities and resist outside attacks.

Marulanda and 48 other “primitive rebels”, all former Liberal guerrillas, set up one such community, Marquetalia, in the mountains not far from the capital. A leading Conservative politician, Alvaro Gómez Hurtado, described Marquetalia as an “independent republic” and called on the Government to crush it. The military duly launched an all-out assault on the rebel stronghold in May 1964, forcing Marulanda and his followers to scatter. Within two years he and other local guerrilla commanders under Communist influence came together to found the Farc in the south of Tolima department in April 1966. The Farc at that time consisted of about 400 poorly armed peasants, under the overall command of Jacobo Arenas.

The aims of the Farc were idealistic: “Colombia for the Colombians, with equality of opportunities and equitable distribution of wealth. . . where we can build peace with social equality and sovereignty.” This was enough to attract a stream of recruits in rural areas, and the organisation grew steadily, despite sporadic attempts by the military to destroy it. In the mid-1980s the Conservative President of the day, Belisario Betancur, invited its commanders to a peace conference. A truce was declared in May 1984 to enable talks to take place, and the two sides subsequently agreed that guerrillas who laid down their arms could return to civilian life and form their own legal political party, the Patriotic Union (UP). Marulanda remained aloof, and the murder by death squad over the next few years of thousands of former guerrillas justified his suspicions: he would never agree to take part in any peace process that involved a cessation of hostilities, which would leave the guerrillas defenceless against paramilitary gangs. Marulanda became overall commander of the Farc in 1990.

Pedro Antonio Marín was born in 1928 or 1930 (versions differ) in Génova, a coffee town in Quindío department, in the central Andes. He came from a poor peasant background, and after a few years at primary school he was forced to go out and make a living: he hawked trinkets around the nearby villages on mule-back. He eventually adopted the name Manuel Marulanda Vélez in memory of a Communist trade union leader murdered by government agents in 1951. He said that he had hoped it would replace Tirofijo, but it never did. Marulanda was a taciturn, unflappable campesino, not much more than five feet tall. But he imposed strict military discipline and hierarchy in Farc ranks, and became a self-taught expert on military organisation.

As leader of the Farc, Marulanda headed the so-called “secretariat”, the inner circle of strategists. Under his command, the Farc became not only a large and well-equipped irregular fighting force but also a wealthy organisation, collecting millions of dollars a year from ransoming kidnap victims, extortion and, mainly, from the drugs trade. From the 1980s onwards the Farc guerrillas collected protection money from the traffickers and “taxed” their operations at every stage. The guerrillas also used drugs to exchange for arms.

Guerrilla warfare eventually went out of fashion almost everywhere in Latin America, but not in Colombia. The high point of Farc power and influence came during the presidency of Andrés Pastrana, a Conservative, between 1998 and 2002. Pastrana had pledged during his election campaign to bring the decades of civil conflict to an end, and he held two personal meetings with the old guerrilla leader to prepare the ground for peace talks. Marulanda helped Pastrana to win the election by announcing that he supported his peace plans. On taking office, Pastrana appointed a “peace commission” to engage in negotiations with the guerrillas. To overcome Marulanda’s suspicions, he agreed that talks could begin without a truce being declared first, and he ordered troops and government officials to withdraw from a demilitarised zone the size of Switzerland in the south of the country, where the two sides’ representatives would meet.

The results, however, were disappointing. Marulanda failed to put in an appearance for the opening ceremony and talks went on in desultory fashion for the next three years, with the guerrillas insisting on a “change of economic model” and sweeping social reforms. But government negotiators became convinced that Marulanda was not really interested in reaching a settlement. He was instead using the demilitarised zone as a base for launching military operations in other parts of the country, and as a holding area for “prisoners of war”. Pastrana lost patience in February 2002, and sent troops back into the demilitarised zone. The kidnapping by the Farc of Ingrid Betancourt, one of the candidates in the forthcoming presidential elections, was the last straw. Marulanda’s subsequent whereabouts were shrouded in mystery.

But when a much tougher president, Alvaro Uribe, replaced Pastrana in August 2002, Marulanda showed that he was still a force to be reckoned with: the Farc launched a rocket attack on the presidential palace on inauguration day. Uribe, with US financial and military assistance, attempted to increase the pressure on the guerrillas, who responded with a campaign of urban bombings. This marked a change in strategy. Until then the Farc had been very much a rural organisation. The bombing techniques put into practice by the Farc at this time had been learnt from the IRA, three of whose members were arrested in Colombia in 2002.

Uribe’s tough counter-insurgency policies, which he called “democratic security”, gradually began to wear the Farc down: it suffered a succession of military reverses at the hands of the rejuvenated armed forces, and a large number of desertions as guerrilla fighters weary of years of roughing it in the jungle handed in their weapons in return for generous financial rewards. Farc units were increasingly forced to take refuge in neighbouring countries. On March 1, 2008, the Farc inner circle suffered its first casualty when the organisation’s second-in-command, Raúl Reyes, was killed when the Colombian military attacked a guerrilla camp just across the border in Ecuador.

In recent months the presidents of Venezuela and Ecuador, both admirers of the Farc, had been trying to persuade Marulanda to release the hundreds of prisoners held by the guerrillas and to drop the practice of taking innocent civilians hostage for ransom or as negotiating counters. They argued that the Farc’s international image was suffering, even among sympathisers. But Marulanda was not convinced: he grudgingly released a handful of high-profile prisoners, with the mediation of President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, but he would go no farther.

Less than a month after the death of Reyes, Marulanda himself was dead — of a heart attack, according to his comrades, though he may have been killed in an air raid. “He must be in Hell”, commented the Colombian Defence Minister, Juan Manuel Santos, when his death was finally confirmed.

Marulanda was extremely reserved about his private life. During the peace talks a young female guerrilla, Sandra, accompanied him everywhere, and was rumoured to be his wife. He had a least one previous wife and several children.

Manuel Marulanda Vélez, Colombian guerrilla leader, was born in Génova, Colombia, on either May 13, 1928, or May 12, 1930. He died of a heart attack on March 26, 2008, aged 79 (77)