BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Pedro Antonio Marin, the hard-bitten Colombian peasant who oversaw South America's largest rebel group's rise to power as well as its recent disintegration, has died, a fellow rebel announced. He was thought to be 77.
In a video broadcast Sunday over Venezuela's Telesur network, Timoleon Jimenez confirmed Marin's death on March 26 of a heart attack. The Colombian government, which said it had launched bombing raids in the area where Marin was believed to be camped around the time he died, wants to conduct an autopsy. Marin's body has not been recovered.
Under the twin banners of land reform and social justice, Marin went by the aliases Manuel Marulanda and "Sureshot." He built the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC, into a force that a few years ago numbered nearly 20,000. The FARC at that time seemed on the verge of assaulting the capital.
But strategic decisions that Marin made in the 1980s to finance the FARC through drug trafficking, kidnapping and terror reduced the popular support on which the leftist rebel group's success depends.
In recent months, FARC leadership has suffered several killings, captures and surrenders, and its ranks have been sharply reduced by desertions. Colombia's armed forces, which have benefited from billions of dollars of U.S. equipment and training, have "seized the initiative," analyst Antonio Caballero wrote in Monday's Semana magazine.
Born into a peasant family in the coffee-growing Quindio state, Marin left school after the fifth grade to work as a farmhand. He was deeply affected by La Violencia, the social upheaval of the late 1940s that left several family members dead and the town he lived in, Ceilan, burned to the ground.
He told his biographer, Arturo Alape, of witnessing massacres and seeing "ten or 15 bodies floating daily down the Cauca River." He joined a Liberal Party self-defense group in the early 1950s, which operated like a small guerrilla group, and immediately displayed leadership qualities. It was then that he took the Marulanda alias.
Although the FARC later adopted a communist ideology and hierarchy, Marin's initial aim was to protect his family and other peasants from marauding Conservative Party gangs. "We didn't call ourselves guerrillas. We didn't know what a guerrilla was," Marin told Alape for his 1989 biography.
