Manuel Marulanda
Manuel Marulanda founded the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and led it for more than forty years. Born Pedro Antonio Marín in 1930 in Génova, Quindío, to a peasant family, he had four years of schooling and worked as a farmhand and small trader. His formation was La Violencia, the civil conflict between Liberals and Conservatives that killed perhaps two hundred thousand people between 1948 and 1958. He took up arms with a Liberal guerrilla band as a young man, and did not disarm when the parties made peace, because the settlement — the National Front, under which Liberals and Conservatives alternated in power — excluded everyone else and left rural land distribution untouched. He took the name Manuel Marulanda Vélez from a murdered trade unionist, and was nicknamed Tirofijo, sureshot. He and a few dozen followers established a peasant enclave at Marquetalia in the south, which the government and the press called an independent republic. In May 1964 the army attacked it with several thousand troops and American support. Marulanda and about forty-five survivors escaped, and formally founded the FARC two years later, with a Marxist-Leninist programme and a demand for agrarian reform. The movement grew to perhaps eighteen thousand fighters, funding itself increasingly through taxation of coca production, kidnapping and extortion, which eroded whatever peasant sympathy it began with. Peace talks in the 1980s collapsed after thousands of members of the associated Patriotic Union party were murdered by paramilitaries. Talks at Caguán from 1998 also failed, and he did not appear at the opening ceremony, leaving an empty chair. He died of a heart attack in the jungle in March 2008.
- Lived: 1930 CE – 2008 CE
- Nationality: Colombian
- Roles: rebel_leader, military_leader
