Colombia's Marulanda, from peasant to guerrilla chief

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Manuel Marulanda rose in status from an unassuming peasant farmer to the powerful Marxist-inspired leader of Latin America's oldest surviving guerrilla force.

Now after four decades of bombings, massacres and kidnappings, the man known as "Sureshot" has died, either of natural causes or in a military bombardment, the government said on Saturday citing military intelligence sources.

Often seen with a towel slung over the shoulder of his combat fatigues, Marulanda spent most of his life living in the country's southern jungles as he became the influential chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC.

"When I die, at least 20 or 30 guerrillas will replace me," Marulanda told Venezuela's Globovision television in a interview a few years ago.

No one knows why rebel companions called him "Sureshot", but Marulanda took up arms in the 1950s, when Colombia was racked by "La Violencia," a bloody conflict between liberal and conservative political factions.

Born into a peasant family, he is rumored to have never visited a big city.

According to most accounts, Marulanda was the oldest of five children and had an elementary education before taking modest jobs such, as cutting wood and selling candy. He later took to the mountains with his cousins to set up a guerrilla unit.

Influenced later by Marxist ideas and social justice and agrarian reform, Marulanda was one of the survivors of a bloody 1964 army attack on Marquetalia, a communist cooperative.

Seeking revenge, he later built a small peasant force into a full-scale national insurgency that at its peak had more than 17,000 fighters and demanded radical political reform. It also took an important role in Colombia's cocaine trade.

But the FARC rebel movement has been weakened by President Alvaro Uribe's U.S.-backed security drive. Several rebel leaders have been killed over the last year as the FARC comes under increasing military pressure.

Colombian and U.S. authorities brand Marulanda's rebel army a "narco-insurgency" because of its involvement in cocaine trafficking.

Marulanda's rebels hold hundreds of hostages, often in miserable conditions in jungle camps, and they openly admit filling its war chests with proceeds from kidnapping and extortion.

(Reporting by Patrick Markey in Bogota; Editing by Kieran Murray)