Colombia offers bounty for FARC founder's body

BOGOTA (Reuters) - Colombian authorities are offering up to $2.7 million in bounty for the body of the founder and chief commander of the FARC rebels, who died after 40 years fighting the state, a top army official said on Tuesday.

FARC chief Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda died of a heart attack in March four decades after he formed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, Latin America's oldest insurgency, the rebels said on Sunday.

His death was a heavy blow to the FARC, which has already been weakened by the deaths of several top commanders over the last year in military strikes under President Alvaro Uribe's U.S.-backed security crackdown.

"Without a doubt this has become a objective for us," said Army chief Gen. Mario Montoya. "It will be important for us to carry out identification of this body."

A peasant himself, Marulanda founded the FARC in 1964 as a Marxist-inspired ragtag army that grew to become a powerful subversive force with more than 17,000 fighters controlling large swaths of Colombia.

Under Uribe's government, the rebels have been steadily weakened and driven back to remoter parts of the country and violence has dropped sharply. But the rebels are still a capable force in areas where state presence is weak.

A FARC commander on Sunday acknowledged Marulanda died after an illness. But military officials do not dismiss the possibility he was wounded in bombardments around that time on the southern jungles where he was believed to be hiding.

The United States and European Union label the FARC a cocaine-trafficking terrorist group. But the rebels are still holding scores of hostages kept for years in jungle camps, including French-Colombian politician Ingrid Betancourt and three Americans.

(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta, writing by Patrick Markey, editing by Philip Barbara)