Crowds have poured into the streets of Uruguay’s capital to bid a poignant farewell to former President José Mujica, a guerrilla fighter-turned-pioneering leader who became an icon of the Latin American left,

José Mujica, a member of a Marxist rebel group that terrorized Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s and who later became a mainstream politician and one of his country’s most venerated presidents, died May 13 at his home in Rincón de Cerro,

The former guerrilla who governed Uruguay from 2010 to 2015 earned his nickname because of his modest lifestyle.