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,

Mourners wept, raised their arms and marched behind the flag-draped casket of former President José Mujica on Wednesday as thousands bid a poignant farewell to the iconic leader in the Uruguayan capital.

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,