A Communist party politician, he had been a Member of the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia from 1992 to 1994, and had served a sentence in prison because of his political ideology, charged for revolutionary activity.

Manuel Cepeda Vargas was born April 13, 1930, in Armenia, department of Quindío.

He was put in charge of rebuilding the Colombian Communist youth, JUCO, and was made that group's general secretary.

Cepeda Vargas was named Secretary General of the Colombian Communist Party in 1992, succeeding Álvaro Vásquez.

A school in Bogotá and a Western Bloc of the FARC-EP front are named in his honor, although his son Iván Cepeda Castro has repudiated the use of his father's name on the part of FARC and has repeatedly condemned the actions of that guerrilla organization, reiterated who “a right and democratic society, like which it loved my father, is not constructed to end of indiscriminate attacks against the civil populace ".