Camilo Torres, the guerrilla priest whose remains are claimed by the ELN

Cement terrace. San Vicente de Chucuri. Santander. February 15. 1966. Camilo Torres, the inclined rifle, participates in his first fight. Shrapnel deafened the mountains and 14 shots knocked down Second Lieutenant Jorge González Angulo, who, before losing consciousness, saw the priest. Weapon in hand, Camilo pointed at him, first with his eyes, then with his gun. He didn’t shoot him. It cost him his life. A soldier took advantage of the priest’s doubt and killed him.

Camilo Torres was born into one of the most important families of the Colombian bourgeoisie. They were not very religious, their father, Don Calixto Torres Umaña, was a renowned doctor and militant of the Liberal Party; his mother, Isabel Restrepo Gaviria, a distinguished lady of Bogota society. Between ancestry and privileges, the destiny of Camilo Torres seemed expeditious and his parents were already blinded by the brilliant career as a lawyer they predicted for him.

But the fate of Camilo Torres was different, closer to the people, first as a priest, then as a university professor and finally as a guerrilla. When Camilo Torres joined the National Liberation Army, in Latin America the triumph of the Cuban Revolution was spreading and new communist-influenced guerrillas were born from the discontent of the less favored sectors of a continent which, since its independence from Spain, had not finished finding itself between its colonial past and the republican myth of liberal democracies.

Before joining the ELN, Camilo Torres began studying law at the National University. It only lasted a semester. Something stirred in him and in 1947 he entered the Council Seminary of Bogotá to be ordained a priest. Seven years later, in 1954, he was ordained. A year later, he went to Belgium to continue his studies in sociology without putting aside his priestly service. In 1959 he returned to the Bogotá headquarters of the Nacional not as a student, but to join the faculty of the Faculty of Economics.

Before entering the seminary, Camilo Torres met Luis Villar Borda and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who picked him up at the request of Doña Isabel Restrepo, and asked them to keep it a secret, since they knew that his mother, Doña Isabel , to find would oppose his priestly intentions.

In Belgium and France, Camilo Torres saw the work of the worker-priests up close, visited the mineworkers and began his enterprise to reconcile Marxist analysis and postulates with the ideals of Christianity and the social work of the Church. Back in Colombia, he finds himself confronted with the curia of Bogotá, in particular with Cardinal Luis Concha Córdoba, who will end up, by his pressure, bringing Camilo Torres to ask for his demotion to the lay state and to celebrate his last mass on 24 June. , 1965. in the Church of San Diego.

The clashes between Camilo Torres and the Colombian Curia arose because the latter invited the people to join the revolutionary struggle. In one of his sermons, he said: “Revolution is not only permitted but obligatory for Christians who see in it the only effective and comprehensive means of realizing love for all”. He also said that “the duty of every Christian is to be a revolutionary. The duty of every revolutionary is to make the revolution.

On his return from Belgium, Camilo Torres joined the National University as chaplain and teacher. Together with Orlando Fals Borda, Eduardo Umaña Luna, María Cristina Salazar, Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda, Carlos Escalante, Darío Botero Uribe and Tomás Ducay, among others, they founded the first sociology chair on the continent. There were great debates about the revolution and the causes of violence in Colombia with a scientific perspective.

“I opted for Christianity because I considered it to be the purest way to serve my neighbour. I was chosen by Christ to be a priest forever, motivated by the desire to devote myself full time to the love of my fellow men. As a sociologist, I wanted this love to become effective through technology and science. By analyzing Colombian society, I realized the need for a revolution in order to be able to feed the hungry, drink the thirsty, clothe the naked and ensure the well-being of the majority of our people,” Camilo Torres said in a statement. . to the press in 1965.

That same year, before joining the ELN, Camilo Torres founded the United Popular Front. A “pluralistic movement for the seizure of power” to create a country that “would work for the dignity of the peoples today dominated and exploited and against American interventionism, which would develop its own science, nationalize state enterprises, with the free public education, university autonomy, agrarian and urban reforms, planning with participatory and communal action, forms of cooperative organization and the participation of workers in companies” through “a system oriented by love of neighbour”.

On January 7, 1966, Camilo Torres joined the ELN. Three weeks later he died in his first fight. His remains were hidden by the Colombian national army, under the pretext that his tomb would not become a place of pilgrimage.

Army General (r) Álvaro Valencia Tovar —who commanded the unit that faced Camilo Torres’ group— assured, in the documentary Camilo’s Trailthat the body was hidden in an “unthinkable” place, because “he did not want his corpse to be transformed into a political flag”.

However, in 2023, before the start of the second round of talks between the Colombian state and the ELN, the guerrilla peace delegation demanded that the remains of the priest be handed over. For the entourage led by Pablo BeltranPablo Beltranthe State is primarily responsible for the disappearance of the body of the priest.

“This is an excellent opportunity for Gustavo Petro to demonstrate his attachment to the memory and to the victims of this armed conflict, of which Camilo is a symbol of dignity and commitment to the social transformation of the country.”

It is a request that has been made for years, but which has never received a response from the State. Today, the ELN peace delegation hopes that with the government of Gustavo Petro this demand will be dealt with. They even suggested that he should “personally lead” these research efforts.