Childhood and education Jorge Camilo Torres Restrepo was born on 3 February 1929 in Bogotá into a well-to-do family of the liberal bourgeoisie. His mother Isabel told him the story of Father Cuco (Juan de la Cruz Gaviria), a liberal businessman who financed the military campaigns against the conservatives in the civil wars of the 19th century. His parents took him to Europe when he was only two years old. He returned to the country in 1934. Three years later, in 1937, the couple separated, leaving Camilo and his brother Fernando at their mother's side. Expelled for his criticism of the teachers at the traditional
Colegio Mayor de Nuestra Señora del Rosario, he finished his baccalaureate at the Liceo de Cervantes in 1946 where he met and became friends with
Luis Villar Borda and Ricardo Samper. His sister Gerda Westendorp Restrepo, daughter of Isabel Restrepo's first marriage, was a medical student (the first woman in Colombia to pursue a university degree). Her brother Fernando devoted himself to medicine like his father and older half-sister, and settled in the
United States. He was close to Camilo although their professions caused them to see each other sporadically. Camilo Torres entered the Faculty of Law at the
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he would meet again with Villar Borda, and only studied there for the first semester. During this brief period Camilo and Luis edited the university page of the Bogota newspaper
La Razón, and on some occasions wrote criticisms against some university magazines that they considered radical. Influenced by the social ideas of two French Dominican priests, Nielly and Blanchet, whom he met through the father of his girlfriend Teresa Montalvo, daughter of a prestigious Bogota family, the idea of becoming a priest began to take hold of Camilo, and to make this decision, he withdrew to meditate in the eastern plains. After breaking up with his girlfriend and despite the reluctance of his mother and father, Camilo entered the Conciliar Seminary of Bogotá of the
Archdiocese of Bogotá (in agreement with his parents to avoid entering the
Dominican Seminary of
Chiquinquirá which was in poor condition) where he remained for seven years, during which time he began to take an interest in social realities.
Priesthood and academic life Poverty and social injustice attracted his attention and, together with his fellow disciple Gustavo Pérez, he created a social studies circle that functioned even after Torres was ordained a priest in 1954 under the direction of Jonatan Gómez. Camilo started social activities in the neighbourhoods surrounding the Conciliar Seminary, which were populated by displaced families from the countryside. In 1955, in order to specialize, Torres travelled to
Belgium, to study for a few more years at the
Catholic University of Louvain. The first months were very difficult for the Bogota priest because of the cold climate, Belgian food and the conditions of the boarding house where he lived with Gustavo; for this reason, at the end of the first semester, he moved with his mother to a flat. With a group of Colombian students at the university, he founded the ECISE (Equipo Colombiano de Investigación Socioeconómica) and came into contact with Christian Democracy, the Christian trade union movement and
Algerian resistance groups in
Paris. He founded the Bogota, Paris and London sections of ECISE. In 1957 he met Marguerite-Marie 'Guitemie' Olivieri, a Frenchwoman of
Corso origin and bourgeois daughter of a doctor like Torres, who was to become his closest friend and secretary, and who by then was living in a poor neighbourhood of Paris, accompanying the pieds noirs in sabotage work against the French regime that was being imposed by force in Algeria. In turn, Torres met Villar Borda again in
Berlin and spent holidays in
Belgrade where he unsuccessfully wanted to exercise his priesthood, or failing that in
Prague. In 1958, the Belgian university awarded him the degree of
sociologist. His doctoral thesis,
Una aproximación estadística a la realidad socioeconómica de Bogotá, a pioneering work in urban sociology in Latin America, was published in 1987 under the title
La proletarización de Bogotá. While studying, Torres also studied Marxism after being given a permission to do so by the Cardinal
Crisanto Luque Sánchez. He was also exposed to the
worker-priest movement; according to Walter J. Broderick, "Camilo came in on the tail-end of it and was enormously affected by the spirit of commitment to the working masses which this movement had aroused in the more generous elements of the French and Belgian clergy". The impact was profound, and Camilo would accompany a local priest, who adhered to the worker-priest movement, to the poor districts. Broderick recalls that Camilo "became engaged in activities with flesh and blood people. He rarely missed a chance to help out at weekends in a parish of coal miners not far from Louvain, and would go back to his books pondering on what he had seen and heard: the hardships of the miners’ lives, their pastor's anguish for them and his efforts to improve their lot. For the pastor of this mining town was a firm convert to the Priest Worker Movement." After witnessing the poverty of Belgian miners, and under the influence of the worker-priest movement and Marxism, Camilo became embarrassed at his own luxury, and decided to sell his car and live as humbly as possible. After Camilo informed his mother of his decision, she chastized him; Camilo responded that his 'bourgeois' status was preventing him from establishing a "real contact" with the workers, whom he came to see as the embodiment of "the person of Jesus". Torres also stayed in touch with his friends from Colombia through letters, who informed him of dissemination of communist guerrillas and movements in Colombia; Camilo's friend Miguel wrote to him: "In my free time I'm working with the workers, finally...! They have many needs of all kinds and we are going to see how we can organise them to solve them. [...] On the subject of the country [...] I can add that the guerrillas seem to be fuelled by communism, which has gained ground even against the president." Camilo Torres' fascination with Marxism led him to visit the
Soviet Union at the time and praise
Joseph Stalin. Camilo's friend who became a communist, Jaime Díaz, praised Camilo for going to Moscow and "praying at the miraculous tomb of our father Stalin". promoted by the government of
Alberto Lleras Camargo, from Law 9 of 1958, Torres recognises in it the possibility of decentralising political power and giving possibilities of empowerment to grassroots communities. Together with teachers and students, he carried out community action programmes in working-class neighbourhoods in Bogotá. Torres was also the organiser of the IX Congress of the Latin American Sociological Association. MUNIPROC's work led to the founding of the first Junta de Acción Comunal (JAC) in
Tunjuelito, at that time a working class enclave in the south of Bogotá, where he had been working continuously for several years. In 1963, he chaired the first National Congress of Sociology, also held in Tunjuelito (Bogotá), and presented the study "La violencia y los cambios socio-culturales en las áreas rurales colombianas" (Violence and socio-cultural changes in rural areas of Colombia). Torres was also a member of the technical committee of the agrarian reform founded by the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA), where he represented the most reformist position of the Board of Directors, which was divided between the Conservative and Liberal parties, typical of the
National Front but considered by Torres an inefficient entity in the face of the needs of the Colombian countryside. In his career as a member of the Board, the episode of the project to set up an Agrarian School in Yopal (Casanare) and the difficulties presented by the then director of INCORA Enrique Peñalosa Camargo (liberal, father of the former mayor of Bogotá
Enrique Peñalosa Londoño) and Álvaro Gómez Hurtado (conservative, son of former president
Laureano Gómez) stand out. During this period of his life he was interested in founding a farm-school in
Yopal (
Casanare), as part of the rural action programme that he encouraged in the region and which would go on to achieve other organisational successes; on the board of the Incora, he sparked off a controversy over the application of the law of extinction of ownership restricted to uncultivated lands, which brought him into conflict with
Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, also a member of that body and head of the "Laureanist" group of the Conservative Party. Because of the resonance of this conflict, some conservative bishops wrote to the Cardinal to request his dismissal from the board. Invited to Peru, he gave courses and lectures on the subject of agrarian reform and social change. His view of the Latin American situation is not flattering, as he expresses it in a letter from
Lima. He writes: In 1962, the year in which the
Second Vatican Council was initiated by
Pope John XXIII, Torres was one of the first priests to offer a
Mass facing forward and in Spanish, when by then the Mass was offered facing backwards and in
Latin. Between 8 and 9 June of that year, under pressure from Cardinal
Luis Concha Córdoba, after entering, together with other professors, into contradictions with the rector, by honouring at mass the students killed after a demonstration repressed by the
National Police and by opposing the expulsion of other students, he was forced to resign from all his activities at the
National University of Colombia, being transferred to the Church of La Veracruz in Bogotá as
coadjutor;
Entering politics The
Cuban Revolution, which impacted every country in the Americas, caught Torres' attention after he returned to Colombia from Europe. In 1965, the Movimiento Revolucionario Libera (MRL) went into decline after its split following the presidential elections of 1962. The 1964 parliamentary elections were marked by an enormous
abstention, in which Torres concluded that the traditional parties;
Liberal and
Conservative, were abandoned by public opinion, so he considered creating a new instrument that would bring together the "Non-aligned" in politics; unions, guilds, associations, students and workers, to confront the decadent traditional parties, although for the time being calling for abstentionism. Torres also tried unsuccessfully to act as a mediator between the peasants and the
National Army to prevent the attack on the so-called Independent Republic of Marquetalia, which was his first contact with the
Colombian Communist Party.
The American-sponsored attempt to overthrow the Cuban regime rallied socialist guerrillas and revolutionary student movements across the Latin America, and it exposed Torres to the ideas of anti-imperialism. At the time, he identified as
progressive Catholic and wasn't afraid to raise topics such as poverty and unstable political situation of Colombia. His light-hearted manners made his masses appeal to a wider public, even including atheists. However, he believed that in order to truly realise the concept of Christian charity, a total change of power structures was needed, as the hitherto structures were responsible for social and economical inequality and poverty: He pointed out that the ones who were in the forefront of the fight to change structures were Marxists, and this brought him to the conclusion that collaborating with the Marxists was a necessity. At the same time, he discussed the Marxist thought in his writings - he criticised
vanguardism, attacking Lenin's concept of "the revolution by the elite", insisting that a revolution can only be carried out by ordinary people instead. He regarded
Marxist humanism as a product of
Christian humanist movement, and argued that Marxist principles stem from Christianity itself. In June 1965, at his request, Torres was
reduced to the lay state by his ecclesiastical superior, Cardinal Concha; at the same time he was removed from his post at ESAP and once again had disagreements with Concha, who offered him and his coadjutor bishop Rubén Isaza the post of director of sociology department in the
Archdiocese of Bogotá with the mediation of then-priest Ernesto Umaña de Brigard. Torres turned down the offer, seeing that the position was to prevent him from intervening in politics as well as presenting the socio-political platform in
Medellín, which was the reason why he had previously been removed from his position at the ESAP. Concha argued that the platform went against Catholic ideals and that priests should be apolitical in order to dissociate themselves from Catholicism's ambiguous and traditional relationship with the Conservative Party. Torres met with Concha, who vehemently opposed Torres' entry into politics. Umaña then met with Torres and offered him an ecclesiastical post, but Torres requested a
dispensation so that he could devote himself to politics and avoid problems with the ecclesiastical authority. Torres gave his last
Mass on 27 June 1965 in the Church of San Diego in Bogotá. Torres then travelled to
Lima, returning to Bogotá on 3 July to be received by his mother and a crowd of young people. According to Torres' mother, before his laicization, Camilo had been visited by some politicians and was told that, if he wrote to
Rome that he would lead his flock to the existing political parties and away from the guerilla movement, he would become a
cardinal. He rejected by saying "I'm not for sale, friends." The platform of his movement sought to address the needs of rural and urban areas, to eliminate the restricted democracy of the National Front at all costs, and the participation of the Church in
liberation theology. However, the National Front lacked a clear political platform, despite being close to and sympathetic to the revolutionary left; they also had their own newspaper, headed by Pedro Acosta, of the same name, which was only distributed three times a week from 26 August 1965, printed in the workshops of the Antares publishing house and owned by Torres' friend Gonzalo Canal Ramírez. Despite the growing popularity of the United Front, Torres decided to contact
Fabio Vásquez Castaño through student leader Jaime Arenas on 6 July 1965, who had previously led the strike at the
Universidad Industrial de Santander. The
United Front lasted from August to September 1965 (one month) after breaking with Christian Democracy for imposing a guerrilla line. His decision to resort to armed struggle was taken in the case of
Jorge Eliécer Gaitán and expressed to
Gloria Gaitán, daughter of the assassinated leader, who offered asylum to Torres, who gradually went underground. Despite this, Torres led a peaceful march with his students in Medellín and was arrested with his demonstrators, all university students, and held at the Asociación Sindical Antioqueña. He would later be intercepted in
Ventaquemada on his way to
Tunja, and in Bogotá he would also be detained after police repression of a demonstration by the Frente Unido. On 7 January 1966, Torres announced his incorporation into the
ELN. .
Catholic guerrilla In the guerrilla, Torres was mentored and advised by Jaime Arenas, chosen by Fabio Vásquez, also to keep him away from progressive currents. Shortly before joining the ELN, General
Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, leader of the ANAPO, had recommended Torres not to join any guerrilla group, since as a priest he had no experience in handling weapons to confront the army, so he suggested that he continue in political life since he admired his work with the needy classes, something that Torres disregarded considering the advice as a threat. On joining the ELN, under the
nom de guerre of
Argemiro, the identity of Torres, who was mistaken for a foreigner, was unknown for the moment within the guerrillas, but his identity was later revealed. As he explained in his "Message to the Christians" published in the first issue of
Frente Unido, he realised that the "effective means for the well-being of the majorities ... are not going to be sought by the minorities" and "will not be sought by the privileged minorities in power, because generally these effective means oblige the minorities to sacrifice their privileges", Torres concluded that "it is therefore necessary to take power away from the privileged minorities to give it to the poor majorities" and that "the Revolution is not only permitted but obligatory for Christians who see in it the only effective and ample way of realising love for all". This is how Camilo Torres justified his decision in 1965 to quit his job as a teacher and priest and join the guerrilla, more precisely the National Liberation Army (ELN), although he had previously been interested in joining the
Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) due to his peasant background. In the ELN, Torres mostly participated as a low-ranking member and provided spiritual and ideological assistance from a Catholic point of view. However, his performance as a guerrilla was poor as he was not used to the arduous training (being assisted by a comrade) and to carrying a rifle, so he was barely given a pistol and was emphasised for his role of spiritual and ideological assistance as well as being a good cook. Torres also served as a doctor for the guerrillas, both physically and "spiritually". Before his death, he became a leader of the ELN. He also emerged as the "main ideologue of the group". Under his influence, the ELN not only explicitly embraced
Catholicism and imbued it with
Marxism-Leninism, but also reorganized itself to resemble the structure of the
early Catholic Church: He died in his first combat experience, when the ELN ambushed a patrol of the
National Army. The National Army specifically targeted Torres, and he was brutally beaten at the time of his death. It was also revealed that he was shot at a point-blank range. Another report of his death is that he was shot while picking up the weapons of a fallen guerilla comrade. The
National Army hid the body in a strategic location separate from the other mass graves and the location was not revealed to the public. A symbolic funeral took place in the church of San Diego and a symbolic burial was held. A mass was also held in the grounds of the National University. Shortly after Torres's death, 'Guitemie' Olivieri, despite being linked to the ELN, was persecuted by the Colombian authorities and was helped by Junior Fajardo and Rita Restrepo de Agudelo to obtain political asylum, first in
Panama, then in
Mexico, where she married ex-priest Óscar Maldonado, finally in
Cuba and then in
France. Years later, Valencia Tovar, now retired as a general, wrote the book
El final de Camilo, in which he clarified details of the death of Camilo Torres. According to Valencia Tovar, Torres was buried in a detailed place, and they prepared the procedures to hand over the remains to the family. His older brother, doctor Fernando Torres Restrepo, who lived in the
United States, was informed about the fate of his brother. In addition, General Álvaro Valencia Tovar himself revealed in an interview to the magazine
Semana that the body of Camilo Torres was exhumed three years after his burial, his remains were placed in an urn and transported to
Bucaramanga where, through the efforts of the general himself, the Military Pantheon of the Fifth Brigade of the National Army was created and the first remains to occupy a place in that pantheon were those of Camilo Torres, although he did not reveal their exact location, leaving the retired general's statements in doubt among the ELN high command. In January 2016, the President of Colombia,
Juan Manuel Santos, instructed the
Colombian National Army to begin the process of searching for and exhuming his remains, in a gesture to accelerate the start of the peace talks with the ELN guerrilla group. In 2026, the ELN announced that Torres' body had been found. The Search Unit for Disappeared Persons formally identified the remains as that of Torres on 16 February. President
Gustavo Petro subsequently announced that Torres' body would be "respected and laid to rest with honors." A funeral Mass was held and an ossuary was built at the National University to house his remains. == Political ideology ==