Camilo Torres Restrepo (3 February 1929 – 15 February 1966), also known by his nom de guerre Argemiro, was a Colombian Catholic political leader, revolutionary, guerilla, priest, author and a leader of the National Liberation Army (ELN). During his life, he sought to reconcile revolutionary socialism and Catholicism, an ideology which became known as Camilism. This ideology would significantly influence the later liberation theology movement, as well as being adopted by the Montoneros.
As part of the academic staff of the National University of Colombia, he was a co-founder of the Sociology Faculty together with Orlando Fals Borda, as well as some intellectuals such as Eduardo Umaña Luna, María Cristina Salazar, Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda, Carlos Escalante, Darío Botero and Tomás Ducay, in 1960. His involvement in several student and political movements during the time won him a large following as well as many detractors, especially from the Colombian government and the Church itself. Due to the growing pressure to back down from his radical politics, Torres requested to be and was laicized (although he never abandoned his faith and he remained a devout Catholic).
Torres founded the socialist United Front, which lasted only a month. After the failure of the United Front, he joined the Marxist-Leninist ELN in Colombia.
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He mostly served as a low-ranking member of the movement, to which he also provided spiritual assistance and inspiration from a Catholic point of view. After becoming a leader of the ELN, he was killed in his first combat engagement when the guerrillas ambushed a Colombian military patrol. After his death, Camilo Torres was made an official martyr of the ELN. In 1987, the organization was renamed the Camilista Union - National Liberation Army.
Torres is perhaps best known for the quote: "If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero". While the press described him as a communist, Torres, for at least the majority of his life, rejected the label, declaring instead that while he would fight with the communists for common goals, he did not want to be identified with the communists. He also declared that he was not an anti-communist. In the Dominican Republic in 1970, a revolutionary group that included Catholic clergy and university students formed CORECATO (Comando Revolucionario Camilo Torres; "Camilo Torres Revolutionary Command").
Biography
Childhood and education
thumb|Camilo Torres (center, looking sideways) marching with students
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.
thumb|Wall painting homage to Camilo Torres located at the National University of Colombia.
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 Bay of Pigs Invasion, an 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 was unafraid 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: