Camilo Torres Restrepo Biography

Camilo Torres Restrepo

(Jorge Camilo Torres Restrepo; Bogotá, 1929-San Vicente de Chucurí, Santander, 1966) Priest and Colombian guerrilla.After being ordained a priest in 1954 and completing his training with sociology studies in Belgium (1954-1959), he participated in the founding of the Faculty of Sociology of the National University of Colombia, where he taught between 1959 and 1962.

Camilo Torres Restrepo

Worried since his youth about deep social inequalities, the charismatic personality of Camilo Torres Restrepo, the coherence of his progressive message and his initiatives in favor of the classes most disadvantaged had made him, since his return to the country, a figure of great relevance.The expulsion from the university (1962) increased its public projection and marked the beginning of an approach to revolutionary positions, which culminated in the abandonment of the priesthood and the incorporation of the National Liberation Army into the guerrilla (1965).Since then called The guerrilla priest , Camilo Torres Restrepo was killed by the Colombian army just one year later, in his first armed confrontation.

Biography

Camilo Torres Restrepo was born in the traditional neighborhood of La Candelaria, into a bourgeois family made up of the prestigious pediatrician and scientist Calixto Torres Umaña and Isabel Restrepo Gaviria, union from which Fernando and Camilo were born; Dona Isabel, who had been widowed, already had two children from her previous marriage, Gerda and Edgar Westendorp.His parents were totally dissimilar people: the father, focused on his investigations and consultations, was not a friend of social pageantry, while the mother was quite the opposite: outgoing, a friend of excessive spending, meetings, teas and frivolities, although very human and understanding with her children.This opposition of characters made the relationship difficult and predicted a short journey for the couple; finally, the marriage dissolved in 1937.

Camilo Torres Restrepo's intellectual training was quite demanding.In 1931, when he was barely two years old, his father was appointed representative of Colombia in the League of Nations based in Geneva; There he learned the first letters simultaneously in Spanish and French.By then, the Torres Restrepo marriage was working poorly, and after a year of living in Switzerland there was a first separation.Doña Isabel and her four children moved to Barcelona, ​​the city where Dr.Torres went to look for them and from which they returned to Colombia in 1934.

The Torres Restrepo brothers were enrolled in the Andino School, but Camilo finished his baccalaureate at the Liceo de Cervantes in 1946.A good part of Camilo's childhood and adolescence was spent in the countryside, since, after the separation, Doña Isabel had decided to live on a dairy farm located on the outskirts of Bogotá.Camilo joined the boy scouts and from the beginning showed unquestionable leadership skills, although he was undisciplined, "mamagallista" and very given to romance and dolce vita .

Camilo Torres Restrepo

During the first semester of 1947 he began to study law at the National University.But, thanks to contact with two Dominican promoters and after a period of uncertainty, he decided to become a friar of the community of Santo Tomás and wanted to leave, secretly from his mother, to the novitiate of Chiquinquirá.Doña Isabel Restrepo managed to arrest him at the La Sabana station.Then came a period of parental opposition, another of dialogue and finally, in September 1947, the Torres Restrepo spouses accepted that their son enter the Conciliar Seminary of Bogotá, located in the very exclusive and sought-after mountains of El Chicó.

Seven years dedicated Camilo Torres Restrepo to its preparation.He was ordained as a priest on August 29, 1954 and his first mass was celebrated in the chapel of the Liceo de Cervantes.During his stay at the seminary, he began to express his concern for the social problem and for its possible solutions from a Christian point of view, still far from Marxism; Over time he would become a social humanist, a precursor of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples (Algiers, August 4, 1976).

Studies in Europe

On September 25, 1954, Father Camilo moved to Belgium in order to study sociology at the University of Louvain.There he met an old friend of his from the seminary, Gustavo Pérez, and together they participated in the tidal wave of ideas that, in the middle of the cold war, were boiling in Europe at that time.In particular, Camilo Torres was influenced by Christian Democracy, Christian trade unionism and sociological theories in vogue, and approached, albeit timidly, Marxism, an intellectual scaffolding that served him to embrace a cause that he would never abandon: that of the oppressed, with the never achieved ideal of leading a community life with them and sharing their tasks and efforts.

Intellectually restless, Camilo Torres Restrepo also felt inclined towards social action.Since the days of a seminarian in Bogotá, he had organized campaigns in favor of stonemasons from the hills surrounding the Major Seminary of Bogotá.Contact with European society and culture allowed him to verify the existing distances between the first and third worlds, and he also became convinced that one of the great difficulties for a more harmonious development of Latin America lay in the lack of social research, a problem that He tried to alleviate the founding, in 1955, of the Colombian Socio-Economic Research Team (ECISE), which had committees in most Western European countries.

With his mother in Leuven

He also attended as many conferences were held and participated in many meetings of Latin American students on the subjects that interested him; To complete his busy and busy schedule, he served as vice-rectory of the Latin American College.In 1957, Camilo Torres decisively approached very complex social problems: the existing slums in Paris, and very particularly the Algerian resistance groups, allowed him to glimpse the reality of a process of national liberation and the role that corresponded to the intellectual in said struggle.He had the support of his great friend, colleague, confidant and later secretary, Marguerite Marie Guitemie Olivieri.

In 1958, after staying in Bogotá gathering the necessary data, he graduated as a sociologist with the thesis "Una statistical approach to the socio-economic reality of Bogotá ", which was directed by Professor Yves Urbain.This work, a pioneer in urban sociology and anthropology, would be published posthumously under the title La proletarización de Bogotá (1987).

After completing his studies in Leuven and thanks to the intervention of his brother Fernando, he followed a summer course at the University of Minneapolis (Minnesota), where he met Teodore Caplow.He had the opportunity to get a doctorate in sociology at the University of Louvain, but preferred to dedicate himself to the country, its people and problems.In the dramatic moments of the penultimate year of his life, when he still hesitated between the cassock and the rifle, he would also have the opportunity to return to Belgium, and once again his honest commitment to the disinherited would prevail.

At the National University

Upon returning to Colombia, in January 1959, he was appointed auxiliary chaplain of the National University, and, together with the coastal sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, founded the Faculty of Sociology from that university.Camilo Torres Restrepo began an important teaching, research and social action work there, which helped him to undertake a pilot plan for the Tunjuelito neighborhood (Bogotá), with which he won the prestigious Alejandro Ángel Escobar National Charity Award.

At first, the spirited priest was seen as a "freak" by the virulent students, but his message was so convincing and his figure so charismatic that little by little he gained an unrestricted following, not only on the university campus., but in other social sectors.The way Camilo performed the liturgy of the Mass, in front of the faithful, in Spanish, contributed to this, removing a certain stiff ceremonial apparatus, as indicated by the guidelines approved at the Second Vatican Council.In the doctrinal field, he expressed ideas too advanced for the curia: he approved courtship for priests and seminarians and advocated ecumenism and for the dialogue between Christians and Marxists.

With his students from the National University

The ecclesiastical authorities and Cardinal Luis Concha Córdoba began to be suspicious of the actions and the growing popularity of the young priest, who arrived to his peak in July 1962, when, at the end of a long student assembly, the enraged students proclaimed him rector of the National University.That was the straw that broke the patience of the conservative prelate, who immediately dismissed him as chaplain of the University and prohibited him from giving classes there again, putting him in charge of the parish of La Veracruz.After much insistence on the part of the alma mater directives, Luis Concha allowed the academic semester to end.

During the three years that Camilo Torres stayed at the National University, his thought underwent a permanent evolution.Contact with the country's hottest problems progressively radicalized their positions.Already in 1960, some of his concepts had seemed like some out of tune: in an evaluation he made of Radio Sutatenza, founded years ago by Monsignor José Joaquín Salcedo, he affirmed that the programs of that station were demagogic and harmful to the peasant, since , for the sake of an anti-communist campaign aroused after the triumph in Cuba of the revolution of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, hatred was incited and violence was caused, the latter subject in which Camilo Torres also deepened and which served to disappoint him, even more if possible, of the Church and the privileged classes.

The guerrilla priest

Between 1962 and 1965, Camilo Torres Restrepo was one of the most important figures in public life in the country.The parish of La Veracruz, to which he had been assigned, became the preferred place to marry: in Bogota society at that time it was "in" to say that Camilo was the priest who had married them.By the time he left the National University, he had been appointed a member of the Board of Directors of the recently founded Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA); There he had problems permanently questioning the policies of the Ministry of Agriculture, but he knew very closely the Colombian peasant problem, the bureaucracy and state proselytism.

In the meantime, his thinking moved towards revolutionary positions.In 1962 he argued that Marxists were fighting for the new society and that, therefore, Christians should be by their side.In July 1964, a new guerrilla movement appeared in Colombia, the National Liberation Army (ELN), which caught the attention of Camilo Torres; from their point of view, it was not as "contaminated" as the other insurgent groups.In January 1965 he began contacts to communicate with the command and in February launched the United Front of Popular Movements platform, which advocated radical agrarian reform and the nationalization of industry and subsoil products.

In an image taken in 1960

At the end of April 1965 he withdrew from the Higher School of Public Administration (ESAP) and, under pressure from the curia, prepared the suitcases to travel to Leuven.According to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, Camilo Torres had to be "decontaminated"; The trip was scheduled for May 22, but a tremendous demonstration of student support made him give up the same day he was to embark for Belgium.

In June 1965, Camilo Torres Restrepo made one of the most momentous and painful decisions of his life: to abandon the priesthood, to which he had dedicated eleven years of his life.Once out of religious life (but not religion, because until his death he was a convinced Catholic), he visited the guerrilla camp of the Army of National Liberation in Santander and stayed in "commission" in the city, where he had to continue his program of political agitation with the United Front of Popular Movements.At the time it was required, he had to join the ranks.

During the following months Camilo Torres toured the country and attracted a multitude of people, until he had the favor of a large part of the public opinion.He was emerging as the alternative candidate to the National Front, Carlos Lleras Restrepo; However, Camilo Torres never considered the electoral route as a solution to social injustice.His speech penetrated very deeply in a wide spectrum of sectors; It managed to bring together people of different tendencies from the left and from traditional politics, and above all it captured the attention of a large part of the electorate.For Torres, the corruption of the system had made voting a useless instrument; abstentionism, on the other hand, was a revolutionary position, one of confrontation and struggle, since "the electoral apparatus is in the hands of the oligarchy and that is why whoever scrutinizes chooses, whoever counts the votes determines victory." He was not tempted by any political movement, and increasingly a hedge of danger surrounded him.

On October 18, 1965, he finally joined the guerrilla, and on February 15, 1966, in the municipality of San Vicente de Chucurí (Patio Cemento, Santander), he fell dead in his first confrontation with the forces of the Colombian army.The corpse of the guerrilla priest would never be delivered to the mother, Mrs.Isabel Restrepo; the site where he was buried is one of Colombia's best kept secrets.Regarding this situation, Camilo's mother once commented: "I am the only Colombian mother who has been denied the delivery of the corpse of her own son.As a practicing Christian and Catholic, I remind you that when Christ was crucified as' 'bandit' ', they did not deny the Virgin Mary the grace that has been denied me ".

Despite the fact that the death of Camilo Torres was a very hard blow for the National Liberation Army, since it owed part of its prestige to the support of the priest, the group continued its political-military actions and continued to grow until 1972-1973, when under the government of Misael Pastrana Borrero the Anorí operation was carried out in Antioquia, in which the brothers Manuel and Antonio Vásquez Castaño died.The guerrillas retreated again to the mountains of Santander (to their "sanctuaries" of San Vicente and Carmen de Chucurí) to rethink and reorganize the movement, under the leadership of the Spanish priest Manuel Pérez Martínez (1943-1998).

Moved by the admiration that Camilo Torres aroused in many young priests around the world and in the followers of liberation theology, Manuel Pérez had arrived in Colombia at the end of 1969 together with the priests Domingo Laín and José Antonio Jiménez.The figure of Camilo Torres had already acquired mythical proportions and had become a reference for a different way of understanding the priestly exercise.This is how an important group of rebel priests was formed in the country: the so-called "Golconda group", led by Monsignor Gerardo Valencia Cano, apostolic vicar of Buenaventura.

Throughout his life, Camilo Torres Restrepo published several books and pamphlets: Christianity and Revolution , Violence and sociocultural changes in rural areas of Colombia , The radio schools of Sutatenza , Words for a revolution , Proclaim to the Colombian people and The revolution: Christian imperative .A compilation of his texts was published posthumously in 1967 under the title Liberation or death! , a clear example of his social commitment and his radical Christianity, not well regarded by the official Church.His writings constitute an original and stimulating contribution to the panorama of political and sociological theories in contemporary Latin America, linking a great variety of topics to the complex synthesis of ideologies and the depth of analysis, in an attempt to reconcile the revolutionary commitment with the profession of a faith in the values ​​of Christianity.