Colombia’s Ongoing Struggle: The Enduring Legacy of Camilo Torres After Sixty Years

Six decades after his death, the reported discovery of Camilo Torres’s remains revives Colombia’s unresolved arguments about faith, rebellion, and inequality, forcing a country shaped by war to confront why a priest’s choices still trouble politics, memory, and conscience today.

The Body That Refused to Disappear

When the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) announced last week that it had located and identified the remains of Camilo Torres Restrepo, the news landed less like an archaeological update than a reopening of a wound. Torres, the priest-sociologist known as el cura guerrillero, died in 1966, at thirty-seven, during his first combat with the Colombian Army in Patio Cemento, a rural point of El Carmen de Chucurí, Santander. The body, the guerrilla says, was hidden by the State to prevent it from becoming a revolutionary relic—an act that turned absence into myth for decades.

The ELN’s statement framed Torres as more than a sepia-toned symbol, emphasizing his identity as a revolutionary and a person of action, which underscores the ongoing debate about his true legacy and its political significance in Colombia today.

Officialdom responded with caution. The Instituto de Medicina Legal confirmed that forensic analyses were underway “para establecer si una de las muestras corresponde al señor Camilo Torres Restrepo,” while stressing that it does not have custody of the body. In a country trained by conflict to distrust certainty, even bones must be verified twice.

A Priest, A Sociologist, A Rupture

Torres’s influence predates the gunfire that ended his life. Born into an upper-class secular family, trained in Europe, and doctorated at the University of Louvain, he returned to found Latin America’s first faculty of Sociology—a fact that matters because his politics were never merely incendiary. They were analytical. Colombia, he argued, was ruled by a narrow oligarchy; democracy without bread was theater; charity without structural change was hypocrisy. “I have taken off my cassock to be a truer priest,” he said, a line that still divides parishes and plazas alike.

That tension placed him at the threshold of what would soon be called Liberation Theology, a current consolidated at the Medellín Conference of 1968, which insisted that faith be measured by action among the poor. The Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff would later describe the shift as a reordering of priorities from orthodoxy to orthopraxis—correct belief to right action. Torres did not live to see the label stick, but his life sketched the map.

The ELN itself was founded in 1964 and, in its early years, drew priests from Colombia and Spain. Figures like Manuel Pérez Martínez, who later became the group’s top commander until he died in 1998, embodied a moment when theology, sociology, and insurgency overlapped. Not all liberation theologians embraced arms—Óscar Romero in El Salvador would die at the altar in 1980 without taking them—but many conceded that “systemic violence” made neutrality a luxury. In Colombia at midcentury, more than sixty percent of agricultural land belonged to less than four percent of owners; malnutrition stalked children by the tens of thousands each year. Those numbers did not require a sermon to indict them.

Memory, Politics, And the Unfinished Argument

What unsettles Colombia now is not only the past but its curation. The ELN argues that Torres has been “desdibujado y aburguesado” by narratives that sand down his radicalism into a marketable saint. The complaint resonates beyond guerrilla communiqués. In June 2024, President Gustavo Petro—himself a former member of the M-19—said he possessed Torres’s cassock after scientific confirmation of its provenance, a gesture heavy with symbolism in a presidency that has tried to braid memory, reform, and reconciliation.

The debate inevitably returns to violence. Can a Christian take up arms? Torres sought laicization before entering the jungle, as if to quarantine the sacrament from the bullet. Critics cite the Gospel’s injunction to sheathe the sword; defenders point to the Church’s long accommodation with state violence and to papal language that has, at times, conceded the legitimacy of uprising against “manifest, long-standing tyranny.” The argument is old, but in Colombia it remains intimate. Violence here is not an abstraction; it is a geography.

Yet Torres’s writings insist on a different center of gravity. Love, he argued, is not sentiment but efficacy. Politics grows out of proximity, not slogans. He criticized a left enamored of imported jargon and indifferent to local suffering, and an elite content to export capital rather than invest in its own country. Read today, the lines sting with relevance.

The reported discovery of his remains forces Colombia to decide what to do with a man who refused to fit. To place him at the Universidad Nacional would be to return him to students and debate; to canonize him would be to betray his impatience with comfort; to bury him quietly would be to repeat the concealment that made him a legend. None of the options resolves the contradiction he embodied.

That may be the point. Camilo Torres Restrepo was a priest who doubted ritual without justice, a sociologist who mistrusted theory without risk, a revolutionary uneasy with the gun he carried. Sixty years on, Colombia is still arguing with him—not because his answers were final, but because his questions remain.

Also Read: Latin American Democracy Faces a Hard Turn Toward Uniformed Solutions