Torres, Camilo

Key Information

Camilo Torres (1929–1966) was a Colombian Catholic priest who joined the National Liberation Army guerrilla forces in 1965. He was born in 1929, ordained a priest in 1954, and studied sociology in Louvain (Leuven, Belgium) in 1954–1959. From 1959 to 1962, Torres taught sociology at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, where he co-founded the faculty of sociology in 1960. Torres was killed in his first combat experience on February 15, 1966.

Camilo Torres was a Latin American Catholic priest who was born in Bogotá, the Colombian capital, on February 3, 1929. He came from a wealthy family with a liberal outlook on politics; his father was a medical doctor. Torres lived with his family in Europe in the 1930s (Torres et al. 2016). In 1946, upon his graduation from secondary school, he went back to Colombia where he entered seminary. Due to his profound Christian convictions, Torres became increasingly horrified by injustice, social inequalities, and extreme...