The remains of Colombian priest Camilo Torres were identified after six decades, bringing closure to a case that authorities said had been left unresolved for decades after he was killed in combat and his body’s location was kept secret. Luz Janeth Forero, director of the Unit for the Search of Missing People, said the unit confirmed that bones found in Bucaramanga two years ago belonged to Torres after conducting forensic and genetic testing and reviewing historical documents.
Officials said Torres was a Catholic priest who joined the National Liberation Army and was killed in a firefight with Colombia’s army in February 1966. They said the identification followed the unit’s conclusion that the bones recovered from a Bucaramanga cemetery matched Torres’s remains.
The unit said Torres had been born in 1929 in Bogota and ordained a priest in the 1950s. Authorities said he later helped establish the sociology faculty at Bogota’s National University and became a leading critic of a political pact that kept traditional parties in power. The unit said Torres also promoted doctrines calling on the Catholic Church to help change social and economic structures that it said oppressed the poor.
In late 1965, authorities said Torres joined the National Liberation Army after threats from authorities and disillusionment with Colombia’s political system. Officials said he lasted only a few months in the guerrilla ranks and died at 37 during his first combat engagement, while the government kept the body’s location secret and soldiers “apparently dumped chemicals” on the remains, complicating identification.
Forero said the identification was a milestone for families who have been searching for decades. “Finding Camilo after he was disappeared for 60 years is a milestone,” she said, adding that the case shows that people whose relatives have been missing for a long time should not lose hope because the unit has “the technical and investigative capabilities to respond to their queries.”
Authorities said Torres’s remains will be housed at a chapel in Bogota’s National University. The search, officials said, intensified in 2019 after another priest, Javier Giraldo, petitioned the missing people’s unit to find Torres’s remains, and Giraldo said Monday that Torres was among the precursors of liberation theology.
Giraldo also described Torres’s legacy as broader than a guerrilla priest label. “Today we have a biographical vision of Father Camilo Torres that is more wholesome,” he said during Monday’s press conference. “He was not simply a guerrilla priest.”
The officials’ announcement came as Colombia continues to process the legacy of decades of armed conflict. A truth commission created in 2017 following a peace deal between Colombia’s government and the nation’s largest rebel group, the FARC, said more than 450,000 people were killed and at least 120,000 were reported missing during the period from 1986 to 2016, which it described as the conflict’s most intense fighting years involving the state, paramilitary squads, drug traffickers and multiple rebel groups.