By Cindy A. Morales Castillo, COLOMBIA+20, EL ESPECTADOR, February 17, 2026
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
The Jesuit priest, Javier Giraldo, was not only the person who received the remains of the sociologist and priest killed sixty years ago in his first and only combat in the ranks of the ELN guerrillas, but he was also the one who initiated the search for him two years ago. In an interview with Colombia +20, he talks about the tensions around the figure of Torres and proposes that he was much more than that “guerrilla priest”.
The recent delivery of the remains of Camilo Torres Restrepo by the Unit for the Search for Persons Disappeared (UPBD in Spanish) puts the spotlight on the figure of the priest and sociologist whose life continues to generate both admiration and controversy.
The urn was received by Fr. Javier Giraldo, a Jesuit priest and well-known defender of human rights who drove the search. The UPBD referred to Giraldo as Torres’ “social family”.
In a conversation with COLOMBIA +20, Giraldo reconstructs the reasons for that commitment, proposes an integrated reading of Torres’ trajectory—beyond his passage into the armed struggle—and explains the backdrop of his ideas like “effective love”, the main idea of his Christian and social proposition.
A few days ago, the UPBD delivered to you an urn holding the remains of Fr. Camilo Torres, and in the press conference, the agency Director stressed the importance of what she called the “social family”. Meaning the people who search for the disappeared without having ties of blood, as in your case with Fr. Torres. Where does your interest in searching for Torres’ remains come from?
When Camilo was at his most intense time of social and political action in 1965, I was 19 years old and I was in the Jesuit Novitiate. We had to serve in a hospital for a month. They sent me to the Social Security Hospital in Medellín, and Camilo arrived in Medellín that same week; I was able to see and experience in those three clinics where I was working at that time how everybody came over to listen to him. We could see the meetings with him. We had an enormous dining room where we went to eat with all the doctors, the nurses, the administrators, everybody that worked in the hospitals, and we saw how some of the sick got up out of their beds to come and listen to him. The people at all the clinics fought for a place at the table with us. I think there were three of us Novices, we were wearing our cassocks then, and we sat down to discuss why the Church was treating Camilo Torres that way. At that time he already had the conflict with the Cardinal. We were still very inexperienced at discussing all these things, but I’ll never forget what the people were saying. They were saying they didn’t understand the Church’s condemnation of Camilo’s interpretations, when you could go and hear him, and what he was saying was the pure Gospel. And so, we were asking ourselves, is the Church condemning the Gospel?
I never had the opportunity to see him in person, or talk with him, or shake hands and so on. I saw him, but it was on TV or on the radio. What I heard was engraved in me so deeply and from that time on, it kept turning over and over in my mind.
And now, years later, you are the one who receives his remains. What were you feeling yesterday when they gave them to you?
A very deep emotion, but at the same time, I felt something like what I’m doing here, I’m not doing as a person, but as a nation. I think in a large part of this country I have sensed this, in all of the anniversaries and all my forays around the country, because I work in a lot of social movements and protesting communities. So I’ve felt it: the admiration and love for Camilo’s memory is great, very great.
But there has also been a great deal of controversy, a lot of tension around the figure of Camilo Torres, above all for his decision to take up arms. What do you think provoked this polarization about the figure of the man?
It’s that he was a priest who ended up being part of an armed group, and that was something that not only upset and scandalized Colombians, we might say, but the entire world. Newspapers around the world commented on that, how could a priest become part of an armed group? And because of that, the explanations he gave, his messages, his speeches, also started being items and texts for study and discussion. But, really, I’ve explained several times that his connection to the National Liberation Army has many aspects that haven’t been considered. I believe one element is the context of persecution he was experiencing in those last months. Friends of his, who were very involved with him in his social studies and university classes, told him, “If you don’t join the guerrillas, you’ll be in prison for the rest of your life because the military is already looking for you.”
You said he went with the guerrillas a little bit out of fear about what might happen to him?
I don’t think it was just about his being a guerrilla but more about all the things he had been saying about the social situation in the country. He visited the ELN guerrillas, made an agreement with them and joined the ELN, because he saw that the problem of changing the way Colombia is organized was not going to be peaceful, and that necessarily, it was going to be violent. There were other elements that could have invited him, like considering connecting with the guerrillas in other ways. But, as I’m saying, there are three months that contrast with the many years he had functioned as a priest, worked on his Master’s Degree at the University, working to dialog with many social and political movements. All of that is forgotten and thus he is condemned. I think this tells us more about the positions of those who are condemning him, their fanaticism and radicalism; they only see a very limited view of these problems.
You said at the press conference that the priest Camilo Torres is judged, is viewed, and is admired above all for the last three months of his life and they don’t pay attention to the rest. What is the rest that we ought to know about? That has not been told, and that highlights his life as a priest and a sociologist?
I think we ought to begin with his priesthood. We might say that he was not a run of the mill priest. His vocation was based on deep conviction; he was very enthusiastic about his vocation, very much in love with his vocation. Ever since he entered the seminary, we have witnesses, we have his seminary diary, finally, and his interests, because, for example, the Bible he read was full of underlining of texts referring to love, to love of others, Christian love, of charity. And his writings, his reflections, they’re all in that same sense.
He didn’t want to be a priest simply as a formal profession. He wanted to stand out precisely as taking on the centrality of the Gospel, which was love for others. For his commitment to justice. And in that, he lived in an enthusiasm and a very deep conviction, out of the ordinary. But, besides that, as a sociologist, he understood that love had to be expressed practically in society. And he saw a society completely divided, and in particular, he saw a very large segment that was excluded from society.
And how did he do in the National University?
When he went back to his studies in sociology, and started to work as the Chaplain in the University, his first thought was that the students ought to know and experience how unjust the world of Colombia is, and he took them to the most impoverished neighborhoods in Bogotá. It was at the outskirts of Bogotá at that time, the Tunjuelito neighborhood with the brickworks where children were forced to work.
But there he discovers, as the Chaplain at the University, that the students he invites to visit the neighborhoods and learn about their reality, the ones that attended mass most regularly, took communion every day in the University Chapel, didn’t like to be in those neighborhoods and they didn’t go. And instead, the students that did go to the neighborhoods were the ones that didn’t like religion and said they were atheists. He noticed the difference, and wrote the archbishop a very profound letter, and told him that the ones that have love have no faith, and the ones that have faith do not love.
So there has to be a turnaround, we have to change the pastoral style we’ve had in the Church for centuries, since the Spanish evangelization, of administering the sacraments, i.e., baptizing the people, confirming them, marrying them, having them go to communion every Sunday, and that’s all. But those are the sacraments and the other parts, let’s say, of the pastoral, such as, for example, teaching the catechism and what they call charity, charitable activities, are not very important.
So, he says, all this scheme of pastoring has to be turned upside down, and he starts that with a commitment to charity and justice. And he says that if there is anyone that is really unaware of the problems of justice, he doesn’t have what it takes to be a Christian. And he proposed a kind of pastoring ultimately formulating the principles that gave rise to liberation theology a few years later. So that is the fundamental profile of Fr. Camilo.
One of the most popular concepts of Camilo Torres was that of “effective love” that he conceived as not just a sentiment, but rather a series of revolutionary activities to help others, and also to change the social structures that perpetuate inequality. How did he arrive at that concept?
“Effective love” was, let’s say, the central motto of Camilo’s life. He became enthusiastic and fell in love with that part of the Bible, the Gospels, that talked about loving others, but when he became a sociologist, he understood that that could not be a romantic or theoretical love, but rather, that love had to be effective.
And he took the Gospel text that he repeated continually, and it was a text from the Gospel of St. Matthew that talks about the final judgment and enumerates the works of mercy. And so, Camilo used to say that to be Christians we had to feed the hungry, not just the few, but the whole country. And to feed all the poor in Colombia, we would need a change in our structures, and he would say it in these words: a revolution. And in his last years, he said that this revolution should not be theoretical; it has to be practical, and we should all commit to this revolution, and that was his final struggle. In other words, the committed revolution is almost a synonym for “effective love”.
Regarding the ELN’s use of his image, do you think it’s important for a coherent ideology, or because the popularity of Camilo Torres provided publicity for the guerrillas?
Well, there are many versions there, and it’s very hard to distinguish between all of them. Camilo ended up under the command of Fabio Vázquez Castaño, and some versions would have it that when intellectuals from the Industrial University of Santander started joining the guerrillas, and Vázquez was a campesino with no university degrees, they say he became jealous and ordered several of the intellectuals to be shot, that he treated Camilo very badly, he didn’t understand how brave it was for Camilo to join them, and he put him right in the front line. Camilo didn’t know how to handle weapons, and he made him to go into the ambush and that’s how he died.
But anyway, other commanders came after Fabio Vázquez and they gave a higher value to the fact that Camilo had joined the guerrillas. Manuel Pérez, for example, who was also a priest, or Nicolás Gabino. . . they lamented Camilo’s death very much and they gave it very great symbolic value within the organization. But, as I’m saying, there are a lot of versions, and it’s very hard to completely establish what happened there internally, and what exactly were the decisions and motivations of the commanders at that moment. What’s definitely clear is that later on, his figure became a very strong model within that organization, and that has also contributed to the permanent controversy about his memory.