Camilo Torres Restrepo

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"Camilo Torres" redirects here. For the early leader of Colombian Independence, see Camilo Torres Tenorio.

San Francisco Bay Area political silkscreen poster depicting Camilo Torres, ca. 1970s.

Father Camilo Torres Restrepo (born in Bogotá, Colombia 3 February 1929 – Santander, 15 February 1966) was a Colombian Roman Catholic priest, a predecessor of the Liberation Theology and a member of the National Liberation Army guerrilla group. During his life, he tried to reconcile revolutionary Marxism with Catholicism, or vice-versa.

Torres was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in 1954, but continued to study for some years at the Pontifical Roman Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. When he returned to Colombia, he increasingly felt obliged to actively support the cause of poor people and the labouring class.Camilo Tores believed that in order to secure justice for the people that Christians had a duty to use violent action.

As part of the academic staff of the National University of Colombia, he was a co-founder of the Sociology Faculty together with Orlando Fals Borda in 1960.

After leaving his job as an academic and joining the guerrillas, he died during his first combat with the Colombian Army as a low-ranking member of the ELN to whom he also provided spiritual assistance and inspiration from a Marxist-Christian point of view.

Back in those days, guerrillas were poorly financed and equipped. The ELN had ambushed an Army patrol in order to steal its weaponry. During this first engagement, Camilo Torres ran towards a fallen soldier in order to seize a gun, being shot by one of the patrol's survivors.

After his death, Camilo Torres was later made an official martyr of the ELN.

He is perhaps best known for the quote: "If Jesus were alive today, He would be a guerrillero."