Profile: Camilo Torres = Priest-Guerrillero

Profile: Camilo Torres Priest-Guerrillero

Camilo Torres: Priest and Guerilla Fighter
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February 15 is the 30th anniversary of the death in combat of the Colombian priest and revolutionary, Camilo Torres.

LUIS AUGUSTO GARCIA GUERERO of the Camilista Union -- National Liberation Army (UCELN) remembers Torres' life and work, and reflects on their significance to the ongoing liberation struggle of the people of Colombia and all of Latin America.

Consideration of the presence and role of Father Camilo Torres in the Colombian guerilla forces involves not only consideration of his personal trajectory, but also evaluation of his thinking and political and revolutionary actions in the context of the birth of the National Liberation Army (ELN), which he joined as a combatant. The ELN was, among other things, the first guerilla organisation to count Christians in the ranks of its fighters.

Camilo Torres formed the United Front in January 1965, at the same time as the ELN, which had been formed in July 1964, came to public attention in the mountains of Santander. From that time Camilo and the ELN formed part of the same history, and the same commitment to struggle to the death, if necessary, for the liberation of the poorest classes.

Camilo was born in Santa Fé de Bogotá on February 3, 1929. From a very young age he expressed his intention to study for the priesthood. In 1954, after being ordained, he went to Belgium to study sociology at the University of Lovaina. On his return to Colombia five years later, he discovered the complex problems affecting Colombia and immersed himself in them.

His contact with ordinary people, and his respect for them and their achievements, quickly led him to become an important leader of the people's movement. He was convinced that only through unity could the acquisition of power be achieved, and it was from this perspective that, along with other leaders of the people's movement, he formed the United Front.

The front very quickly became part of the life of the poor classes of Colombia. Camilo's ideas were constantly developing, and he began to stress the need for unity between Marxists and Christians to achieve the common objective of making revolution so as to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty and give clothes to the naked. Camilo used to say, "Why should we debate amongst ourselves whether the soul is mortal or immortal, when we both know that hunger is mortal?" He called on Christians to live up to the moral and ethical demands of their faith, contending, "Revolution is not only permitted for Christians, but obligatory".

He once described the objectives of the United Front movement in the following way: "Our principal work is to organise the non-aligned majority of the poor classes, who don't belong to any political party, into a program and a line of action that will lead us toward the taking of power by, and for, the poor".

The work of the front gave meaning to its slogans, "For the unity of the people forever", and "For the taking of power by the people forever." Camilo realised that the corrupt political class of Colombia would not develop policies beneficial to the people, nor hand over power to them, and that it fell to the people to take power for themselves.

In early 1965, Camilo began to have contact with the National Liberation Army because he shared the principles and objectives of this emerging guerilla movement. Later that year, in an open letter to the Colombian people, he wrote, "I have joined the ELN because in it I find the ideals of the United Front, and the desire for, and existence of, a unity of the base, a campesino base, without differences of religion or traditional parties. The ELN will not lay down its arms until power is totally in the hands of the people."

The progressive radicalisation of Camilo, the repression against the United Front and the imprisonment of its members all hastened his joining the guerillas in the mountains. His life was under threat from the oligarchy, who feared him because they saw his leadership and ideas questioning the structures of repression and creating consciousness amongst broad sectors of the poor classes.

On October 18, 1965, he joined the ELN as an ordinary combatant. He expressed his wish to be considered as just another soldier in a letter to the leadership of the ELN. He wrote, "Be sure that with God's help I will put aside all other considerations, except the good of the revolution, in whatever role I am assigned. I don't aspire to be a leader, just to serve up to the ultimate consequences."

He remained true to these words until his death. In his difficult life as a guerilla, he happily performed his duties, rejecting any privileges offered him on the basis of his priesthood and history within the people's movement. Teaching campesinos to read, he shared with them the little food they could offer him and came to understand and share their needs.

It was his strong desire to serve that led him to ask to participate in political-military actions. He was refused several times because of the risks involved. Nevertheless, he continued to ask, and eventually was allowed to form part of a column that was to carry out an ambush of army troops and attempt to seize their weaponry. On February 15, 1966, in Patio Cemento in the department of Santander, Camilo died in combat.

The presence of Camilo, and his contribution to the development of the popular movement, despite his tragically early death, began a process of opening up spaces for Christians and gaining their commitment to the people's struggle. Consciousness of the continent's revolutionary history inspired Christians to collaborate in the transformation of reality.

Through his actions Camilo Torres showed a path that would be taken by many Christian and non-Christian revolutionaries. It is a path which stresses the decisiveness of people's participation in revolution, and gives the example of personal commitment up to death, if necessary.

Our guerilla commander Camilo Torres was convinced of the need to work with the masses. He used to say, "No-one can be truly revolutionary if he doesn't trust in the values of the people". Camilo personifies a liberation project in which men and women are guided by revolution as the unique option for transforming love for humanity into an effective reality. His actions and his thinking are permanent invitations to struggle, "so that the next generation of Colombians will not be slaves".

Like Camilo, other priests also joined the liberation struggle as guerillas in the ELN. Among them were Fathers Domingo Laín, Antonio Jiménez, Diego Cristóbal Uribe and the commander in chief of the UCELN, Father Manuel Pérez Martínez.

The example of these committed Christian revolutionaries has sown Camilo's seeds throughout Latin America. His influence continues to live in the struggle of our peoples, transcending Colombia's borders and opening new paths for revolutionary struggle and the social activity of the poorest classes. His thoughts and actions remain valid today in our struggle to liberate ourselves from the deadly exploitation and submission that capitalism engenders.

In 1987 the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR -- Free Fatherland) fused. They took the name Camilista Union National Liberation Army (UCELN) as a means of symbolising, and paying tribute to, the influence Camilo's thinking had within the ELN. In the hymn of the UCELN is the following verse:

"Advance to combat, comrades! The conscience and reason of Camilo, our guerilla commander, are alive in our slogan: Not one step backward, Liberation or Death!"

The life and example of Commander Father Camilo Torres continue to light the way forward in the march of the Colombian people toward a true peace, in which hunger and injustice will be things of the past.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/1996/219/219p16.htm
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Message to the oligarchies: Camilo Torres
http://members.tripod.com/~Mictlantecuhtli/Camiloi/Camilo2i.html

Directing a message for those who don't want nor they can't hear, is a distressing duty. However, it's a historical duty, at the moment in which the Colombian oligarchy wants to peak its iniquity against the motherland and against the Colombians.

During more than 150 years, the economic caste, the few families that have nearly all the Colombian wealth, have yielded the political power in their own profit. They have used all the tricks and traps to preserve that power cheating the people.

They invented the division between liberals and conservatives. This division that people was not understanding, they served to sow the hatred between the same elements of the popular class. Those old hatreds transmited from parents to children have served solely to the oligarchy. While the poors fight, the rich govern in their own profit. The people was not understanding the policy of the rich, but all the anger it was feeling by not to be able to eat neither study, by feeling sick, without house, without land, and without work, all that rancor was unloaded by liberal poors against the conservator poors and the conservative poors against the liberal poors. The oligarchs, guilties of the wrong situation of the poors, were watching happy "the bulls from the barrier", earning money and ruling the country. The only thing that divided liberal oligarchs from conservative oligarchs was the problem of the budget and public posts distribution. The national budget, the public revenues, didn't satisfy the gathered liberal and conservative oligarchs. That's why they were fighting, to arrive to power; to settle the electoral accounts giving public positions to the addicted bosses and to distribute themselves the budget excluding totally those of other political partie.

The liberals have no positions during forty years and later a similar event happened to the conservatives during sixteen years. The religious and political differences had already ceased. There were no longer fights between oligarchs but by the silver of the government and by the public positions. Meanwhile, people realized that the struggle by the liberal party or by the conservative party was sinking them increasingly in the misery. The rich didn't realize that people became fed up towards them. When Jorge Eliécer Gaitán appeared waving the flag of the moral restoration of the Republic, he made it so much against the liberal oligarchy as aganist the conservative. Therefore, the two oligarchies were anti-gaitanistas. The liberal oligarchy became gaitanista after the conservative oligarchy killed Gaitán in the streets of Bogotá.

Already begun in the violence to preserve power, the oligarchy would not stop in the use of that violence. Put the liberal peasants against the conservative peasants in order to kill between them. When the aggressiveness, the hatred and the rancor of poors were overflowed in a struggle among all the needy of Colombia, the oligarchy was frightened and sponsored a military coup. The military government didn't serve either sufficiently effective to the interest of the oligarchy. Then, the chief of the liberal oligarchy, doctor Alberto Lleras Camargo, and the chief of the conservative oligarchy, doctor Laureano Gómez, said: "By be fighting by the allotment of the budget and the bureaucratic booty, we almost lose the power for oligarchy. We shall quit of fighting, making a contract, dividing us the country as who divides a property by half, between the oligarchies. The parities and the alteration let us an equitable allotment so we can encourage a new party: the party of the oligarchy". Thus was born the National Front as the first class party, as the party of the Colombian oligarchy.

People is again cheated and attend the elections to vote the plebiscite, to vote for Alberto Lleras, for the National Front. The result, naturally, was worse: now it was the united oligarchy the one which was governing against the people. By this reason, anything Colombians desired became the opposite. The National Front offered peace and the peasants continued being murdered: they were accomplished massacres of the sugar workers in Santa Bárbara. Universities were invaded and war budget was increased.

The National Front said that it would remedy the financial situation, and duplicated the external debt producing three devaluations (up until now) and with them the misery of the Colombian people by several generations. The National Front said that it would make the agrarian reform and it did not made but dictate a law that guarantees the interest of the rich against the rights of the poors.

It imposed to the country an inept candidate for the Presidency of the Republic. The National Front achieved the greater electoral abstention of our history and now, in front of its total failure, what's making the oligarchy?

It returns again to violence. Declares the state of siege. Legislates by decree. Sells the country to United States. It gathers in a luxurious hotel and decides on the next president. Solves from the salons about the entire country. They are thoroughly blind.

As a last alarm yell I want to say you:
Oligarch sirs, the people don't believe you nothing anymore. The people don't want to vote for you. People are completely despaired. People don't want to go to the elections you organize. People don't want to Carlos neither Alberto Lleras nor none of you. People are suffering and ar ready for everything. People know that you are also ready for everything. Therefore I request you to be realistic and if you want to cheat the people with your new political settlements, don't you believe that people are going to trust you. You know that the struggle will go until the last consequences. The experience has been so bitter, that people is already to stake everything. Unfortunately the isolated oligarchs, blind and proud, do not seem to realize that the Colombian popular masses revolution won't stop now but until achieving the conquest of the power for the people"

Published in the weekly "Frente Unido", December 8th, 1965, p1.
"The message to the oligarchies" and those directed to "The political prisoners" and "To the United Front of the People", they were certainly not written by Camilo. It seems that he only gave the ideas. They were drafted by some of his collaboratives. Hence the difference of style is discovered at first sight. At all events, he did not deny them, in spite of the fact that they appeared with his signature.
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Most recent revision: March 27th, 2002.
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CAMILO BIOGRAPHY TOWERS RESTREPO. THE "GUERRILLA PRIEST"

Camilo Towers R. was born the 3 of February of 1929 in Bogota (Colombia); from very early age it begins to give testimonies of his constant preoccupation by the pressed ones and it is increased in his conscience that the fundamental thing of the man is the inclaudicable love by the destitutes.

Convinced that the best way to find lightening, to the sufferings of the town and by their own motivations enter the seminary and priest became. In 1954 in Lovaina (Belgium), he receives the lawyer rank in Social Sciences, remaining in this country between 1954- 59. He returns to Colombia in 1959 tying to the National university exerting the activities of chaplain and professor of sociology, where in addition I found the sociology faculty on collaboration with professor Eduardo Umaña Moon in 1959.

In these Camilo years it begins to express the necessity and the historical possibility of I engage in a dialog between the MARXISTS and the CHRISTIANS, thoughts that in its development I practice would create new situations to the interior of the Colombian and Latin American church.

In 1962 it begins to have difficulties of part of the eclesiales authorities, being dismissed by the cardinal Luis explaining Cordova Shell of the most rancid conservadurismo.

It begins to exert the decanatura of the Superior School of Administracio'n Pu'blica (ESAP) and "Violence in Colombia" collaborates in the writing of the book. It participates in several seminaries in Argentina, Venezuela and Peru and in them openly proclaims the necessity of deep changes of articles of incorporation in the continent.

As of 1964 it promotes meetings with political leaders of the Communist Party, youths of the liberal Revolutionary movement, (MRL), the Colombian student movement the United Front of revolutionary action and with young people nonaligned politically. This moment is transcendental in the life of Camilo since nonsingle it knows more close by the diverse sectors of the Colombian Left; If not that allows to be taking its step him of sociologist to political leader.

Its preoccupation by pressed, the its conscience of the exigency of love to the fellow is increased, plus its studies and sociological formation demonstrates the importance to him that the love must be efficient; that is to say, that is needed the change structures, that is obligatory a social revolution.

Simultaneously with the appearance of the programmatic declaration of the ELN in February of 1965, Camilo does soon publishes its "platform for a movement of popular unit", well-known like the Platform of the United Front.

Its political and revolutionary life is born bound to the historical and social context in which arises the ELN and this explains the deep coincidences between the ELN and Camilo.

In the ample call of the Camilismo they begin to converge ample sectors of workers, popular sectors, students, Christians, intellectuals. Its persistence in the unit, in the amplitude, expressed in its call "to take what it unites to us and we leave what it separates to us" becomes the key of the later growth of the United Front. Unfortunately the sectarianism, natural father of the left, prevails and the United Front is decimated by the own meanness of the great majority of its components.

The aligned sectors are not the vital plinth of the United Front and among them some student leaders stand out members of the ELN as Julio To stop Courteous, Jaime Sands Kings and Jose Manuel Martinez Quiroz.

In 1965 July he presents/displays the request of being reduced to the lay state, due to the persecution which he is put under by the hierarchy of the catholic church. The 27 of July celebrate their last mass.

In the months that go of July to October takes contact with different regions from Colombia, and through the United Front, the newspaper of the Front, transmits its famous messages to the Christians, the camilistas to the military, to the farmers, the women, the students, the oligarchy, the unionists, not aligned, the dismissed ones and the united front of the town.

Camilo was had tie to the ELN, months before sending its historical "proclamation to the Colombian town", in January 7 of 1966 where it makes his incorporation to our rows public.

In effect, the 3 of 1965 July, Camilo interview with Fabio Vásquez C in mountains of San Vicente de Chucuri and there one remembers his permanence and militancy in the organization.

The 18 of October of the 65, to 5 of afternoon say Camilo to him to one of their advisers: "I cannot be more here. The army already knows everything to it. My entailment with the ELN knows. I do not want that they kill to me like Gaitán in the race seventh but that kills to me in the mount. Because to Gaitán they killed it in the city and its death did not show any way. Whereas if to me kills to me in the mount, my death if it indicates a way ".

Camilo arrives at the front Jose Antonio Gallant the nine from October from 1965, after receiving from commander Manuel Brown Vásquez you complete them instructions. In the guerrilla it is distinguished by his simplicity and its immense affection by the farmers, physically adapts and contributes in the alphabetization of the combatants.

Camilo dies in combat the 15 of February of 1966 in the path "Patio Cement" of the municipality of san Vicente de Chucuri (Santander) as her mother Isabel de Restrepo said it : " CAMILO WAS BORN WHEN THEY KILLED IT ".
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Communist Heroes of South America, needlepoint pillows, Jim Finn
http://www.redstatecraft.net/communist_heroes.htm

These six needlepoint portraits are all of people who were once and often still are considered communist heroes. Each portrait appears alongside a symbol of a group they belonged to, were sponsored by, or influenced. Besides representing different countries, each of them also represents a different aspect of communism. Carlos Marighella represents the urban foco, or the idea that the revolution should start in a major city and work its way out; Tania, who fought in the Bolivian countryside with Ché, represents the rural foco, the Cuban model that the revolution will begin in the countryside; Markus Wolf represents the institutional communism of the Eastern Bloc; Edith Lagos represents the Maoist insurgency; Carlos the Jackal represents the international terrorism of the left; and finally, Father Camilo Torres represents liberation theology, which is the moral imperative that the struggle for justice happen in this world before getting to the next.

I chose needlepoint because I grew up with it. In St Louis, girls make their boyfriends and brothers needlepoint belts and women needlepoint pillows and church cushions among other things. I designed the images I wanted and sent them to the Sign of the Arrow, a needlepoint store in an affluent suburb of St. Louis. They hand-paint the image on the canvas and I stitch across it and then make them into pillows. A number of people have helped on this project. I want to acknowledge the hard work of Kerry Gilley, Kathy Finn, Sarah Wood, Evelyn Weston, Madeline Finn, Colleen Burke, Cecilia Rubalcava, Dana Carter, Fatima Tucker, Susie Poole, Dean DeMatteis, and Shane Gabier; all of whom helped stitch, stuff, sew, iron, and advise.

Carlos Marighella:
Brazilian revolutionary (1911-1969) famous for writing the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla. He was born in Bahia in eastern Brazil and joined the Brazilian Communist Party in 1930. In 1953 he traveled to China and met Mao Tse-tung. After being expelled from the party in 1967 for his “pro-Cuban” sympathies, he formed the National Liberation Action (ALN). His tactics and writings inspired the Italian Red Brigades, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang). It is their logo that appears on the pillow. He was killed in a police ambush in November 1969.

A second strategic objective of revolutionary terrorism is to provoke ruling elites into a disastrous overreaction, thereby creating widespread resentment against them. This is a classic strategy, and when it works, the impact can be devastating. As explained by Carlos Marighella, the Brazilian guerrilla leader whose writings influenced political terrorists in the 1960s and 1970s, if a government can be provoked into a purely military response to terrorism, its overreaction will alienate the masses, causing them to “revolt against the army and the police and blame them for this state of things.”
(Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, 2004 introduction)

Markus Wolf:
An East German born in 1923 and a “fluent Spanish speaker who ran Stasi operations in Chile during the Allende government, set up a system using false compartments in cars to smuggle fugitives like [Chilean Socialist Party leader Carlos] Altamirano across the border into Argentina.” (John Dinges, The Condor Years, 2004) The sword and the shield were the symbol of the East German intelligence agency, the Ministry for State Security, Stasi for short. Known as the man without a face for his ability to avoid being photographed, Wolf went on to be the head of the entire Stasi and had a reputation as brutally efficient in his intelligence work. He was put on trial and later acquitted by the post-communist unified German government.

It used to be my principle, even with someone who sold himself to us, to try to remove their feeling that they were doing something dirty. I tried to instill a different motivation, to give them the security and the conviction that they were doing something good, something necessary, something useful—if you want to use a grandiose expression, that they were doing something for peace. I mean, we did believe we were doing it for peace.
(Markus Wolf, CNN interview, 1998)

Edith Lagos:
On September 3, 1982, nineteen-year-old Edith Lagos was killed in a confrontation with members of Peru’s Guardia Reublicana. A few days later more than thirty thousand people attended her funeral in Ayacucho in an act of open defiance to the authorities’ ban of a public funeral. The frail-looking, petite Lagos had become a tragic and romantic rallying figure in a context where there were none. A member of the Partido Comunista del Perú-Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) since the age of sixteen, Lagos symbolized the aspirations of many of the Sierra youth who were, then, still trying to understand the full significance of the bloody rebellion initiated only two years earlier in the remote Sierra village of Chuschi. More significant still, the apotheosic posthumous tribute paid to Lagos was a clear recognition of the important role played by women in Sendero’s organization.
(Daniel Castro, “War is Our Daily Life” from Confronting Change, Challenging Tradition: Women in Latin American History, 1994)

Tania la guerrilla:
“The only woman who fought with the guerrilla force led by Ché Guevara in Bolivia, Tania’s portrait hangs in every Women’s Federation office in Cuba.” (from the foreward to Tania, Marta Rojas, 1973) She was born Haydee Tamara Bunke Bider in Argentina to German exiles in 1937. She moved to Cuba in 1961 and was trained in third world liberation struggles. She was assigned to build a support network for the newly forming Bolivian guerrilla front. With the assistance of CIA advisors the Bolivian army tracked down the guerrillas. Tania was killed in an ambush just six weeks before Che’s death in 1967. Her bones were discovered in 1998 and reinterred near Che’s in Santa Clara, Cuba.

When Tania’s diary was later examined it was found to contain only one entry, a quotation from Niccolai Ostrovski’s How the Steel was Tempered: "The most precious thing a man possesses is life. It is given to him only once and he must make use of it in such a way that the years he has lived do not weigh on him and he is not shamed by a mean and miserable past, so that when he dies he can say, I have devoted my whole life and strength to the most beautiful thing in the world, the struggle for the liberation of mankind.”
(Epilogue, Tania)

Carlos the Jackal:
Born Ilich Ramírez Sánchez in 1949 in Caracas, Venezuela, he was named by his Marxist father after Lenin’s middle name. He joined the Venezuela Communist Youth in 1964 and studied at Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow. Carlos befriended Palestinian students and after he was expelled from the university for joining Arab student protests, he went to Jordan to train in the camps for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He gained a reputation as a fearless fighter during the “Black September” expulsion of the Palestinian guerrillas. He adopted his guerrilla name Carlos while a member of the Popular Front and became famous as an international terrorist after kidnapping the OPEC representatives in Vienna. He was later expelled from the Popular Front and began work as a terrorist subcontractor based in Eastern Europe and the Mideast. He was captured in the Sudan in 1997 and is currently imprisoned in France.

Father Camilo Torres:
Fidel Castro remarked that ‘the Communists in Latin America have become the the theologians and the theologians Communists.’ His aphorism has enough truth in it to trouble the ruling classes and confound the State Department and the CIA. With the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America, heretofore a rampart of the existing order, there has appeared a new movement—priests preaching the gospel of socialist revolution in the language of Christianity. No one is more exemplary of that movement than Camilo Torres, the Colombian priest who was killed in the mountains of Bucaranga by government troops, on February 15, 1966, four months after joining the guerrillas of the Army of National Liberation.

Camilo was a rare man: priest, professor, agitator and organizer, and for an all too brief moment in his life, guerrilla fighter. At his death, his personal influence among the masses had become so extraordinary that for fear that his grave might become a revolutionary shrine for the dispossessed, the government has never disclosed its location.
(Maurice Zeitlin, “Camilo’s Colombia”, 1969)




Further Reading
The Condor Years, John Dinges

Carlos the Jackal, John Follain

For the Liberation of Brazil, Carlos Marighela

Tania, Marta Rojas

Revolutionary Writings, Father Camilo Torres

Man Without a Face, Markus Wolf

Confronting Change, Challenging Tradition: Women in Latin American History, edited by Gertrude Yeager

Revolution and Revolutionaries, Guerrilla Movements in Latin America,
edited by Daniel Castro

Links to artwork:
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microRevolt Nike Blanket

contact us:
redstatecraft@microrevolt.org
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Camilo Torres: A Biography of the Priest-Guerrillero
Published in Hardcover by Doubleday (February, 1975)
Author: Walter J., Broderick
http://colombia.vacationbookreview.com/colombia_2.html

Average review score:
An important book on the Colombian resistance

This book is not only the biography of one of Colombia's most famous guerrillas, it is also an excellent account of Colombian politics during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the story of Camilo Torres, a young priest who was born into the Colombian elite. While pursuing university studies abroad he became engaged with new ideas circulating in those times about the role the church could play in social causes. Upon his return to Colombia he took a faculty position at the National University where his political activities steadily moved him away from his establishment roots and into the fold of the leftist movement.

One of the Greatest Books on Colombia
This is one of the most important books in the world on Colombia. Camilo Torres is a priest and a revolutionary. He was born into the Colombian oligarchy but turned his back on the wealth and dedicated his life to the Church. His anger with the absence of significant social and land reforms in Colombia forced him to take up arms agains the state. This is a thrilling book. Walter Broderick makes Camilo Torres a martyr to the cause of social justice.
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Camilo Torres and the ELN
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/colombia/universityviolence.htm

Note: Kind of fascist spin, but thought I would throw it in the mix. ~ PSL

Recently the Embassy was approached by a former member of the Executive Committee of the Juventud del Movimiento Revolucionario Liberal (Liberal Revolutionary Movement Youth-JMRL), who was able to offer hard information on the clandestine terrorist organization, the Army of National Liberation or Army of Liberation. (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN, or Ejército de Liberación, EL). As has been reported by the Embassy for the past two years, prior to most mass urban bombings, local newspapers received calls from persons identifying themselves as members of this organization. These persons would accurately predict that bombs would be placed that night and proclaim the reason as a protest against some Government action or other.

The ELN is the terrorist branch of the MRL Youth or JMRL, a Chinese-line extremist group having no connection at the present time with Alfonso LOPEZ Michelsen's MRL. Of the some 2,500 members of the JRML, about 500 of them also belong to the ELN. Of these 500, only about 100 have been actually involved in direct terrorist activities, with the remainder confining themselves to propaganda and courier activities.

ELN urban bombings have subsided in recent months because of a reshuffling of leadership and a reorientation of the group's activities from urban bombings to guerrilla activities.

The ELN is presently in the midst of organizing guerrilla bands in the Department of Santander. Two groups are being established: one of ten men operating in the mountains south of San Vicente, and the other of about twenty-five men located along the rail line north of Puerto Wilches. The ten men in San Vicente all studied academic subjects in Cuba, but while they were there they were also trained in guerrilla warfare. They returned to Colombia as a unit calling themselves the "José Antonio Galan Bridage" with the object of initiating guerrilla operations in Santander. However, they fused with the ELN upon their return, and disbursement of the Cuban funds which they were promised are now being handled through the ELN. Fabio Vásquez is the leader of the Santander ground and Víctor Medina is his lieutenant. Colombian "Army of National Liberation," November 20, 1964

He said quite frankly that to capture the ELN as a body in the mountains of Santander will be an extremely difficult proposition as the bandits are able to blend quite easily with the local scene of this relatively heavily populated area. Conversation with Colonel Jorge ROBLEDO Pulido, Chief, Colombian Army Intelligence, Re Papayal Attack and Other Subersive Activities, February 19, 1965

Father Camilo Torres Restrepo and National University Matters, Conversation with Dr. Orlando Fals Borda, September 5, 1965

At one point during riotous activities Torres and followers encountered CTC president Mercado in street and according latter Torres set his goons on him obliging Mercado and group with him pull pistols in self-defense. Mercado has announced he bringing legal charges against Torres for attempted murder.

At end deomonstration Torres reportedly barricaded self in store, refusing leave [sic] until Valencia resigned, later scaling down demand to release arrested demonstrators. Telegram from U.S. Embassy, Bogotá, to Secretary of State, October 2, 1965

According to reports received, major elements of the formerly deeply-divided Colombian extreme left have agreed to cooperate in a guerrilla enterprise under an accord entitled "Plan Aurora." These elements include the original Army of National Liberation (ELN), which is the armed wing of the Youth of Liberal Revolutionary Movement (JMRL); the Workers-Students-Peasants movement (MOEC); and the Chinese-line dissident Communist Party (PCC-ML). Also, the Soviet-line Communist Party (PCC), while not participating directly in this plan, has indicated that instead of condemning such guerrilla activity as in the past, it will lend the activists its "fraternal cooperation." ... It also appears that the consolidated apparatus will adopt the title "Army of National Liberation" in order to draw on the established "mistique" of the name. Although the JRML and MOEC had previously obtained financing from Cuba, there are indications that this source of money has dried up and that they now have turned to Red China for assistance.

The keystone in this subversive meeting of minds appears to be rebel priest Camilo TORRES Restrepo. Torres, who announced he had gone to the mountains to join the ELN in the first week of January, had previously brought the various leftist groups to the conference table through his abortive United Front political movement. Although Torres can hardly be considered the military mastermind of the "Aurora" terrorist plan, he will now likely become the leading figurehead in the movement, if it becomes operational. Progress Report on Colombian Internal Defense Plan, January 26, 1966

Elimination Camilo Torres as figure around whom various extremist groups could coalesce was a most significant development affecting Colombian internal security. Cohesion such extremists as ELN, MOEC, JMRL, PCC-ML and PCC was nascent before his removal from scene Feb. 15. ELN accusation that PCC "betrayed" Camilo to his death (EMBTEL 1131) along with other charges.

... Ultimately, Colombia should have some kind of Central Intelligence Service to eliminate competition between DAS and E-2 section of Army. While E-2 is now pre-eminent in field because of state of siege powers, its intelligence is not adequate. Telegram from Bogota Embassy to Secretary of State, March 4, 1966

[Jaime] Arenas told reporters that the ELN is presently divided into three groups -- one led by Fabio VASQUEZ Castano with 40 members; one led by his brother Manuel VASQUEZ Castano with 12 members; and a third led by Juan de Dios AGUILERA, with 20 members. The Aguilera group, according to Aernas, is at odds with the two led by the Vasquez brothers.

Asked if he had "counseled" former priest Camilo Torres to join the ELN, Arenas replied, "I accompanied him and was his collaborator. So, indirectly I may have influenced his decision to join the guerrillas. The guerrilla chiefs despised Camilo also." Defecting Guerrilla Reveals Weaknesses of ELN, March 6, 1969

Army Claims it has killed ELN Leaders Antonio and Manuel Vasquez, October 1973
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Updated:01-11-06~PSL