By Eduardo Garcia Aguilar The picture of Father Camilo Torres on the front page of newspapers struck me forever in that distant February 1966, when still a child I knew who had killed the 37-year-old, 15 this month, a Patiocemento combat in the mountains of San Vicente de Chucuri. 45 years have passed and things have changed very little in the country, which is immersed in his own obsessions under the command of the grandchildren of the leaders then, as if time were stuck in a vicious circle of Thanatos worshiper.
child In my view most people see as the day had opened and read in silence the news that closed the short and frenzied political dream of a new popular leader, three decades after the death of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán in 1948. The dead priest's eyes were half open, opaque, the fish gone, the dark, into nothingness. In the photo of the day looked entrabierta priest's mouth, teeth and face apparent expressionless in the peace of inertia. And the curly black hair and messy beard clinging to his face fallen angel, Lucifer ousted from the heights. Diablo. Angel. Diablo. Angel.
Another photo from the side, with open arms crucified, revealed blood mixed with his beard and curly hair and the lost boy profile of child well upper-class Bogota, and exceptionally had been given to the poor, away from mom Isabel, without the aura that gave the clergyman suit, a graduate sociologist pipe in Leuven or striking oratory poses a national leader. The guerrilla priest, founder of the Front Kingdom in 1965, had committed the terrible and naive mistake of going to the lion's den of the guerrillas, as parallel, mesmerized by the fashion set fire to the continent and has its climax in 1967 with the death of another child well, Che Guevara .
Bogota Politicians black suit and Stetson hat and staff bishops, held together happily next to the Plaza Bolivar to the guerrillas in Colombia. Leaders of the Liberal Party or Conservative Party allies in the National Front, succeeded in radio excited to celebrate the event, the death of the idealistic priest, now in the XXI century, when I write 45 years after slaughter waste, almost no one remembers.
A half its national reputation, and pretty solid from a few years after returning from Louvain, grew rapidly and the fact that he was priest and professed the Catholic religion made him even more dangerous the eyes of the establishment. For the ruling class was much easier to challenge and pursue outlaws Marxist Leninist ideology which a priest was to be a "professional of love." He became a charismatic leader and where he would find hundreds of fans and riot and thousands and thousands of people from all walks of people willing to follow him to work for the cause of the United Front. Workers, peasants, trade unionists, artisans, teachers, petty officials, housewives, came to meet him to cities and towns where they came.
In the latter half accelerated climax reaching its destination, in addition to the guerrillas and absurd death in the first fight. In those moments are the pictures where he looks to his bag, beard, military fatigues, like a militant of the Cuban revolution, who was then from a few years ago the model of the most radical revolutionary idealists American. In those pictures he looked lost, light, naive, playing the partisan as did many other thousands of young Colombians that time.
All this was a great waste, a great delusion and illusions local expression of inland after the victory of the Cuban revolutionaries. Camilo Torres was a character in his time, a perfect product of its time desperate. Some with Stalin and the Bolsheviks, Mao Tse Tung others and its latest cultural revolution, others with liberation theology and the recent Cuban revolution of Fidel Castro. And up front, in the context of the Cold War, a ruthless power, greedy, akin to the terrible American hawks, they would kill Martin Luther King and propitiate terrible coups and dictatorships such as the Southern Cone, sponsored by the dark agents of the CIA.
What looking for this cure? In his message to Christians, published the first edition of the newspaper United Front on August 26, 1965, Camilo Torres said "I think I have given the revolution of love of neighbor. I stopped say Mass for the love of neighbor in the temporal field, economically and socially. " But those words and the wind carried them away and only belongs to history and its analysts. A story that is repeated constantly and that the Colombians never learn anything. We can only live this epic novel in the biographies they wrote Germain Guzmán Campos, Eduardo Umaña Luna and Joe Broderick and ask what had become of him if he were alive among us, as old at 82 years of age, two Unless your friend Gabriel García Márquez.
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