[1] 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, as well as some intellectuals such as Eduardo Umaña Luna, María Cristina Salazar, Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda, Carlos Escalante, Darío Botero and Tomás Ducay, in 1960.

Due to the growing pressure to back down from his radical politics, Camilo Torres was persecuted and went into hiding (leaving his job as an academic) by joining the guerrillas in Colombia.

[5] Camilo Torres, along with Gustavo Gutiérrez, Helder Camara and Des Wilson, is one of the most important figures in the history of liberation theology.

His mother Isabel told him the story of Father Cuco (Juan de la Cruz Gaviria), a liberal businessman who financed the military campaigns against the conservatives in the civil wars of the 19th century.

Camilo Torres entered the Faculty of Law at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he would meet again with Villar Borda, and only studied there for the first semester.

The first months were very difficult for the Bogota priest because of the cold climate, Belgian food and the conditions of the boarding house where he lived with Gustavo; for this reason, at the end of the first semester, he moved with his mother to a flat.

In 1957 he met Marguerite-Marie 'Guitemie' Olivieri, a Frenchwoman of Corso origin and bourgeois daughter of a doctor like Torres, who was to become his closest friend and secretary, and who by then was living in a poor neighbourhood of Paris, accompanying the pieds noirs in sabotage work against the French regime that was being imposed by force in Algeria.

[7] In turn, Torres met Villar Borda again in Berlin and spent holidays in Belgrade where he unsuccessfully wanted to exercise his priesthood, or failing that in Prague.

The following year, in 1960, he participated along with Orlando Fals Borda, Carlos Escalante, Eduardo Umaña Luna, María Cristina Salazar, Darío Botero Uribe, Virginia Gutiérrez de Pineda and Tomás Ducay, among others, in the founding of the first faculty of Sociology in Latin America (today a department) of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where he was a professor and was close to and popular with the students.

Torres was also a member of the technical committee of the agrarian reform founded by the Colombian Institute of Agrarian Reform (INCORA), where he represented the most reformist position of the Board of Directors, which was divided between the Conservative and Liberal parties, typical of the National Front but considered by Torres an inefficient entity in the face of the needs of the Colombian countryside.

In his career as a member of the Board, the episode of the project to set up an Agrarian School in Yopal (Casanare) and the difficulties presented by the then director of INCORA Enrique Peñalosa Camargo (liberal, father of the former mayor of Bogotá Enrique Peñalosa Londoño) and Álvaro Gómez Hurtado (conservative, son of former president Laureano Gómez) stand out.

During this period of his life he was interested in founding a farm-school in Yopal (Casanare), as part of the rural action programme that he encouraged in the region and which would go on to achieve other organisational successes; on the board of the Incora, he sparked off a controversy over the application of the law of extinction of ownership restricted to uncultivated lands, which brought him into conflict with Álvaro Gómez Hurtado, also a member of that body and head of the "Laureanist" group of the Conservative Party.

Between 8 and 9 June of that year, under pressure from Cardinal Luis Concha Córdoba, after entering, together with other professors, into contradictions with the rector, by honouring at mass the students killed after a demonstration repressed by the National Police and by opposing the expulsion of other students, he was forced to resign from all his activities at the National University of Colombia, being transferred to the Church of La Veracruz in Bogotá as coadjutor;[14][13] assistant to the parish priest with only confession and baptismal certificate functions.

He was in turn appointed dean of the Institute of Social Administration of the Escuela Superior de Administración Pública (ESAP) and promoted to member of the Board of Directors of INCORA.

Torres also tried unsuccessfully to act as a mediator between the peasants and the National Army to prevent the attack on the so-called Independent Republic of Marquetalia, which was his first contact with the Colombian Communist Party.

[13][16][17] The American-sponsored attempt to overthrow the Cuban regime rallied socialist guerrillas and revolutionary student movements across the Latin America, and it exposed Torres to the ideas of anti-imperialism.

The Cuban-oriented guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army was founded on 4 July 1964, and made its public appearance with the seizure of the town of Simacota in Santander on 7 January 1965.

Faced with the failure of some intellectuals who had undertaken to write articles and papers for a publication aimed at making the situation of Colombian society visible from the perspective of the social sciences, Camilo drafted a political platform open to debate by different groups of intellectuals, students and workers, in which he proposed the union of the popular class to socially renovate the country.

[18] This document was widely disseminated during his travels around the country and, thanks to the discussion it was subjected to during this tour, became the platform of the United Front of the Colombian People, the political movement that Camilo promoted as an alternative for the transformation of society in Colombia.

[13] The National Front regime led Camilo Torres in January 1964 to found the Frente Unido del Pueblo; a movement in opposition to the coalition of the traditional parties.

A meeting with the goal to create a political platform was held, with the participation of the MOEC, the MRL Youth, the JUCO and some student groups from the Universidad de los Andes.

Torres sought to bring together all the opposition of the time (Anapo, MRL and Colombian Communist Party); however, he didn't declare himself a Marxist due to the atheism of the ideology, but related several points to Catholicism itself instead.

[20] In June 1965, Torres was reduced to the lay state by his ecclesiastical superior, Cardinal Concha, given his practices and teachings that disregarded what was already established by the Catholic Church in the condemnation of atheistic communism made by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Divini Redemptoris in the year 1937, and which was confirmed by Pope John Paul II in two documents published by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith during his pontificate in 1984 and 1986 which set out the errors being promulgated by the liberation theology,[21] and at the same time he was removed from his post at ESAP and once again had disagreements with Cardinal Concha, who offered him and his coadjutor bishop Rubén Isaza the post of director of sociology department in the Archbishopric of Bogotá with the mediation of the then priest Ernesto Umaña de Brigard.

Cardinal Concha argued that the platform went against Catholic ideals and that priests should be apolitical in order to dissociate themselves from Catholicism's ambiguous and traditional relationship with the Conservative Party.

The platform of his movement sought to address the needs of rural and urban areas, to eliminate the restricted democracy of the National Front at all costs, and the participation of the Church in Liberation Theology.

Despite the growing popularity of the United Front, Torres decided to contact Fabio Vásquez Castaño through student leader Jaime Arenas on 6 July 1965, who had previously led the strike at the Universidad Industrial de Santander.

Shortly before joining the ELN, General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, leader of the ANAPO, had recommended Torres not to join any guerrilla group, since being a priest he had no experience in handling weapons to confront the army, so he suggested that he continue in political life since he admired his work with the needy classes, something that Torres disregarded considering the advice as a threat.

Torres died on 15 February 1966 in Patio Cemento, after combat with troops of the Fifth Brigade from Bucaramanga, led by Colonel Álvaro Valencia Tovar, who, ironically years earlier, was his childhood friend.

Shortly after Torres's death, 'Guitemie' Olivieri, despite being linked to the ELN, was persecuted by the Colombian authorities and was helped by Junior Fajardo and Rita Restrepo de Agudelo to obtain political asylum, first in Panama, then in Mexico where she married ex-priest Óscar Maldonado, finally in Cuba and then in France.

In January 2016, the President of Colombia, Juan Manuel Santos, instructed the Colombian National Army to begin the process of searching for and exhuming his remains, in a gesture to accelerate the start of the peace talks with the ELN guerrilla group.