Colombia identifies stays of legendary ‘guerrilla priest’ a long time later | EUROtoday

The Colombian state entity tasked with discovering and figuring out greater than 135,000 individuals who have disappeared throughout the nation’s six a long time of civil battle introduced on Monday the identification of Camilo Torres’ stays.

Torres was a Catholic priest well-known for his membership within the National Liberation Army (ELN) insurgent group and was killed in fight within the Nineteen Sixties.

The Search Unit for Disappeared People (UBPD) was created by a 2016 peace deal between the federal government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group.

Its function is to take cost of archival and forensic efforts to seek out disappeared individuals, together with these forcibly disappeared by right-wing paramilitaries, insurgent teams and state safety forces, these compelled to hitch armed teams, troopers lacking in motion and others.

The ELN, based in 1964, stays energetic and is itself accused of compelled disappearances.

It has held sporadic peace talks with varied governments and mentioned in December it was prepared to renew negotiations.

Torres, son of a well-connected Bogota household, was an adherent of liberation theology, a Catholic, anti-imperialist social justice motion.

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He joined the ELN some 4 months earlier than his loss of life and was killed in February 1966 in japanese Santander province in a skirmish with the military.

UBPD Director Luz Janeth Forero instructed journalists the search unit used public and categorised information, together with from the army justice system, to seek out the place Torres’ stays had been interred by the army after his loss of life.

DNA samples from bones present in 2024 within the army part of a cemetery in Bucaramanga had been in contrast with a pattern taken from the stays of Torres’ father Calisto, which had been exhumed for testing from a cemetery in Bogota.

“After 60 years of disappearance, the search unit found, identified and completed a dignified handover of Father Camilo Torres,” Forero mentioned.

The unit, which started work in 2017, has discovered almost 5,000 stays, figuring out and handing over some 700 to family members to this point, Forero added. It has additionally discovered 500 residing individuals who had been reported as disappeared.

Torres’ stays had been handed over to Javier Giraldo, a Catholic priest well-known for his activism on behalf of battle victims, on Sunday, the sixtieth anniversary of Torres’ loss of life, Forero mentioned.

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Giraldo, who recognised the efforts of Torres’ mom Isabel Restrepo to seek out her son whereas she was alive, mentioned Torres will likely be buried at Bogota’s National University, the place he studied and labored as a chaplain.

Though the Catholic Church has traditionally rejected Torres’ involvement with the ELN, there may be now extra openness to discussing his legacy as a chaplain, activist and social justice thinker, Giraldo added.