Camilo Torres: A Biography of the Priest-Guerrillero 0385087101, 9780385087100

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CAMILO TORRES

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Gamilo Torres A Biography of the Priest-Guerrillero

WALTER J. BRODERICK

Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York

COPYRIGHT © 1975 BY WALTER JOSEPH BRODERICK ALL RIGHTS RESERVED PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Broderick, Walter J 1935Camilo Torres: a biography of the priest-guerrillero.

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Bibliography Includes index. 1. Torres Restrepo, Camilo. 2. Guerrillas—Colombia. F2278.T6B76 322.4'2'0924 [B] ISBN 0-385-08710-1 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 73-15327

PHOTO CREDITS

Photographs numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 21, and 24 by permission of Lunga, Bogota; 9, 10, and 11 by permission of El Tiempo, Bogota; 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, and 26 by permission of Ediciones la Chispa, Bogota. Number 22 photo by Hernan Diaz; 12, 13, 15, and 18 courtesy of Hernan Diaz; 25 courtesy of General Rincon Quinones, Archives of the Fifth Brigade, Bucaramanga.

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for Lalita

Foreword

What follows is a documented account of the life of the Colombian priest-revolutionary Camilo Torres, bom in 1929 into a bourgeois family in Bogota and killed in action as a guerrilla fighter in 1966 in the Colombian jungle. The study of Camilo’s life discloses more than the unusual, al¬ though logical, development of his character. It reveals also the con¬ text in which that evolution took place: the economic servitude of his native country, the intrigues of its power-hungry oligarchy and, as a consequence, the sorry plight of its people. Both these stories— Camilo’s and Colombia’s—were the object of my research during the four years spent in preparing this book. All the material contained herein is based either on personal ob¬ servations or on documents and interviews. My method of using this material is explained in an introductory note to the complete Index of Sources at the back of the book. For the moment I want simply to record here my debt to dozens of people interviewed over the years 1969-73. All of them, in one way or another, played their part in Camilo’s drama. Not all of them will be flattered by their portraits here, since my view of history does not necessarily coincide with theirs, and the book, though a biography not a thesis, nonetheless re¬ flects a very specific method, what that master historian Leon Trot¬ sky calls “the materialist method.” “This method,” says Trotsky,

VIII

FOREWORD

“disciplines the historian, compelling him to take his departure from the weighty facts of the social structure. For us the fundamental forces of the historic process are classes; political parties rest upon them; ideas and slogans emerge as the small change of objective interests. The whole course of the investigation proceeds from the objective to the subjective, from the social to the individual, from the fundamental to the incidental.” If, as a result of my adherence to this method, some of my collaborators feel themselves badly represented, this takes nothing from the sincerity of my thanks for their help. > A few of my collaborators have had to remain anonymous, since their commitment to the revolution in Colombia, either in the past or at present, leaves them vulnerable to reprisals. Camilo’s cause is a very live issue. My heartfelt thanks, therefore, to them and to all those mentioned in the Index of Sources, as well as to the Benedictine monks of Santa Maria de Usme who generously allowed me to write many of these chapters in the quiet of their cloister, to Ivan Illich, who put me up to it, to Ralph Della Cava who got me started, to Julio Jose (“Junior”) Fajardo who hounded me critically all along the way, and to Walter Bradbury, who has been a patient and painstaking editor. I am indebted to all my Colombian friends, and in a special way to Alonso Moncada and his wife, Lala. To her memory the book is dedicated.

Contents

FOREWORD

vii

1. The End

1

2. The Beginning

7

3. From Dancing Millions to Dominicans 4. The Cloister and the Violence

34

5. From Louvain to Minneapolis

68

6. The University Chaplain 7. Picking Sides

101

139

8. Declaring War

174

9. The Cassock or the Revolution 10. The United Front 11. The Guerrilla 12. The Ambush

260 308

323

13. The Aftermath INDEX OF SOURCES index

363

334 341

215

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If you have no sword sell your cloak and buy one for I tell you these words of scripture are to be fulfilled in me: He let himself be taken for a criminal. JESUS

Men make their own history. But they do not simply make it to their own liking; they do not make it in circumstances chosen by them, but rather in circumstances which exist already and have been handed down to them from the past. MARX

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CAM1LO TORRES

Chapter 1

THE END

At 8 a.m. on February 15, 1966, Lieutenant Jorge Gonzalez of the 120th Mortar Battery, Fusileers Unit, Fifth Brigade, Santander, Colombia, lined up his troops alongside the peasant’s shack near where they had pitched camp the night before. For ten days he had been leading his men through some of the hottest, roughest jungle in this part of the country. They were tired out and tense. “This will be our last morning’s march,” he said. “We will leave at nine. In two hours time we should be back at our base in El Centenario.” The soldiers grinned at one another and seemed more relaxed. “But there must be no let-up,” said Gonzalez. “We’re in dangerous country, and every precaution must be taken.” Suddenly, behind him, someone moved. The lieutenant swung round. A man had emerged from the shack and was making off into the scrub. He stopped, and seemed to go guilty under the officer’s glare. “With your permission, sir,” he whined, “I’ll just be getting along.” “Come over here,” Gonzalez ordered, “and let’s see your identifi¬ cation papers.” The man approached fumbling in his pocket, and produced a crum¬ pled yellow card. Gonzalez glanced at it. “This is out of date. Where’s your safe-conduct pass?”

2

CAMILO TORRES

The man was nervous. “I—er—I forgot it, sir.” Gonzalez was nervous too. He disguised the fact by barking out an interrogation. “Well, where do you think you’re going?” “Just up the hill, sir, to get a donkey of mine that strayed . . .” “Have you seen any traces of the men we’re looking for? You know who I mean! The bandits!” “No, sir. In the sight of God I swear I never saw them.’’ Gonzalez knew he would get no information out of the man. These people gave away nothing. Most of them covered up for the guerrilla fighters—what Gonzalez called the bandits. The peasants resented troop columns tramping through their fields, giving orders, confiscat¬ ing their provisions, throwing them in jail. Gonzalez let the fellow go and turned back to the row of soldiers. “We will march at nine,” he repeated. “In single file. The platoon will form into three squads, nine men in each squad. The men in the first squad will spread out; they will maintain a distance of ten to fif¬ teen paces.” He reckoned the tactic might avert the danger of an ambush. The peasant’s behaviour had aroused his suspicions. The farther apart the soldiers marched, the harder it would be to trap them. Lieutenant Gonzalez was under a strain. “Torres is somewhere out there,” his captain had kept repeating. “And we aim to get him.” Ever since Camilo Torres had joined the guerrilla band the army chiefs had given orders to step up operations, double patrols, conduct investigations. The troops were more like policemen than soldiers. Gonzalez’ platoon had been on this patrol too long. They would have been back at their barracks days before this if their walkie-talkie hadn’t broken down. They’d lost their bearings for forty-eight hours in the Cerro de los Andes until finally they had picked up signals again from El Centenario. It was important to keep contact with the cap¬ tain in case of an attack. Three weeks earlier a patrol like this had been surprised by the guerrilleros in a place called Los Aljibes only a mile from where they were now. Two soldiers were left dead. These bandits meant business. Gonzalez would be glad to return to base. Around nine he ordered Sergeant Castro, his second-in-command,

THE END

3

to get the men ready to march. The sergeant called the soldiers into the first squad: “Alarcon! Castellanos! Navarro! Patarroyo!” He didn’t know it, but he was calling a death list. The commander-in-chief of the Fifth Brigade, Colonel Alvaro Valencia Tovar, at his headquarter's in Bucaramanga some sixty miles away, was waiting anxiously for reports from the El Centenario area. He was convinced that the guerrilla leader, Fabio Vasquez, and his Army of National Liberation were operating there, in the region between the Cerro de los Andes and the Cordillera de los Cobardes, and he knew from military intelligence sources that Father Camilo Torres was down there with them. Less than a year earlier the colonel had worked with the priest, had been his friend. But now his mission was to wipe out Torres and his guerrilleros. They were a menace to the state. So the colonel had sent out infantry patrolmen as bait to draw the guerrilleros’ fire. After an hour’s march Lieutenant Gonzalez and his men reached a dense patch of jungle. Rays filtering through tall trees formed a pattern of light and shadows among leaves. The long whistle of a pajuil bird echoed in branches high above their heads. The men picked their way over fallen tree trunks and giant entangled roots. One soldier slipped and lost balance. He pulled himself up and went on, not to lose sight of the man ahead. They marched in silence, each man closed in on his own thoughts. Young Private Jose Torres was thinking of Simacota, a town the guerrilla fighters had invaded the year before. Jose had been with the relief platoon sent to Simacota and had almost got himself shot when the attackers killed a soldier right beside him and made off with his rifle. In every patrol since, Jose felt certain he was being watched by snipers. Private Solano led the second squad. He had only just been drafted. If he could have raked together a few hundred pesos he would have bought his military service card and not been foot-slogging like this through the jungle, a sitting duck for guerrilleros. Last month

4

CAMILO TORRES

in Los Aljibes he had seen them strip two dead soldier buddies right down to their boots. It had been Solano’s first action. Villalobos, the fifth man in number one squad, had been repri¬ manded last month by the colonel. It was after the Aljibes debacle. Colonel Valencia Tovar had visited the camp in a fury and picked on Villalobos. “Some of you men don’t seem to have the fighting spirit. You, soldier! Do you want to quit?” Villalobos would have loved to quit. “No, sir,” he said. “We’re here to fight, sir.” He was marching now behind Sergeant Castro into the enemy’s gunsights. , Ahead of the sergeant he could see Lieutenant Gonzalez and, far¬ ther up the line, Navarro and Alarcon. Those two were the pathfind¬ ers—the pigeons more likely: in case of an ambush, they’d be the first to take the impact. The lieutenant paused a second and looked into the tumble of trees and tropical plants that sloped upwards on his right. He strained to detect any odd movement, any strange shape, the gleam of another man’s eyes. A soldier, pushing past Villalobos and the sergeant, came up and asked him for permission to pick a banana. It was Private Marco Antonio Higuera. He pointed to a banana tree on the left of the track where the land fell away towards the river. Gonzalez said, “Right,” and the soldier broke ranks. The rest moved forward. On one side ran the river thirty feet below them, on the other a wall of jungle. Private Higuera didn’t reach the banana tree. A stinging current burnt into his body, his legs, his hand. The forest shattered, cracked. He fell. He saw other soldiers toppling, clutching at their bodies, flinging themselves on the ground. The lieutenant was lying on his face, dead still, his rifle flung aside. The sergeant sprang to the left and rolled down the river embank¬ ment. A bullet bit into his left arm. He burrowed into the under¬ growth, was hidden by roots, brambles, the shadows; he lifted his carbine, nestled it against his shoulder. The shooting stopped. Still air. No birds’ sound. Soldiers shuffled on their bellies, looked for shelter, dug into the ground. Three or four seemed dead. The lieutenant wasn’t moving. Presently a rustle of bushes; a man’s figure flickered above the track and came down over where the lieutenant was lying. Sergeant

THE END

5

Castro saw it from down below in shadows, a silhouette against sun¬ light. He looked along the barrel of his carbine. Aimed. Fired. Brought the man down. He hissed to the nearest soldier: “Go get him.” Private Villalobos (“Do you want to quit, Villalobos?”) crept up close and fired a bullet into the fallen man’s left side. Voices above. “Look out! There’s one of them dug in down there!” A second figure crawled out on all fours, tugged at the fallen guerrillero. The sergeant pressed the trigger, three, four, five times. The man dropped dead. There was a third man up the track bending over Higuera. The latter, wounded, shut his eyes, stopped breathing, prayed to the Vir¬ gin Mary not to let him breathe, to give him the strength not to have to breathe. He heard a voice say “Pass me a knife,” thought “This is it!” felt the knife cutting . . . cutting his laces! Someone pulled off his boots. The sergeant fired several more shots. The guerrillero fell with the boots in his hand. Sergeant Castro had blown off his head. More voices. “Get the bastard! Fry him! Throw that damn grenade! For Chris’sake, throw it now!” Shooting began again. The second and third squads were outside the ambush—eighteen well-armed soldiers. They clambered up above the track, encircling the hidden enemy, shouting to keep up spirits—'“Viva Colombia! Viva la Patria!”—firing wildly, blindly, into the bushes. They saw men run¬ ning, shadowy figures zigzagging between trees. One soldier met a man full-on. Fired right into him. The man’s chest exploded in blood. The soldier didn’t look. He rushed ahead. Shoot. Reload. Shoot. Then there was no more movement, no more running men. The soldiers were shooting at air. No sign of the attackers. Only dead bodies. The sergeant ordered the men to cease fire, keep alert. They emerged from the scrub. Lieutenant Gonzalez was alive but badly hurt. Higuera was going to be all right. But the first two soldiers were dead, Navarro and Alarcon. So was Private Patarroyo. Private Cas¬ tellanos, his guts hanging out, was crying like a baby: “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me alone!” Then: “No! Shoot me! Shoot me! Finish me off!”

6

CAMILO TORRES

They looked around for the sons-of-bitches who had caused this. They kicked carcasses, rolled them over. One of them had no face left. Another was just a kid. A soldier saw a big man lying face-down —the one Villalobos got—and put a boot into him. The man turned on his side, groaned, fell back. The soldier stared down to see if he would move again; when he booted the body, he didn’t think it was still alive. Sergeant Castro came across, looked at the fallen man’s face, white, with a reddish beard. His eyes were open. The sergeant stooped and prodded the body. It was going cold. The man had on army fatigues, boots and a leather belt. He wore a red armband with white initials: ELN. On the ground beside him there was a Colt re¬ volver calibre .38. The left side of his shirt had a bloodstain, the other side was even more soaked in blood. The bullet must have gone right through him. The sergeant turned around and gave orders. First the men would make stretchers for Lieutenant Gonzalez and the rest of the wounded. After that, more stretchers for the dead. He picked up the walkie-talkie and tried to make contact with El Centenario. All he got was static. After a half-dozen attempts he handed the gadget to a soldier and told him to keep trying. He went back to the bearded guerrillero and unbuttoned one of the two large pockets in the dead man’s drill shirt. He pulled out a pipe and tobacco pouch. Then he rummaged in the other pocket. This one contained a small wad of papers, some typed, others printed, one written by hand. Most of them were in languages Castro couldn’t read. But the handwritten one was in Spanish. It was a letter from Minneapolis dated January 27. It began “mi amorcito” and ended with “thousands of kisses from your Isabel.” There was a post-script signed “your brother and best friend, Fernando.” The sergeant carefully folded the papers, put them in his pocket and went back to organizing the evacuation. Private Castellanos stopped whimpering and died.

Chapter 2

THE BEGINNING

On the night of February 2, 1929, little Gerda Westendorp was too excited to sleep. It wasn’t just the fact that the next day she would turn thirteen. What was keeping her awake was the thought of the baby they were expecting in the family. Gerda had been watch¬ ing her mother, Isabel, with growing wonderment and was hoping that the baby might be bom on her birthday. She sat bolt upright in bed straining to catch any unusual sound. Boards creaked in the old rambling house. She thought she heard footsteps in the main courtyard. This might be the doctor come to deliver the baby. She wondered why her stepfather could not deliver it. He was Calixto Torres, the most famous doctor in Bogota. They said that he had once saved her life when she was a tiny little girl, but she could hardly remember. That was long ago, before her daddy had died and mamma had married the doctor. . . . She drew her knees up under her chin and waited and listened. At last, at the first light of day, Gerda slipped out of bed and tip¬ toed into her mother’s room. Isabel was sound asleep and there was not yet any sign of a baby. Disappointed and still very excited, the little girl was packed off to her aunt’s and let herself be distracted by the birthday surprises her cousins had prepared for her. Back at the house on Fourteenth Street, Calixto Torres was nervously fuss¬ ing around his wife, Isabel Restrepo, as she began to give birth to

8

CAMILO TORRES

their child. This baby would be her fourth and, most definitely, her last. Over these recent weeks the expectant Isabel had been more than usually impatient. In the first place, the baby was overdue. And in the second, an odd spiritualist friend of her mother had come up with the prophecy that “the child would be a boy and would make a name for himself either in the Church or in politics.” To Isabel this sounded like a joke in very bad taste. She was horrified to think that any son of hers might go into the Church and end up a cura. For Isabel descended from the Restrepos and Gavirias, diehard Liberals and anti-clericals. Her father, Dr. Manuel Restrepo, had died in 1901, when she was three, attending to the Liberal Party men wounded in the “Thousand Days War,” the last of the constant civil wars between Liberals and Conservatives which had tom Colombia apart through most of the nineteenth century. In the same Liberal tradition, her maternal grandfather, old Juan de la Cruz Gaviria (with whom she was raised and whom she fondly remembered not as John of the Cross but as Papa Cuco), had lost several fortunes making war on the “goths”—a Liberal epithet for the Conservatives. Papa Cuco’s personality and the memory of his adventures were stamped on Isabel’s character. And this little boy she was carrying within her was to inherit something of the restlessness and audacity of this singular great-grandfather. Papa Cuco did not belong to the landed gentry of the fertile Cauca Valley, home of the aristocratic Restrepos. Rather he was part of that hardworking crowd of pioneers who, early in the last century, began opening up the western slopes of the Andes. That side of the country had been left practically undiscovered, since plentiful pastures abounded on the high plateaus of the eastern Andes and the sugar cane grew tall in the immense fields of the Cauca River Valley. But the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a new group on the Colombian scene: the laborious, individualistic, tenacious people, mostly either of Sephardic Jewish origin or Basques, like the Gavirias, who set off to conquer the steep mountains over westward, to peg out their claims and plant their coffee where no one before had been hardy enough to work. These people were the founders of the prov¬ ince of Antioquia and the forebears of modern-day bankers and in-

THE BEGINNING

9

dustrialists. They were the only people in Colombia who, as a group, cultivated something of the true bourgeois capitalist spirit. The rest of the rich were simply landed gentry, conservatives both by heredity and tradition, even though some of them might pin a Liberal Party label on themselves. The political labels so important to Colombians often had little relation to reality. The Antioquenian bourgeoisie be¬ came the backbone of the Conservative Party, while not a few wealthy land-owners from other parts of the country considered themselves liberals. Thus, for example, the Torres family, ancestors of Camilo’s father, supported the Liberal Party; yet the real liberal, progressive spirit in Camilo’s family sprang not from the Torres but from the Gavirias. In Papa Cuco this liberal spirit of freedom and individualism burst through the family conventions and party tags. He was the youngest of his Conservative and very Catholic family and from early boyhood was destined for a life in the Church. His parents put him into a seminary and, like the good Antioquenians they were, savoured the thought of the ecclesiastical benefices which would eventually accrue to him and thus to the family. But young Juan de la Cruz’s eye fell on a pretty girl and he left the seminary to marry her. His family cut him off without a penny, but the enterprising young man set himself up in a store. Then one night, quite inexplicably, the store was burned to the ground. Juan de la Cruz was in debt and about to be thrown into prison. A friend gave him the price of a fare out of Antioquia and the young man began fife anew on the banks of the Magdalena River down in the province of Tolima. There his wife joined him with their two little children. This time the young Gaviria worked as an accountant for tobacco planters. He began to save, bought land and started to reap the bene¬ fit of his own tobacco and indigo crops. After ten years the little family had risen from poverty to riches and Isabel’s mother had been born. Then one day Papa Cuco hauled out a box of gold coins from under the bed, filled his saddlebags and rode off to his home town in An¬ tioquia to settle his old debts—ten years after the fire. The last decades of the nineteenth century were Papa Cuco’s days of glory. He soon owned a string of shops in a town in the province of Tolima and would occasionally sail off to Europe to buy his

10

CAMILO TORRES

merchandise in Hamburg and Marseilles. Colombia had no indus¬ tries; she sold her coffee cheap to buy silks and satins in Europe for the upper classes. In those days a series of bloody civil wars was kept alive by the ruling classes who led the country people to make war on one an¬ other in the name of political parties. The real issue was a feud over land claims carried on between the rich, but the simple farm-hands were ignorant of this. When the priests thundered from their pulpits against the Liberals in the next village, condemning tffem as masons! atheists! and heretics! the Conservative peasant folk fell upon their “enemies” and razed that village to the ground. The Liberals, in their turn, exhorted by local political demagogues, set farmsteads aflame for the cause, they thought, of freedom and democracy. Thus the greedy landlords widened their boundaries to include the small hold¬ ings abandoned by fleeing sharecroppers. This sorry history was re¬ peated over and over again during the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth. Papa Cuco was part of that history. He and his family were now staunch members of the Liberal Party, not only in defiance of the fam¬ ily who had disinherited him as a boy, but also because the slogans of the Liberals were more akin to his own proud spirit. Naturally enough he supported the Liberal faction in the civil wars. On one occasion, so the story went, he had three ships sailing from Hamburg laden down with merchandise when another of these wars broke out. The authorities got word that the Gaviria fortune was to be put into the war. Immediately the Conservative troops came down and wrecked his stores. When the ships reached the port of Cartagena they were ransacked and their rich cargo sold by the government. Juan de la Cruz was ruined again. Undaunted, he accumulated more capital and invested in a coffee plantation at Sasaima, a day’s ride west from Bogota, down in the sub¬ tropical country of the mountains that skirt the great Magdalena River bed. Here his grand-daughter, Isabel, spent her childhood until it was time to make her debut in Bogota. She recalled that the old man (now white-haired and patriarchal) had forty-eight grandsons who swooped down on the farm one night and requisitioned every horse

THE BEGINNING

11

in his stable. They were riding off to kill more “goths” in a new civil war! Isabel inherited much of her family’s spirit of adventure and would pass some of it on to this baby boy who was bom on February 3, 1929. On that day, at three o’clock in the afternoon, Gerda was still at play with her cousins when she was called to the telephone. It was her stepfather speaking. “We have a birthday present for you,” Dr. Torres said. “Your baby brother has arrived.” Then, in his most pro¬ fessional manner he added: “The baby weighs seven and a half pounds.” A few weeks later, in accordance with the traditional custom ob¬ served even in this liberal household, they took the infant down to the parish church all wrapped in white tulle and had him baptized. He was given the name Jorge Camilo, but from then on they simply called him Camilo. At the time of Camilo’s birth Isabel was still quite young (thirtyone years of age). She was very beautiful and happily married to one of the country’s most celebrated young professionals. Dr. Calixto Torres Umana was not her first husband. When she was only a girl she had married a German businessman some twenty years her sen¬ ior, Karl Westendorp, who was busy making a fortune in Colombia and had taken time off to fall in love with this lovely daughter of Bogota’s high society. She was a slender, bright-eyed, dark-haired beauty and Westendorp adored her. He built her a mansion in the city, full of Empire furniture and Limoges china, with servants and carriages at her beck and call, and with private tutors to supplement what he considered her deficient education. Isabel, for her part, bore him two children. Then, in 1920, Westendorp suddenly died, leaving her with a fortune, the two children (Gerda and Edgar), a collection of pretty dolls and memories of herself leaning over the piano listen¬ ing to her refined husband playing Beethoven. She had been his child rather than his wife. But she would not always remain so meek and submissive. Upon Westendorp’s death, Isabel went off to Germany with her mother and the children. They set themselves up in a three-storied manor house in Hamburg and travelled about Europe in the lap of luxury. Isabel was not the one to hoard her treasure; quickly she

12

CAMILO TORRES

earned herself the title of “the Dollar Princess.” Over to Europe hur¬ ried the family doctor, Calixto Torres, to specialize in pediatrics and to marry the Dollar Princess. “I’ve always done everything upside down,” she said. “I married a German in Colombia and a Colombian in Germany!” The newlyweds moved to Paris, where their first son, Fernando, was bom in 1925. Then they journeyed back to Bogota, where the doctor set up his practice. The future seemed bright for them, but before long the big, stolid medico began to squabble with his coquet¬ tish young wife, and the fiery Isabel grew tired of her finnicky hus¬ band. They were hardly a perfect match. Calixto Torres Umana, both by temperament and family tradition, represented the very opposite of the warm-blooded, carefree, adventurous spirit of the Gavirias. His forebears had been “heroes of the fatherland” too, but of a very dif¬ ferent kind. His great- (or was it his great-great?) grandfather, Don Joaquin Umana, was shot by the Spanish in 1816. But he was not shot, as a Gaviria might have been shot, in the heat of battle. He was executed in the public square for having set himself up as one of the heads of the local government. He was a founding father of what had come to be known in Colombian history as the “Patria Boba,” which simply means the “Nitwit Fatherland.” The men whom history remembered by that unflattering title were criollos of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They had taken over large tracts of pastureland in the high plains of what is now Boyaca, Santander and that part of the province of Cundinamarca which includes the sweeping green savannas of Bogota. They were the Torres, the Umanas, the Calderons, the Montejos, whose names, for generations after, formed the hard core of the Bogota upper classes. And they were dubbed nitwits (or more exactly, the found¬ ing fathers of “Nitwit Land”) in the early nineteenth century when their leader, one Camilo Torres (not, apparently, a forebear of the Camilo of this story) led them to arise and implant their own local government against the Spanish regime. For a while they had success, but refused to heed the warning of military leaders and statesmen of wider vision (Simon Bolivar, for example, and the interim president Narino) who insisted that, if they did not unite and arm themselves,

THE BEGINNING

13

the Spanish would come back in force and wrest this ephemeral power from their hands. So it happened. Camilo Torres and his friends were executed, their era ridiculed in a nickname, and yet, strangely enough, their statues have been mounted in the plazas of Colombia ever since as national heroes. They had risked their lives not for the freedom of their country but for their own economic interests. Their sons were true to that spirit and, once Bolivar and his gallant band of warriors had overthrown the Spanish troops and banished the vice¬ roys forever, the narrow-minded gentry from the tablelands of Boyaca and Bogota took control of the country and divided up the spoils. Calixto Torres was the son and heir of these men. Calixto was a fussy, scrupulous person, inclined to fret at the slightest provocation. Though he became famous as the specialist called upon to attend the children of the cream of bourgeois Bogota, was several times dean of the medical school in Colombia’s National University and esteemed one of the pillars of modern medical science in his country, Calixto was never a happy man. He was a self-styled free-thinker who never really won the free¬ dom to think for himself. He was an anti-clerical whose fundamental belief in God was badly hidden under a veneer of repeated efforts to deny God’s existence. He was a tum-of-the-century atheist steeped in religious and conservative traditions from which he could never shake himself free. Something of Calixto’s character was captured in the curious letters he wrote to Camilo when the latter, already in his twenties, was study¬ ing in Europe. They were full of endless queries like “Did you get warm clothes? gloves? woolen underwear?” and advice like “Always put on a sweater before going out of doors” and “When you are go¬ ing to cross the road look first to the left then to the right and wait for the lights. Never cross diagonally and only cross where there is a pedestrian crossing” and so on, page after page, letter after letter. By the time he was writing these letters, Calixto was resigned to the fact that his son had entered the Church and hoped that Camilo would be “a good priest and an able propagator of Christianity, in other words of civilization, because that is what Christianity really is.” These were scarcely the sentiments of the inflexible Voltairian which Calixto had tried so hard to be. He and his peers were abortive

14

CAMILO TORRES

and very tardy sons of the Enlightenment. They were bom in the dark¬ ness of dull, rainy plateaus under the yoke of a Spanish-type hier¬ archy which left its indelible mark on them all. Calixto’s was a peevish spirit, in strong contrast with the icono¬ clastic, rebellious nature of his wife. It was no wonder, then, that the temperaments of Calixto and Isabel were to clash and, each being what it was, to clash violently. At first things had gone well and Isabel had thrown herself energetically into her husband’s every enterprise. In partnership with Isabel’s brothers, the two of them invested whatever savings they had, plus the remains of the Westendorp fortune, in a fashionable hotel downtown. They bought the Hotel Ritz on Seventh Avenue (Bogota’s main street) and, shortly after Camilo’s birth in 1929, the family moved into a spacious apartment which adjoined it. For Isabel had decided to run the Ritz. She ran it, indeed, in grand style, and its elegant dining hall soon became the scene of dazzling banquets, the most memorable of which were those designed to pro¬ mote the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate, Olaya Herrera. These were the days of the Liberals’ bid for power after some fifty years of Conservative governments and Isabel revelled in the cam¬ paign and bristled with the expectation of victory at the polls. It was a victory in more senses than one. No sooner did Olaya come to power than Isabel was pressing him for a reward. She demanded a post in Europe for Calixto. The Hotel Ritz had been a great social success, but, perhaps due to her lavish spending, it had turned out a financial disaster. Isabel beleaguered the newly elected President Olaya until she had wrung from him a post for Calixto in the League of Nations at Geneva. Soon they were on their way to Europe again. Tensions had been growing between the two of them, but in Europe they made a fresh start. Isabel dedicated herself to helping Calixto with his meticulous tests and experiments. She became his laboratory assistant, his receptionist, nurse to his patients, and even turned her hand to drawing the minute diagrams which illustrated his scientific essays. Nevertheless, in those years, just as the storm was gathering over Europe, it seemed to be gathering over the Torres couple as well. Their rather straitened circumstances frequently led to an ex¬ change of mutual recriminations. Then they would separate for a

THE BEGINNING

15

time, Isabel going off to Brussels with her mother and the four chil¬ dren, on the grounds that life was cheaper in Belgium. The children had scarcely settled into new schools before Isabel uprooted them again and moved off to live, this time, in Barcelona. Finally, in 1934, she and Calixto made up their minds to go back to Colombia and make one last effort to achieve stability and a happy marriage. Their effort was not to be successful. Isabel was obviously suffering from the pressures exerted on the woman in the Latin male culture. She felt she had let herself become more Dr. Torres’ assistant than Calixto’s wife, and her indomitable spirit bucked a cultural tradition which she, years ahead of her time, refused to accept. Calixto, on the other hand, was irked by her in¬ dependent spirit, her showiness, her vanity, the attentions she sought and so easily won on all sides. However, Gerda, not Calixto, was the first to react dramatically against what she considered Isabel’s scandalous behaviour. Gerda Westendorp was no longer a little girl; she had grown into a lively and intelligent young woman, scarcely less attractive a personality than her mother. Maybe it was Gerda’s vigorous character, coupled with the fact that Isabel was still young enough to see her daughter as a kind of rival, that sparked off the growing animosity between the two women. As a girl Gerda had adored her mother; in adolescence she had feared her, as well she might since Isabel kept a rigid control over her daughter’s comings and goings. Now, as a young woman studying medicine at the National University—she was the first woman student ever to enroll in a Colombian university—Gerda found her mother unbearable. Isabel’s hysterical threats to take her own life, her truculence, her flirtations were all more than Gerda could abide. As if to highlight this rejection of her mother, she magnified fond memories of her dead father, hankered after all that was German and nonColombian and recalled the strict moral code instilled into her at high school by Belgian and Spanish Catholic nuns. In this way she grew to see Isabel more and more as the denial of all that she most cherished. Then, at the age of seventeen, she made her break; she married and left home. About the same time, her brother Edgar Westendorp,

CAMILO TORRES

16

in more or less the same frame of mind as Gerda, moved to live in Chile. They left Isabel and Calixto to fight their own battles. In the presence of the two little boys, Fernando and Camilo, those battles were waged. They would invariably begin over a question of money. Calixto repeatedly accused Isabel of being a spendthrift. He protested that she was ruining him. Isabel retaliated that, on the con¬ trary, Calixto had ruined her. Westendorp had left her a fortune—a hundred thousand dollars! she said, plus three country properties!— and the doctor had squandered it all. There would be endless rows over whose fault it was that their big joint venture, the Hotel Ritz, had ended up a failure. These discussions always concluded with Calixto bewailing the fact that he had married her before 1932, which was the year the new Liberal government had changed the marriage laws and left a woman fully responsible for her acts and the disposi¬ tion of her property. Isabel’s tongue, always sharp, reached a fine cutting edge in these dreadful family scenes. Calixto was no match for her. She recognized, she said, that he was a great scientist. She only lamented his three faults: he was as mad as a hatter, tight-fisted and an inveterate ladies’ man! His only three defects! Long afterwards she would laugh about it. “And I so innocent,” she would say, “I didn’t think he had time for women. I thought he was always peering down his microscope!” In later years Calixto was given to harking back and harping on the past. Isabel, on the other hand, rarely bothered to mention those un¬ pleasant scenes. At least in her many letters there was never any reference to the matter. It was Camilo’s father who, in his lengthy correspondence, reminded Camilo of what those family brawls were like. “Fernando throwing himself on the ground and crying out that I had knocked her down with my fist!” “Once, in your presence, she said that I had left you hungry and that she had to pawn a medal, a trophy of mine!” “Once, on the phone, just because I wouldn’t accept her abusive remarks, she cried out that I had no right to speak to her in that way and Fernando took the receiver from her and accused me of insulting his mother, thus showing complete ignorance of my character,” Calixto justified himself, “as I am incapable of insulting anyone, let alone a woman!” Camilo, years later, would write an accusing (if very loving) letter

THE BEGINNING

17

to his father: “You knew only the sporadic manifestations of my mother’s violent temperament,” he wrote. “You don’t know, as I do, of the respect and affection for you which mamma inculcated in us, expressly and intentionally. It is partly because of this that, from the formative years of our infancy, that love and respect has endured un¬ broken until today—as you admit. ... I don’t think you ever took the trouble to study mamma, to try to understand her. In those first years of married life I am sure that she gave herself to you heart and soul, because that is her way. You only noticed her defects, which got on your nerves. . . . Mamma never told us that you were the one to blame. . . . She has recognized her faults. On the other hand you have never admitted the least imperfection on your part. . . .” These words of Camilo, written when he was twenty-five, reflected the feelings of a son who was reared by his mother in the father’s ab¬ sence, and by a mother with “an extraordinarily strong personality,” as Camilo mentioned. He loved and felt himself loved by both his parents and their constant bouts of hostility left a lasting mark on the eight-year-old boy. The incessant hostility required a drastic solution. Thus, in 1937, Calixto and Isabel separated once and for all. Separation, a normal thing amongst incompatible couples the world over, was looked upon as a most shocking and dramatic event in the social circles of Bogota at that time. The Torres-Restrepo bust-up became the talk of the town. Nevertheless they faced it bravely and accepted it as inevitable. The boys stayed with their mother and Calixto went to live with some maiden sisters. From then on there was relative peace amongst the members of the family, and both Isabel and her husband collaborated in the education of the growing boys. Usually they made these ar¬ rangements by phone. Sometimes they met. And they strained at all times to maintain a courteous relationship. In short, Camilo was the son of a fuss-budget and a prima donna. But Isabel turned out to be very much more than a prima donna, which was fortunate for Camilo (and for history) as she was to have the prime influence on his life.

Chapter 3

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

The upper crust of Bogota’s society in the thirties and forties —the environment and the era in which Camilo was brought up—was a little world glowing with self-inflated feelings of prosperity. Nonetheless, Isabel would make much of the dreadful calamity which befell them with the failure of the Ritz, and told many a tale of how she saved the little family from the brink of penury with her re¬ sourcefulness in the making of “French” hats—and her shamelessness in selling them to her well-to-do lady friends as genuine models im¬ ported from Paris. She could turn her hand to anything. When neither hats nor hotels would do the trick, she bought a farm, La Granja, a few miles from the city (“. . . with money out of my pocket!” Calixto was still wincing years after) and set up a dairy. Despite all Isabel’s stories of hard times and her constant battles to make ends meet, there is nothing to indicate that the two boys ever wanted for anything or even felt the slightest threat of poverty hang¬ ing over them. On the contrary, they were sent to the best schools and grew up as fully accepted members of Bogota’s social set, and must have felt security in the wave of progress which the new bourgeoisie was experiencing. Indeed, Fernando and his young brother Camilo seemed to be coming in on the crest of that wave. The optimism of Camilo’s generation can be explained only by the events which led up to it.

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

19

In 1921 the United States Government decided to win back friend¬ ship with Colombia after having ruthlessly taken from her the state of Panama almost two decades earlier. It was easy to make amends the American way: the United States gave Colombia a gift of $25 million and diplomatic relations were re-established in 1924 with the paying of this “indemnity.” Thus the doors were opened to a flood of American investments: oil wells, gold mines, platinum deposits, railways, telephone cables, electric plants, banana plantations, sugar refineries and much more. These were the days of the so-called Dancing Millions. They cor¬ respond to the Roaring Twenties in the United States and indeed the two parallel eras were closely related. If the millions danced in Colombia, they danced in a constant carnival which led north. They danced to make the twenties “roaring” for the United States. They danced for the foreign investors and for their trusted colleagues, the Colombian upper classes who served as middlemen. But they did not dance for the masses of Colombians, who had never been so impoverished. The country people were encouraged to leave their lands and flocked to work as salaried labourers in the mines, plantations and public works. Soon basic foods were no longer being produced, hunger and death swept over the country and the newly formed proletariat, groaning under inhuman conditions of work, drew near to the breaking point. These were the first years of the Revolutionary Socialist (later Communist) Party. Populist lead¬ ers began to arise and speak, for the first time, of “class war.” The first stirrings of trade unionism were felt and began to grow along the great arterial river of the Magdalena. Here, in the tropical heart of Colombia, were concentrated the lines of transport between the hinterland and the Atlantic coast, the railways and shipping, the oil deposits and the banana plantations. In these plantations the United Fruit Company exploited thou¬ sands of day labourers on the most appalling terms. And so it was there that the great strike was organized by twenty-three thousand workers in 1928. The Conservative government sent in the head of the Army to deal with the situation; General Carlos Cortes Vargas would thus become one of the great villains of Colombian history. On a hot December night, thousands of workers, with their wives and

20

CAMILO TORRES

families, dozed in a town square as they awaited the arrival of the governor’s train. At a given signal from the general, the troops opened fire on their defenceless victims and left thousands of people strewn dead or wounded over the ground. This horrible bloodstain on the nation’s conscience was not for¬ gotten. The massacre took place just a year before Camilo’s birth, and he must have heard it discussed many times in his boyhood years. Indeed the Liberal Party of those days rode into power over the sins of the Conservative government whose misrule had led to such a crime. Furthermore, the general state of bankruptcy which the Great Depression revealed to the world obliged the Colombian ruling classes to submit their economic and political systems to a thorough over¬ haul. For these reasons, after half a century of Conservative govern¬ ments, the Liberal Party won the elections in 1930. As the Torres and Restrepo clans rejoiced in a victory banquet at the Ritz, all over Colombia nationalistic pride was swelling. Old structures seemed to be breaking down. The old-guard landlords were seething with wrath at the rising industrialist groups; and the more retrograde elements in the Catholic Church were being challenged by a progressive, new, clerical elite who hopped onto the Liberal bandwagon. The Church had always been a power in the land, and it was in¬ teresting to watch how she went about changing her colours to suit the new political moment. The old primate, Monsignor Herrera Restrepo, arch-Conservative, who had ruled over his Bogota flock with a heavy crozier for nearly forty years, was dead. His successor, Ismael Perdomo, son of a Liberal Party leader in the province of Tolima, was a man more attuned to the needs of the times than the lordly old Archbishop Herrera had been. Not only did Perdomo possess a higher degree of intelligence than his predecessor and a certain awareness of social problems, he was also shrewd enough to listen to wise counsellors. His secretary in those early years of his archbishopric was Luis Concha Cordoba, a competent young cleric trained in the best ecclesiastical colleges of Rome and Paris and son of a distinguished Conservative diplomat and one-time President of Colombia. Concha and Perdomo could both see that the hey-day of Conservatism was at an end. In fact Perdomo’s indecision about which

FROM DANCING MILLIONS

TO

DOMINICANS

21

of the two Conservative candidates most deserved the Church’s sup¬ port had been one of the factors which led to the Liberals’ victory. Concha helped the archbishop to realize that he had to accept a fait accompli. There was no point in trying to turn back the clock. In any case the Liberals were the lesser of two evils. If their government were not supported, the masses of angry union workers might revolt. Communist doctrines were.in the air. It would be madness to oppose the Liberals. The clerics would do better by their church if they modified and interpreted the papal condemnations of liberalism, adapting and applying them in a common-sense way to the Liberal Party in Colombia. After all, the popes had condemned the general liberal doctrine but not the individual liberal parties. Thus Perdomo and Concha, the two learned prelates at the head of church affairs in Bogota, won for themselves the bitter opposition of most of their fellow bishops, who obstinately remained true to their intransigent anti-Liberal policy and sided with the Conservative Party leaders. However, despite such marked divisions in the political opinions of Catholic bishops and party leaders, the change in Colombia’s life was not so real nor so deep as it seemed. The oppressed masses had no reason to throw triumphant victory parties; the celebrations took place in the red-brick mock-Tudor villas to the north of Bogota and in the archiepiscopal palace, not in the slum dwellings to the south. But neither the northern residents nor the bishops were at all aware of this, for they had built the city in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for the rich to come into contact with the poor. The gabled suburban homes with their mullioned windows and trim lawns nestled against high mountains in the comer of a vast, green plateau. Beyond them, to the south, the makeshift hovels of the poor sprawled out over the plains. In the paved streets of the northern zone ran healthy, welldressed children; the muddy tracks of the southern quarter were full of scrawny, ragged urchins playing beside uncovered pools of stagnant sewerage water. The southern areas were immensely more populous than those of the north, but the northerners never saw them. The occasional beggar outside church on a Sunday morning or the dirty shoe-shine boy on a street comer downtown were scarcely even a reminder of that other world. They merely served as opportunities

22

CAMILO TORRES

to slip a coin into a needy palm and feel a glow of satisfaction at hav¬ ing done some poor fellow a “charity.” Camilo grew up amidst the frivolous atmosphere which prevailed in the northern suburbs, in the English- and French-style salons of the self-opinionated upper classes who ran after everything that was new and foreign and who believed that, as long as an idea or a fashion was not Colombian, then it must for that reason alone be very excit¬ ing. In political matters too the bogotanos liked to think of them¬ selves as past masters in the English school of democracy. They took it as axiomatic that Bogota was the “Athens of South* America,” and many a drawing room yawned before the pompous discourses of bogotano lawyers expatiating on the glories of the new Liberal regime. They never thought to look behind the sparkle of progress which dazzled Bogota in the thirties and forties. If they had, they might have discovered the germ of its decadence. For the new “Revolution on the March,” as it was later to be called, was much more superficial than anyone imagined. To begin with, the first Liberal President had been put into office by a coalition of oligarchic forces of both parties. Thus the oligarchy was able to stem the rising tide of class war which was being generated by so many manifest injustices. Nonetheless, the Olaya Herrera administration, with its meagre and timid reforms, did little to ease the misery and discontent of the masses. A border dispute with Peru, which de¬ veloped into a war between the two countries, was most opportune; it distracted the people’s attention from the internal problems and whipped up feelings of nationalism. This was an old trick employed by shaky governments, and a very reliable one. But things were get¬ ting worse in Colombia. Just when it seemed that, in the long run, all might be lost for the oligarchs, they suddenly produced, as if out of a hat, one of their greatest caudillo figures, the Liberal leader Alfonso Lopez. They put him into power in 1934. Lopez, oozing charm from every pore and cajoling the resentful and hungry workers with the most skillful use of their own socialist jargon, was able not only to hold the revolution at bay; he was able to channel it to the advantage of big business. Lopez saw that the interests of the more enlightened industrialists coincided, to a cer-

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

23

tain extent, with the interests of the workers and, in fact, with the interests of Colombia. It was that certain extent of coincidence that he was able to exploit. He readjusted labour laws to bring them up to date with the minimum requirements of the twentieth century; he introduced the first modem system of income tax; he encouraged the foundation of trade unions; he was the advocate of the separation of church and state; and he proposed land reforms. His reforms did not touch the heart of Colombia’s problems. The power and wealth re¬ mained in the hands of the upper classes. But the modernization process which Lopez sponsored did avert the storm which was brew¬ ing. The Communist Party was given legal rights, which it readily ac¬ cepted in accordance with Stalin’s current Popular Front policy. The comrades, faithful to the new party fine dictated from Moscow, let themselves be beguiled by the expansiveness of the Liberal leader. In those days (and ever since) many a Communist Party bureaucrat and many a trade union boss betrayed the cause of the working classes by accepting well-paid posts in the governmental machinery. Lopez was happy to have Communist ministers in his cabinet. The higher their positions, the more harmless they became. The progressive churchmen, no less than the Communist leaders, continued to play along with the Liberals. In 1942, for example, when the government proposed reforms to Colombia’s concordat with the Vatican, Monsignor Concha raised no objection. However, most of the bishops protested violently against any tampering with the privileges guaranteed them by the concordat, and applauded the at¬ tacks on Concha which were published in the Conservative press, so much so that Bishop Concha came to be viewed with a certain sympathy by more liberal-minded Colombians, and was known as a champion of moderation and of the nonintervention of clerics in the political sphere. Thus, indeed, did he consider himself. Years later, as cardinal archbishop of Bogota, he would play a decisive role in Camilo’s life over this same issue—the Church and politics. At the moment his so-called nonintervention in politics simply gave added authority to the Liberal government. Not only the more enlightened clerics, but the more intelligent businessmen too threw their considerable weight behind the programs of President Lopez and his successor, Santos. And the working masses

24

CAMILO TORRES

followed blindly behind their false shepherds and were lulled by the demagogic phrases of a hundred political leaders. On the other hand, the recalcitrant Conservatives, the big land-holders and the more reactionary elements of the clergy, began to dam up flood tides of opposition and hate. A few years later, when the people’s clamour for justice could no longer be silenced nor contained, the flood-gates would open and a torrent of violence and bloodshed burst over the land. In the thirties and early forties, then, while the Antioquenian bank¬ ers grew fat and the shallow-minded bogotanos leaned on their furled umbrellas and discussed politics, the seeds of a terrible destruction were being sown in their midst. During these years, out at La Granja, Isabel was busy running the dairy farm and raising her two sons. To Calixto her method of bring¬ ing up children seemed anything but orthodox. Her own upbringing, he knew, had been strange enough. The youngest of a large family, and bereft of her father in early childhood, Isabel had been let run wild, like a boy, climbing on rooftops and getting up to all kinds of pranks. Calixto was ever hovering around, then, doing his best to fulfill his duty as a parent. When Isabel was inclined to condone the boys’ mischief, Calixto would be there to remonstrate with them. On one occasion he was chastising Camilo, who had played truant from school and was threatened with expulsion. Isabel intervened in the boy’s defence. She insisted that Camilo was doing well at school and was only occasionally in trouble. “In any case,” she said, “he’s not to blame. It’s hereditary. I was expelled from every decent college in Bogota!” Then she turned and asked Camilo where he had been and what he had been doing. He had been down at the waterfall with some of his mates having a few drinks. “Oh, good lord!” she exclaimed. “That’s something you got from your father!” Poor Calixto’s authority must have been dreadfully undermined. To make matters worse, Isabel, not Calixto, faced the school heads and appeased them by taking Camilo out of school for a week. She needed him on the farm to make a lake for the geese. Such behaviour endeared her to her mischievous son. His mother

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

25

may have been irascible at times, but on the whole he found her en¬ tertaining and would listen enraptured to the tales she told of the Restrepos and the Gavirias and their daring deeds in the wars against the goths. In these stories Papa Cuco played a prominent role and became a legend in the family. But he was not the only hero. She also told of an uncle of hers, one of the Restrepos from the Cauca Valley, who rose up against the notorious slave-dealer Don Julio Arboleda. Arboleda had him captured and, as he was led away to be shot, his valiant wife shouted after the cruel master of the slaves: “May they kill you just as you are killing my husband!” and with that was struck dumb for the rest of her days. Her last words were a prophecy, Isabel concluded; before the year was out they had shot Don Julio Arboleda! There were countless tales of this kind in some of which Isabel’s own mother figured as a heroine of the Liberal forces in the last great civil war. By means of these anecdotes from the family album Isabel was taking care of the political education of her sons. The children’s religious education was attended to as a matter of course, though with less enthusiasm. In such a predominantly Catholic country as Colombia it was unthinkable that religious matters should be neglected altogether, even by such anti-clericals as Isabel and her husband. Thus, Camilo, at the age of ten, all done up in a new sailor’s suit, received his first Holy Communion. But Isabel made sure that the boys did not suffer from any religious traumas. She recalled all too vividly her own childhood. The sermons she had heard in church as a little girl had drummed into her a profound fear of God and the Devil. She would hide under the blankets at night to escape the Devil. She thought he was going to swallow her up. Then one night came her moment of liberation. She threw off the bed clothes and cried: “Let him swallow me up!” and, as he didn’t, he gradually began to disap¬ pear. Remembering this, Isabel, as a mother, adopted a rather loose stance with regard to religious matters and this rubbed off on her growing sons. The two of them developed a healthy attitude towards religion: neither a haunting sense of guilt, nor an absolute indiffer¬ ence. They would observe simple practices of family prayer together, like the novena for the souls in purgatory. And she would call Camilo for Mass on Sundays.

26

CAMILO TORRES

“Why me and not Fernando?” he once asked. “Because you believe in the Mass and he doesn’t,” Isabel replied. “It’s not a sin for him to miss Mass. But it would be for you.” If Camilo was inclined to believe in the Mass, this incipient taste of his for things religious was off-set by the hypocrisy which he dis¬ covered to be characteristic of so many so-called good Catholics. He discovered it precisely because these people gave vent to the most scathing attacks on his mother. No one said that she was a public woman, at least not in so many words. Such a phrase would never have sullied their respectable lips. But by dint of innuendo, and with much pursing of those lips and raising of the brows and casting down of the eyes, they managed to convey the most awful impression of what a virago she must be. Dreadful tales quickly reached Camilo and caused him untold suffering. These attacks on Isabel were inevitable, for the simple reason that every woman in Bogota was jealous of her. In the carping atmosphere of that narrow provincial city, closed in by mountain ranges and smothered in grey rain-clouds, a town where, in the little circle known as “the High,” everyone minded everyone else’s business, and Isabel was faced with the inescapable alternative: either to suffocate or to rebel. She decided, naturally enough, on the latter course. She was still a most attractive woman, and did not consider her separation from Calixto any reason for putting on widow’s weeds or confining herself to the house. She would go out and lead her active life and enjoy herself. Witty and intelligent, she would be welcomed in many places. And certainly she would always be welcome in male company. Her critics watched her like hawks, and how they crowed the night she appeared in a box at the opera escorted by one of the most distin¬ guished generals of the Colombian Army. Every eye turned to take in the spectacle of Isabel and the tall figure by her side all hung about with medals and gold braid. And the tongues that began to wag that night had not been stilled even thirty years later. Long after Camilo had grown up, become a revolutionary leader and died in battle, the devout Catholics of Bogota’s social elite were still talking about the night that Isabel went to the opera with the general, and attributing all her son’s “aberrations” to the harmful influence which she had ex-

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

27

erted upon him. Camilo’s life, they continued to insist, was a constant flight from the shame of being Isabel Restrepo’s son. Such was the stifling, moralistic world which wrapped round Camilo in his youth. He could not but be affected by it, and being young and inexperienced, he may have succumbed to moments of doubt. The social pressures in Bogota were very strong. But he never once be¬ trayed his mother, not in the slightest way. And one day, in contact with masses of honest and hardworking folk, he would discover the other Colombia untarnished by petty petit-bourgeois vices. That day he too would rebel. But not yet. The Camilo of the forties was as bland a youth as any on the roll call of the Lycee Cervantes, the last of a series of high schools which he was put into and taken out of over the years. At Cervantes he would graduate in 1947 and make some life-long friendships. He was remembered as a young dare-devil, practical joker, good sport and so forth. He was the boy who played the big drum in the school band. He was also the boy who ran the school newspaper (“a weekly daily published once a month”) in which he and his friends wrote satires on the teachers. Like most boys growing up, Camilo had his broody moments and would shut himself up in his shell. He came out of his shell maybe a bit faster than other boys and would sometimes do so with some abrupt and unexpected (and later unfulfilled) resolution like, say, never to take another drink! or never to go out with another girl! He was a member of the Country Club, and drove around recklessly with a gang of friends in a bor¬ rowed sports car until the fateful night they collided with a traffic cop. Camilo came up before the head master, and once again was threatened with expulsion from Cervantes. The Lycee Cervantes was probably the most self-consciously reli¬ gious environment in which he had been educated. It was a private school run for the scions of influential families, not by a group of priests but by laymen who were even more steeped in devotion to the precepts and mystique of the Catholic Church than many of her min¬ isters. Thus Camilo was drafted into annual retreats (or “Spiritual Exercises”) under the direction of the Jesuit Fathers. He took them seriously enough but was not especially affected by them. He blithely continued to enjoy his own little bogotano version of the dolce vita.

28

CAMILO TORRES

He was a tall lad now and good-looking, with just the faintest hint of defiance in his stmt. He had his mother’s infectious laugh and was what is known as popular. From high school Camilo floated as naturally as a bubble into the university, the National University, and began to study law. This was in 1947. His closest friend at the time was Luis Villar, who had also graduated from Cervantes and, like Camilo, entered the law school. Together they could be seen at almost any hour of the day in El Molino (The Mill), a cafe on Jimenez Avenue, where they sat solving great philosophical problems. Luis Villar had already decided that he was a rationalist. He had actually read a bit of Kant as well as Hegel’s Universal History and would indulge in lengthy arguments against the existence of God. Camilo delighted in taking the case for the defence of theism, although he would later refer to those discussions as “Byzantine,” maybe be¬ cause they went round and round like a dome. Luis’ interest was distinctly political, Camilo’s more in the line of social concern. They were not content merely to stick to the essentials of getting a university degree. Luis believed in “an organic and integral culture” and protested against the “deforming” effect of a university education which produced nothing but “cogs in a machine.” Neither he nor Camilo wanted to be swallowed up by the machine nor lost in the anonymous herd. They had something to say and looked for a tribune from which to say it. “Their concern for jour¬ nalistic expression,” according to young Camilo, “was a logical fruit of their intellectual concern.” It was not surprising, therefore, that before long the two friends were editing a weekly “university page” in one of the Bogota dailies. In its columns they insisted on the importance of student unity and organization in order to obtain bigger government grants for the uni¬ versity, technical improvements and independence from political party control. The university students, they proclaimed, were the “bom leaders of the future Colombia,” and Camilo’s special praises went to the students of the National University for having “overcome that intellectual slovenliness so characteristic of the students in the private universities.” Their university page was by no means revolutionary. Camilo and

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

29

Luis said that they wanted it to be a forum for all tendencies and currents of thought, although Camilo did, in fact, publish petulant attacks on radical student reviews. The review lzquierdas (The Left), which was edited, oddly enough, by a young man who would one day become co-editor of Camilo’s future Frente Unido, was dispatched high-handedly by the young law student as a “pseudo” magazine. Camilo found its attacks on United States imperialism as distasteful as its support for the Soviet Union. He detested its “Marxist mental¬ ity” and its “determinist way of seeing things.” Indeed, in an article which he wrote on student publications in general, Camilo praised the medical faculty’s Bisturi (The Scalpel) as the only review which was “purely scientific” and did not stoop to “cheap and unsavoury politiking.” The review Bisturi was destined to become the organ of one of the most radical groups in the National University and, by a quirk of history, eighteen years later its student-editors would be comrades-inarms of Camilo the revolutionary priest. However, the only faint sign of the future revolutionary which Camilo showed at this early stage was his desire to get involved in works for social betterment. To this end he joined a group called the University Union, which was engaged in social works. The Union was infiltrated by Conservative Party members, and a left-wing student quickly exposed it as “a falangist organization composed of students who foment parallel unionism in the poorer quarters of Bogota under the pretext of their so-called social works.” To justify his activity in this highly suspect group, Camilo retorted that he was “not a politi¬ cian” and, speaking in the name of the University Union, he said that he “would like it to be known that the Union is an institution designed to promote works of the apostolate.” “Works of the apostolate” was a phrase which sounded odd on the lips of a student leader even in those days. Luis Villar, for example, would never have used it. It was Luis who noticed that Camilo was drifting away from him and getting more and more interested in re¬ ligious affairs. Camilo had, in fact, come under the influence of a pair of cultured French priests who had appeared on the scene in Bogota. These two men were members of the Dominican Order and had been sent from France with the mission of injecting a shot of new life into their confreres in Colombia. It was a source of concern to the

30

CAMILO TORRES

international superiors of the order that such a very Catholic country as Colombia should have exhibited so shoddy a version of their glorious tradition. For while the Jesuits were strong in universities and spanking big high schools for the training of Catholic gentlemen, the Dominicans had not much more than the National Shrine to the Virgin. Worst of all, the reverend fathers who kept the votive lamps burning at that shrine had a well-won reputation as a set of ignorant knaves (“indians,” as the racially prejudiced bogotanos would say) who lived off the superstitions of the poor. It was time the French branch of the order, now enjoying a new vitality and prestige, sent out some recruiting officers (or “vocation promoters” as they called them) to look for fresh talent. Thus Fathers Blanchet and Nielly, in their majestic white habits, were launched on the Bogota elite, ever avid for things foreign and new, especially things with a French accent. Camilo met them through his girl friend Teresa Montalvo, whose father was one of the political heavyweights of the Conservative Party. Montalvo was not only a politician; he was also a sort of lay pontiff in Catholic social circles, and it was natural enough that he should be sponsoring the visit of the French Dominicans and that his daughter’s boy friend should fall within their orbit. The fathers were concentrat¬ ing especially on the young Catholic intellectuals; in other words, faithful to their custom, on the apostolate to the rich. Their technique was to hold conferences, study circles and retreats for the students. Camilo followed a course of their lectures and discovered, as he said, “not just one more example of fetishist clericalism full of supersti¬ tions, but a rational expression of belief.” By the middle of the year Camilo and Teresa had become regular attenders at the Dominicans’ lecture cycles, and Camilo wrote enthu¬ siastic reports for his university column on “the broad philosophical base on which this religious community is built and which gives it a genuinely cultural aspect.” That priests should be so cultured seemed to Camilo a contradic¬ tion. The image of the clergy which he had received from his parents had no relationship at all to what he discovered in Fathers Blanchet and Nielly. The two French priests were eloquent exponents of a re¬ newal in the Catholic Church. They were products of the French

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

31

Church which was born out of the experience of the Second World War, the collaboration with the Resistance and the priest-workers in German prison camps. Father Jean-Baptiste Nielly, for instance, as a young lieutenant from Brittany, had fallen into the hands of the Nazis and made a dramatic escape. His stories captivated Camilo. And when he spoke of the apostolate, he did not talk of saving souls or in¬ creasing attendance at Sunday Mass; he spoke instead of commitment (engagement) and witness (temoignage). This new brand of Christi¬ anity was adventurous and defiant, and struck a chord somewhere in Camilo. Before long, one of the Dominicans had popped the inevitable question: did Camilo feel he had a vocation to the priesthood? An¬ other boy might have laughed at such an idea. But Camilo took it to heart. The challenge of it haunted him, and he had to get away from the city to think about it. In school days, as a scout, he had grown to love the countryside, above all the vast tropical plains where he had spent his vacations, hunting and fishing and swimming in the fast¬ flowing rivers. Now he went back to the silence of those plains where space and time were endless. Was it sheer chance, he wondered, that had placed these two importunate priests in his path? Or was their appearance the sign of a destiny, a providence? Camilo was enthu¬ siastic and generous by nature. He never wanted to do things by halves. To the question of what to do with his life, he felt the priest¬ hood gave “a total answer.” In a matter of weeks he was back in Bogota with his mind made up. He would become a Dominican. There was only one real problem: how to break the news to his mother. He knew that she would fly into one of her tantrums. Better, he thought, not to tell her at all. He made furtive arrangements to meet the Dominican fathers on a fixed day at the hour the train was to leave for the country town of Chiquinquira, where the Dominicans had their monastery. Without a word Camilo stole out of the house, leaving a note for his mother. However, Isabel was alerted and descended on him just as the train was about to pull out from the station. The whole incident reads like a chapter from a nineteenth-century melodrama—the note left for his mother, the silent departure, the dramatic appearance of Dona Isabel at the station snatching her son out of a railway carriage,

32

CAMILO TORRES

her threat that she had two armed detectives waiting at the station door. Young Camilo pleaded that he must at least wait for the priests and explain what had happened, at which Isabel shouted: “We will not wait for the Dominican fathers! I don’t want headlines in tomor¬ row’s papers: ‘Wife of Prominent Physician Hits Priests on Railway Platform’!” She carried off her hapless son and held him prisoner in his room, incommunicado, for several days. His father, Calixto, came hurrying back from a medical congress in Washington. There was a great upheaval, and lengthy discussions ensued. The notion that their son, an otherwise healthy and balanced lad, should have got it into his head to be a priest seemed too much for the mind. Despite their many differences and disputes, on one issue Calixto and Isabel were united: for both of them the Catholic Church and its curas were an abominable scourge on civilized society. The faint glimmerings of liberalism in the ranks of the clergy during the thirties had been a mere flash in the pan. It was now 1947, the Conservatives were back in power and, with them, the priests had re¬ gained all their old influence over education, government, marriagein a word, over everybody else’s business. And here was Camilo with this bee in his bonnet that he wanted to be a cura. Worse still, a Dominican! If any group of curas was more obscurantist than an¬ other, it was the Dominican Order of Chiquinquira! At this stage an old family friend intervened to conciliate and ad¬ vise. Enrique Martinez, a gentle soul, had won the affection of Camilo and, as he was one of the pious laymen who circled in the wake of the Dominican fathers (as a member of their Third Order), he had be¬ come something of a spiritual counsellor to the young man. His counsel on this occasion was prudent and wise. He suggested that Camilo should come to a compromise with his parents. Instead of entering the Dominican monastery, Camilo could enter the local dioc¬ esan seminary. Neither Camilo nor his parents were very happy about this, but it seemed the only sensible middle course open to them. Camilo had dug in his heels and there was no question of his giving up the idea altogether. Calixto decided to make a visit of inspection to the seminary, no

FROM DANCING MILLIONS TO DOMINICANS

33

doubt expecting to find a delapidated seventeenth-century abbey with dank and badly lit cells reflecting the darkness of mind of the clerics who infested it. Instead he found the last word in modem seminaries. Only very recently the Colombian bishops had built this new symbol of their prosperity and temporal power: a giant edifice in red brick situated in the elegant parklands of El Chico to the north of Bogota. The playing fields and facilities, the discreet austerity which barely concealed the real grandeur left a favourable impression on Calixto. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad place after all. And the roly-poly little priest who opened the door and showed him around seemed as jovial and urbane a person as one could wish to meet. In September of 1947 Camilo entered the seminary. For the next seven years the big brick building would be his home, and the world of the clerics—their long robes, their incense-burning, their theology, their asceticisms, their daily chit-chat about the appointment of Bishop So-and-So to such-and-such a diocese, their idealism, their genuine concern for the moral welfare of their future flocks—all this would be Camilo’s world.

Chapter U

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

Rumours about Camilo reached the seminary before he did. The young man who was coming, someone said, was a recent convert to the Catholic faith. He had been a student at the National Univer¬ sity, which the seminary rector always called a cesspool of laxity and vice. And to make the story spicier, the new boy’s parents were some kind of celebrities who lived separate lives. His mother had done something which was not respectable, but no one ever mentioned what; maybe they didn’t dare. When Camilo arrived, therefore, and was shown down a long cor¬ ridor to his room, doors half-opened silently behind him, and pimply teen-agers in long black robes peered out to get a first look at this latter-day Aloysius Gonzaga. Camilo felt himself to be an oddity. He was uncomfortable in the cassock they gave him to wear, and could not be bothered doing all its buttons up, with the result that his white celluloid dog-collar, not well anchored, swivelled on its stud and sprang out at crazy angles. His legs got entangled in folds of black serge, and the simplest move¬ ments became complicated. For the first few days it was hard to walk properly, and impossible to run. In amazement he watched veteran cassock-wearers playing basketball without tripping over, and won¬ dered if he would ever manage to do the same. But within a week he had his cassock broken in and wore it as non-

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

35

chalantly as the next man. He began to feel at home. His fellowstudents gossiped less, although hidden eyes were watching when his mother came to call, and a whisper went down the passage if Calixto drove up, separately, in his big grey Chrysler. Camilo was hardly aware of their comments, and only once in those first weeks did he know he had caused a stir. That was the day a red convertible roared up the drive and a voice shouted: “Hey! Is this where the cura Camilo lives?” The car was full of his university friends who broke into loud gufiaws when Camilo appeared decked out in ankle-length black skirts. As the weeks went by his old friends forgot to visit him, and he began to make new ones. They came from varied backgrounds, for the seminary was a small-scale model of that old favourite of the economists, the social pyramid, whose wide base was formed by country boys and the sons of working-class families. The pyramid’s narrow peak was a group of stand-offish young men, many of whom Camilo knew already. Amongst them were old friends like the Montalvo boys, brothers of his ex-girl friend; several others had been at Cervantes in his time; some were cousins on one or other side of his family; and all of them, from the first day they drove up to the seminary, packed potential mitres in the bottom of their suitcases. Sandwiched in between the base and peak of the pyramid was a thin layer of young men who, while not exactly poor, were unaccept¬ able to the elite. They would eventually make a comfortable living as ministers of the Church. But if they were to gain admittance to the top, they needed to make friends with people who were born there. They were attracted to Camilo as bees are drawn to the hive, in¬ stinctively. Camilo, quite unaware of the socio-economic factors, sim¬ ply made friends. Amongst the young men of the upper strata, one of the first to seek his friendship was Miguel Triana, a boy he had known slightly in school days. Miguel was a couple of years older than Camilo and an intensely earnest person. He had never been impressed with the flip¬ pant party-loving Camilo he had known “outside in the world.” At a dance a year or two before he had watched Camilo necking, and the scene was graven on his mind. He set himself the task, therefore, of guiding his friend along holier paths.

CAMILO TORRES

36

He found Camilo a willing pupil. Having renounced the world and its pleasures, Camilo would settle for nothing less than the highest levels of sanctity. Thus he and Miguel invented austere practices, like discarding their mattresses furtively at night and sleeping on the boards. They recited extra prayers, and outdid one another in think¬ ing up new penances and mortifications and little secret acts of selfdenial which nobody else knew about. One of Miguel’s spiritual counsel’s proved difficult for Camilo to grasp; he spoke of the pitfall of mixing exclusively with boys of their own social class, of not being equally friendly towards the “less fortunate” country lads. This danger was so remote from his young disciple as to be hardly comprehensible, for Camilo made friends spontaneously with everyone. Miguel endeavoured to cure Camilo of his yearning for the monastic life of the Dominicans. But it was not easy. Three of his friends had gone off to Chiquinquira and donned the white habit of Saint Dominic, and Camilo envied them their cloister in the hills of Boyaca. This seminary on the outskirts of the city seemed a poor substitute. Someday, maybe when he turned twenty-one, he would have his way and follow in the footsteps of Fathers Nielly and Blanchet. “Contemplata aliis tradere,” said the Dominican motto: “Pass on to others the truths which you have contemplated.” That was what Camilo wanted: contemplation and preaching. His friend Miguel insisted that he could achieve the same spirit by adhering strictly to the seminary rule, which was what Camilo did. At five-thirty every morning he sprang out of bed at the first buzz¬ ing of the electric bells. As the early morning light filtered through the chapel windows he knelt alongside the others for a long half hour of meditation. He clenched his fists and held them up under his chin and did his desperate best to keep awake. During Mass he turned the pages of his missal to keep pace with the Latin the priest was hum¬ ming at the altar. He received the white papery Host on his tongue, and returned to his pew with downcast eyes. He filed into the re¬ fectory in silence, and tried to keep his mind on the Blessed Trinity while he ate his breakfast. Sometimes he felt he was getting close to spiritual perfection. On the academic side, he applied himself to the courses of

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

37

scholastic philosophy and studied the theses enunciated in his Latin textbooks. His teachers introduced him to truths which had been handed down, they said, if not from all eternity, from at least the Middle Ages. They were backed up by impeccable syllogisms. History had produced heretics, his professors explained, men who wilfully blinded themselves to the truth. Amongst the most stubborn were Kant and Hegel, 'Leibniz and Descartes. But it was enough to read Saint Thomas’ Summa to see that such modem philosophers had produced nothing but the most puerile mental aberrations. True wisdom existed only within the tradition of the Catholic Church. Camilo took notes and committed all this to memory and was a most satisfactory student. And so the mornings went by. In the afternoons he was regimented into football or basketball teams, and in the evening, at the sound of another bell, marched into classes of Church history and Greek and Gregorian chant. Bells rang to regulate the community’s movements at all times. Lunch and dinner were put on the tables at appointed hours and the young men gobbled them up to the accompaniment of readings from the life of a saint or the counsels of the medieval monk A’Kempis warning them of the dangers and temptations of the world. No newspaper ever penetrated the precincts of the seminary—at least not legally—nor did Camilo ever hear the sound of a radio. He was growing up in an en¬ vironment where the effects of time and space were largely nullified and the accent was on the transcendent and the eternal. One week was much the same as another; the months and years slipped by im¬ perceptibly; it was a sort of never-never land. On the whole this absence of external interests produced a jolly atmosphere, and the seminarians giggled like novices at the slightest diversion. Camilo, however, felt that something was lacking. One afternoon, as he wandered about alone with his head down and absently kicking an occasional stone out of his path, another lad came up and began to draw him out. What was wrong? Was Camilo bored? Well yes, he had to admit that he had been expecting some¬ thing more from the seminary. And he began to describe his concern to this new acquaintance, young Gustavo Perez. Gustavo was not from the upper classes, nor from the lower. He belonged to the thin layer of in-betweens. Son of a devout and in-

CAMXLO TORRES

38

dustrious Catholic middle-class family from Antioquia, Gustavo, like so many others, had been in the seminary since he was eleven. He had known no other life, and his experience of the outside world was almost nil. Camilo’s arrival had awakened in him a vague desire to discover the unknown and make contact with a wider range of people and places. The trouble with the seminary, Camilo told him, was pre¬ cisely the lack of interest in the real problems of the country. The future priest should be up to date with what is going on in the world around him. The Dominicans had spoken of commitment; but how could one be committed without first studying present-day problems? The two young men began to plan a study circle. Several such circles already existed in different hobbies:

physics, chemistry,

literature. They asked permission to begin one on social matters, but the rector thought it better to wait. They took their case to the vice¬ rector, Father Solano, an ambitious young priest on the way up in clerical circles who was inclined to foster friendship with people like Camilo. He encouraged the two seminarians simply to get together on a Saturday morning during free study time. Later on the thing might be officially approved. Thus, almost in secret and with the connivance of the friendly vice¬ rector, Camilo and Gustavo began the study of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical letter written towards the end of the nineteenth century by Pope Leo XIII as a counter to Marxism. This scarcely seemed a sub¬ versive activity; but it was a beginning. By the following year (1948) Camilo and Gustavo went on to study other nineteenth-century Catholic texts on socio-economic themes. They were not in any hurry to tackle more immediate issues. In any case, twentieth-century texts were not easy to find in the seminary. The first study they considered “serious” was centred on a little book by a Belgian Dominican priest, Pere Rutten, a “pioneer” (so the book’s introduction stated) “of the Christian Workers Movement in

Belgium.”

It consisted mostly of commentaries

on

Rerum

Novarum and accounts of social movements of Catholic origin in Europe. The readers learnt of rather obscure figures like the Count of Mun and the Marquis de Tour du Pin, as well as of Cardinal Man¬ ning and the German Bishop Von Ketteler. According to Rutten’s book, all these Catholic writers and social activists represented a

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

39

balanced Christian viewpoint, introducing nice distinctions between commutative and distributive justice, and roundly condemning such extremists as Proudhon with his “property is robbery.” Finally Rutten brought his readers into the twentieth century with Pius XI’s state¬ ment, in the thirties, that possession of a thing was the first title for claiming it as one’s own property; work, as a title to property rights, came only in second place. The little volume filled the seminarians’ heads with gross con¬ demnations of socialism and with grotesque propaganda against revolution and all forms of anti-religious violence. It proposed Christian Democracy as the key to the world’s problems. Camilo and Gustavo began to feel themselves depositaries of a knowledge which could put the world in order. Meanwhile, out in the streets of Bogota, wild mobs had begun to plunder and kill and bum down the city. It was April 1948. The lid had blown off Colombia. Violence swept over Bogota and over the land; the era, in fact, was to go down in history with that terrible name “the Violence.” The feuding and killings which had been commonplace for a century in Colombia came to a head that year after the murder of one man. For the man in question, singlehanded and by force of his torrential oratory, had buoyed up the hopes of the poor and welded millions of Colombians into a rebellious mass movement. His name: Jorge Eliecer Gaitan. Then in 1948, as Gaitan, at the peak of his career, walked out to lunch on Seventh Avenue at one o’clock in the afternoon of April 9, a shabby unshaven man sprang suddenly out from a doorway and fired several shots into him point-blank. Gaitan crumpled over and writhed on the sidewalk, while bystanders fell upon his assassin, beating and kicking him into lifeless pulp. From that moment the people of Bogota became drank with rage. Savage hordes careened through the streets calling for vengeance and blood. They stormed the capitol in search of the hated Conservative Party leader Laureano Gomez. They swarmed outside the presidential palace screaming for the head of President Ospina. The guards opened fire. The crowd replied with a volley of shot from hastily gathered rifles. Armed with shotguns and machetes, torches and

40

CAMILO TORRES

gasoline, sticks and stones, the desperate howling mobs wrought havoc throughout the town, burning and bombing shops, offices, churches and palaces, slaughtering and being slaughtered in the streets. Night fell at last on the macabre scene. Frightened men and women picked their way through the heaps of corpses strewn along the gut¬ ters, frantically searching for loved ones who had not returned home. Behind them loomed the smouldering skeletons of gutted buildings and the naked hulls of tram-cars burning on their trdcks. An inter¬ mittent hail of machine-gun fire rang through the darkness. From the shelter of the leafy seminary parklands a few miles away, all this had been unimaginable. Only by evening, looking southward, could one make out the wreathes of reddish smoke which stained the drizzling grey sky above the city. Distant Bogota was wrapped in the shroud of death. The seminarians went to their night prayers and commended the salvation of their country into the hands of God be¬ fore turning out the lights at nine-thirty as laid down by the rule. While the seminarians slumbered, more than a million bogotanos shuddered behind closed doors waiting for further horrors; the wily leader of the Conservative Party, Laureano Gomez, under cover of darkness and the rain, scurried across an airstrip to a waiting plane and flew into exile; the angry mob, foiled by his escape, sent the Gomez newspaper house up in flames; and the President of the re¬ public, Mariano Ospina Perez, trembled for fear in the palace. He seemed to hear the tumbrils rolling outside the palace door. However, at the last moment reinforcements arrived to smash the rebels at his gate and, almost at once, a bevy of Liberal politicians bustled in, their umbrellas dripping, to strike a bargain with the President. First they asked Ospina to resign, but he refused. Then they promised to attempt to quell the uprising, but on their terms. To this the shaken man acquiesced and offered ministries and all sorts of high offices to the Liberal men who only yesterday had been Gaitan’s most loquacious supporters. This Liberal pact with the Conservative Ospina helped placate the Gaitan masses and turn the tide against the insurgents. Thus Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, his corpse hardly cold, was betrayed by his political yes-men. For what Gaitan had preached was not compromise with the Con-

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

41

servative oligarchy, but rebellion against the oligarchs, and social change. A stocky lawyer of lowly birth, he had been known as a de¬ fender of the defenceless ever since the days of the United Fruit Com¬ pany’s massacres on the banana plantations in 1928. It was Gaitan, as a young member of Parliament, who had exposed the Conservative government’s complicity in the shooting of innocent Colombian work¬ ers and had paved the way for the Liberals’ rise to power in the thirties. He himself had been several times a cabinet minister in the Liberal regimes and mayor of the city of Bogota. Then, in the mid¬ forties, he had united under a single banner the dispossessed masses of Colombia. Behind him millions of unnamed men and woman came striding noisily onto the stage of history. These masses, barely mentioned in the official annals, must be mentioned here, because without them Camilo’s story can never be told. Camilo, like Gaitan, was destined to seek them out, to discover them, as it were, and to become their lover and their hope, as Gaitan had been, but much later and by a different path and with very dif¬ ferent results. At that moment in Colombia’s history the working classes found their suffering unendurable; the terrible catastrophe which befell them in 1948 was an inevitable outcome of the immediately preceding years. For World War II, which had brought death to the people of Europe, had no less surely brought death and starvation to Colombia. Exports to Europe were drastically reduced, and the United States, consuming everything in its own war production, was able to offer Latin America manufactured goods only scantily and at very high prices. The Americans paid for raw materials not in kind, but in dol¬ lars. And so the privileged few in Colombia piled up huge resources of capital and basked in the dollar prosperity which the war afforded them. Those were the days of the “angle,” the “fix” and the “hot tip” from whoever was on the inside of an agency or a ministry. With the right information you could buy a million-ton load of iron cheap to¬ day, and sell it dear tomorrow. Never had corruption been so rife in government circles. And while the lucky ones amassed quick fortunes, millions of Colombian workers were driven towards starvation. Prices rose in that inflationary society, and wages fell. Factory produc-

CAMILO TORRES

42

tion almost ceased, and if the country people felt hunger, worse still was the plight of the city dwellers. Small wonder that Gaitan, with his arm raised aloft and his full-throated plea for “moral restoration!” had electrified the swelling crowds of fired factory hands. By 1945 the government was in crisis. Alfonso Lopez, the promising Liberal reformer of the thirties back in office for a second term, had lost his old magic. His promises had brought precious little result and he was enmeshed in a web of economic interests and per¬ sonal ambition. Forced to resign, his place was taken by the young Liberal politician Lleras Camargo, who came crashing down on un¬ ion workers, stamping out strikes and preparing the way for the Na¬ tional Union, a new coalition of right-wing forces of both parties against the threat of Gaitan and his turbulent mass movement. In this context of unrest and impending revolution the Conserva¬ tives had seen their chance to make a comeback. Under the fanatical leadership of Laureano Gomez the extremist elements of the oligarchy made their bid for power: the big landlords, the wealthier industrial¬ ists, the bankers and leading financiers and, as their willing accom¬ plices, most of the bishops and priests of the Catholic Church who held so strong a sway over the people. The prelates had not hesitated to bless this crusade for returning political power to the Conservatives. The Roman Catholic leader Bishop Builes dubbed the Liberal Party “a veritable Jewish Sanhedrin against Christ and against the Catholic Church,” and never tired of warning the faithful against “the truly diabolical spirit of LiberalCommunism and its minions.” His diatribes were re-echoed in the pulpits of every parish chapel up and down the land as the clergy urged their flocks to wage a holy war on the Liberals, enemies of God and his Church. Relying on this powerful religious mystique and the well-sharpened weapons of the bourgeois press, the Conservative leaders had fostered the division of the Liberal vote between Gaitan and a more moderate candidate in the election campaign of 1946, and had thus brought their own man, Mariano Ospina Perez, into the presidential chair. President Ospina, elegant and urbane, with his double-breasted blue suits and his silvery hair under a tilted Homberg, turned out to be as polished a gangster as Chicago had ever produced. While giv-

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

43

ing free rein to private enterprise (his own and others), he set to work forging a special political police force to deal with dissident Liberals. His police, recruited largely from an area in the mountains of Boyaca called Chulavita, a stronghold of the most partisan “godos” (Conservatives), were unleashed on the rural population with practi¬ cally unlimited powers of repression, and were quickly put to use by the local Conservative Party bosses who had long been waiting for a chance to revenge themselves on their Liberal counterparts. The change of regime offered these Conservative henchmen a golden op¬ portunity to fill their purses; they drove penniless Liberal peasants off the land, and sold their farmsteads, crops and cattle to powerful Conservative landlords. And so, from 1946 onwards, the Violence broke out over all the countryside. In those first days of the Violence some of the worst atrocities were perpetrated in the villages and towns of Santander where Liberal Party police had, in the thirties, dealt out brutal treatment to the country folk of this traditionally Conservative province. As if in re¬ taliation, towards the end of 1947 the police murdered a whole family of small farmers in the town of Cucutilla (Santander) as punishment for the “crime” of not having migrated from the region as all Liberal Party members had been ordered to do. These unfortunate people, Senor Rico and his family, had begged the governor of the province permission to delay their departure from the area until after they had “reaped their little coffee harvest.” The governor had avowed that the permission did not fall within his jurisdiction and remitted the case to the President of the republic who, in turn, passed it on to the office of the Ministry for Government from which it was eventually dispatched back to the provincial governor . . . ! In the meantime, three generations of the Rico family had met a frightful death at the hands of the police. Hundreds of similar crimes were carried out by the butchering officials of a regime which made much of being free and democratic. Beginning in Santander, the “guardians of law and order” waged a ferocious feud against Liberals through the provinces of Boyaca, Cundinamarca, El Valle, Caldas and further afield. In Caldas, for example, there appeared the first gangs of what were later to become the notorious pajaros (the birds), hired killers organized and trained

CAMILO TORRES

44

by a powerful and highly respected Conservative leader. The pajaros had a very specific mission: they were to penetrate the country¬ side and bring about the flight from the land of anyone affiliated with the Liberal Party. They would thus change the political power struc¬ ture in any given region, and be well paid for the job. Against this violence the country people began to defend them¬ selves with violence. They were hungry and landless and had almost nothing to lose. The cities overflowed with migrant peasants bereft of all their possessions and searching for work and food. Jorge Eliecer Gaitan had heard the anguished cry of his people and, on February 7, 1948, just two months before his death, had led an historic silent march some one hundred thousand strong into the Plaza Bolivar of Bogota. There, within earshot of the presidential palace, Gaitan gave words to the unspoken prayer which was on the lips of all that hushed throng. He addressed his plea to Mariano Ospina Perez. “Cease this violence, Mr. President,” he said. “All we ask of you is the guarantee of human life, which is the least a people can ask for. Our flag is in mourning and only this silent multitude and the mute cry of our hearts beseech you: treat us, our mothers, our wives, our children, our property, as you would wish others to treat you, your mother, your wife, your children, your property!” This moving spectacle had been the people’s last nonviolent demonstration. Two months later Gaitan’s murder opened, once and for all, the floodgates of hate which had been damming up for almost twenty years. The dreadful Bogotazo (Bogota blow-up) of April 1948 marked the spontaneous decision of the people to meet the vio¬ lence inflicted upon them with corresponding violence and hatred. Divided by their leaders, as they had always been, into two opposing political camps, the poor workers of Colombia were led blindly into a savage war against one another. Meanwhile the rich escaped scot-free. From the eminence of a safety which only money could buy, the politicians, the landlords, the businessmen, posed alongside the so-called spiritual leaders of the people, the Catholic bishops, and fell to making pronouncements on the sorry state of affairs. Their moral judgements were directed, of course, against the “agents of International Communism” who, they asserted, had taken advantage of the poor and the ignorant.

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

45

Little of all this penetrated the protective shell of the seminary in El Chico. Of course news of the Bogotazo quickly reached the seminarians, but in such a form that the people’s struggle for mercy and justice was presented as a satanic war on holy religion. Bishop Builes, by far the most articulate and demagogic prelate of the time, shortly published a pastoral letter on the events of April 9. It went like this: ' , As if from the jaws of hell there burst forth upon the ears of be¬ lievers the most horrible blasphemies against God, vomited forth by impious mouths throughout the length and breadth of the fatherland. Close on the heels of these odious cries against God, there fol¬ lowed a series of scarcely believable crimes against all that is holy: the profanation of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Most Adorable Eucharist; the casting down and treading underfoot of the Sacred Species; the robbing of the Sacred Vessels and the putting of the same to ignoble uses, as on the black night of Balthazar; the hurling down from their niches and the destruction of Sacred Images; the employing of sacristies for foul and iniquitous diversions; the burn¬ ing of temples, religious houses and the palaces of the Papal Nuncio and the Primate. . . . Later in the same document Bishop Builes did mention the deaths of several priests and, finally, that of civilians; but the irate clergyman left no doubt that, in his view, the loss of human life was a paltry thing compared to the damage done to church property, and he cer¬ tainly gave no hint as to the real causes of the holocaust. Camilo and his fellow students were led to believe that the great tragedy of April had been the burning down of the two palaces, the nuncio’s and the archbishop’s, by a small coterie of anti-clerical extremists. Prayers were offered for the well-being of the Church and her ministers. The real world was a long way off. Pathetic as this isolation from reality may have been, Camilo’s case was by no means an exceptional one. If he, in his seminary, had shut himself off from contact with the Colombian people, the vast majority of his social class had succeeded in doing the same without having recourse to a cloister. They simply mixed only with their own kind, and turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to that other distasteful world which they had no desire to see.

CAMILO TORRES

46

Camilo, on the other hand, had left the world for the noblest of reasons. In the silence and discipline of the seminary he hoped to encounter the wellsprings of wisdom and grace from which to slake his thirst in order to go back to his people as a consecrated man (in the world, but now not of the world) with the Christian message of faith and hope. And if the curricular studies did not provide enough to prepare him for that mission, he did not hesitate to take initiatives of his own. He and his friend Gustavo Perez soon won official approval for their Circle of Social Studies and widened it to include a number of their friends, mostly young men from the middle and upper strata of the pyramid. They even had handsome visiting cards printed to give their newly formed group distinction. They went on to study more recent papal encyclicals such as the Quadragesimo Anno of Pius XI with its energetic condemnation of socialism and its honest concern for presenting the Christian answer to the abuses committed against the workingman. They studied local documents too, such as the Manual of Work, a booklet published in Bogota in 1945 by Father Juan Botero. The writer insisted on the importance of what he called “workers’ circles” (study groups in the factories) “with the intention of preventing the masses from going over to the Communist Left and being lost forever to the Church.” Botero enumerated the series of excellent social laws which dated from the preceding decade—the liberal reforms of Alfonso Lopez. What he did not mention was the ever-widening gap which existed between the formal statement of these legal dispositions and the man¬ ner in which they were ignored or cynically flouted by politicians and employers alike. Still less were the students led to enquire into the economic and political structures which maintained corrupt govern¬ ments in power in their country. They simply studied the laws with¬ out yet being given any chance to put them to the test of reality. Another priest-author, Andres Basset, provided them with further material for study in his weighty tome on Commutative Justice and Contracts. Herein was explained the Code of Colombian Civil Law and, once again, taken in an abstract way, it seemed to the young readers a moment of good sense. Trade unions, the book taught, must not be used to foment class struggle, and it is a grave sin if the

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

47

union is badly motivated. A Communist union, for example, is mortally sinful. At that time similar doctrines were expounded in pamphlet form by the Jesuit priest Vicente Andrade, the man who was busy building up the Union of Colombian Workers (the UTC) as an antidote to the “sinful” Communist influences which had taken control of the CTC (the Confederation of Colombian Workers), the only other unionists’ organization that existed on a national scale. Father Andrade, S.J., was welcomed by the Conservative governments of those years. They loved his tireless invectives against communism, class war, collective ownership and so forth, not to mention his stout defence of private property, legitimate authority and all the philo¬ sophical paraphernalia with which they justified their felonies. Camilo did not seriously doubt the truth of these assertions. Maybe if he had maintained contact with old school friends like Luis Villar, for example, who was fast becoming a radical student leader at the National University, he might have been led to question the state¬ ments of his clerical mentors and the popes of Rome. But for the mo¬ ment he had no other criterion on social problems; these manuals were the sole formers of his thought. Happily, however, Camilo was never content with thought divorced from action, and an innate streak of common sense helped him to keep one foot, at least, on the ground. He saw no point in studying books on social justice if one never saw poverty or did anything to help the poor or even caught the smell of the poor in one’s nostrils. Now on the slopes of the hills behind the seminary Camilo had espied a cluster of shanties belonging to the families of navvies and quarry labourers who eked out a precarious existence there. He asked for permission to visit some of these families and give them catechism instruction. It was something a little out of the ordinary but Father Solano, once again, could see no objection. So, often after lunch, when the other lads streamed out of the refectory and made for the playing fields, Camilo would be seen climbing off up the steep em¬ bankments to visit a poor widow who lived with her numerous tribe of scruffy ragamuffins in a lean-to shed made of bits of tin and used wooden boards and discarded cardboard boxes.

CAMILO TORRES

48

At last, Camilo felt, lie had begun his apostolate to the poor. If the other seminarians thought this a bit odd, he didn’t mind. They laughed as he came tumbling down the hill at the sound of the bell which brought recreation to an end. They nudged one another as “crazy Camilo” (Camiloco) hurried late into the line-up for the next common duty. But Camilo was content, for he was already, in a sense, exercising his priestly ministry. He soon persuaded some of his friends to join in, and together they would clamber up the hills armed with catechisms and elementary grammar books to carry on their mission of moral uplift. Once they asked Father Solano to bring the Sacraments to a man lying sick in one of the houses. The vice-rector responded to the call and was shocked by the misery in which he found the people living. The patient, who was dying of tuberculosis, was obliged to share his bed with another man, as he had only “rented” half of it. Something had to be done. No sooner did Father Solano get down the hill that night than he was ringing at the door of Dona Mercedes’ manor house only half a mile from the seminary. Dona Mercedes Sierra owned all the land around El Chico and had donated the grounds on which the seminary was built. Surely she would help these poor people. But no. The wealthy dame threw up her hands in horror and for¬ bade the priest to mention misery in her presence. She couldn’t bear it. Besides, she was already busy enough with other charitable works to which she was committed. She was, in fact, able to endow her orphanages most liberally, thanks to the sale of her property to Ospina Perez, who, in turn, increased his fortune by dividing it into housing estates. The priest went back to the seminarians empty-handed, and Camilo began to discover not only the problem of poverty but also that its solution was not to come in the form of donations from the rich. Vacation time gave Camilo other chances to find out what the poor looked and smelt like. One of the professors, Father Jose Restrepo, kept a dilapidated home downtown as a refuge for homeless little boys —gamines, as the Francophile bogotanos called them. To this old house he took many a seminarian to help entertain and instruct the children. But no student made such a hit with those snotty-nosed

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

49

waifs, or so enjoyed their company, or went back and back again as often as Camilo did. Father Restrepo had hopes that Camilo might be the priest to take charge of the boys the day old age forced him to retire. Summer holidays were also an occasion for Camilo to spend a little time at home with his mother and make regular visits to his father’s house. The ageing child specialist (“Old Herod,” as Camilo teasingly called him) lived an increasingly lonely life with his maiden sisters, and Camilo would come away depressed from the “bachelor’s room,” as it seemed to him, in which his father lived. Only on one subject did Calixto forget himself to some extent, and that was on politics. He fulminated against the Conservatives and gave his son frank opin¬ ions on the most recent political development, namely the farcical election of Laureano Gomez to the presidency at the end of 1949. The rise of Laureano Gomez to power and his tyrannical dictator¬ ship left a lasting scar on Colombia. Under Gomez the Violence un¬ leashed hitherto unimagined horrors and created in the people a permanent conditioning for violence which was to be the context of Camilo’s future life. Laureano Gomez dominated the Colombian political scene for some forty years, and the image of his lean, haggard face with the narrow piercing eyes was graven upon the people’s collective imagina¬ tion. His goal was to integrate Catholic dogma with secular govern¬ ment; he was, in other words, a prototype of the Catholic “integrist.” Trained in France in the Action Frangaise of Charles Maurras (con¬ demned by Pius XI and reinstated, significantly, by Pius XII), Laureano returned to Colombia in the thirties determined to do battle for an hispanic Catholic society integrated under the two swords of church and state. A brilliant and sarcastic orator, he carried all before him in parliamentary debates and was considered the greatest politi¬ cian of his age in a country where an agile phrase was valued far above personal integrity. By the time the 1940s were ushering in economic disasters and moral disintegration, Gomez had reached the full maturity of his rhetorical style. He commanded large sums of the oligarchy’s money

CAMILO TORRES

50

with which to campaign through the pages of his newspaper, El Siglo, and the recent triumphs of France over the Spanish Republic fired him with a crusader’s zeal. In the thirties he had not hidden his proNazi and pro-Falangist sympathies, and when his right-hand man, the editor of El Siglo, was jeered at in the Senate for his threat of revolu¬ tion in 1940, that Gomist spokesman shouted angrily back: “Laugh all you want! Don’t think we have no arms! We can get them just where Franco’s Spain got them.” No tactic was too dirty for Gomez in those fanatical »years of the forties. He conducted smear campaigns against the Liberals, often descending to the level of the cheapest gutter press, and once he had established his man, Ospina Perez, in the presidency in 1946, he goaded his party followers into the implacable persecution of his ad¬ versaries. Laureano Gomez, even more, maybe, than Ospina, was the author of the Violence. The blood bath of April 1948 which had forced Laureano into exile also triggered a new era of popular guerrilla armies created under the banner (and with the tacit support) of the Liberal Party. The Liberal guerrillas began in self-defence, but soon took the offensive against the government’s police force. This was the provocation that Gomez had been waiting for. He came storming hot-eyed out of exile in Spain and, as he stepped from his plane onto Colombian soil on June 24, 1949, he greeted the assembled Conservatives with the fascist salute and the falangist cry: “Presente!” During the following month of July violence was almost as marked in the Congress as in the provinces. Gomez’ son, Alvaro Gomez Hurtado, organized roughhouse tactics to replace parliamentary decorum, until, in September, Conservative members of the House actually opened fire on the Liberals with pistols. With that the government closed down the Congress and imposed a state of siege. Only the mockery of an election was needed now to sanctify the dictatorship, and this was arranged for the month of November. In the provinces the repression grew harsher. Conserva¬ tive goon squads roamed the countryside, backed up by soldiers, obliging the peasants to turn in their registration certificates and register anew as Conservatives. They received safe-conduct cards

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

51

which bore the photograph of Laureano Gomez and the following printed message:

The undersigned President of the Conservative Directory certifies: that Mr.-, bearer of card No.-issued in_ has sworn that he does not belong to the Liberal Party. Therefore his life, property and family are to be respected. In the farce that took place on November 27, 1949, Laureano Gomez was elected President. The Liberals did not vote. Gomez got all but 14 of the 1,140,634 votes cast. One of the saddest aspects of this gory history was the defection of the Gaitanist Liberal Party politicians who, in the hour when the peo¬ ple had lost their leader and looked up for guidance, joined the com¬ bined Liberal-Conservative oligarchy, abandoning the masses for the sake of economic advantages. And those economic advantages would not be long in coming. The industrialists and entrepreneurs who had favoured the Lopez re¬ forms a decade earlier were tired now of the instability and uncer¬ tainty of the period from 1946 to 1949 and felt that a “strong man” as President might be a “salutary change.” The “salutary change” was to cost further blood and tears and the misery of millions; but it was good for business. These political events were not without their effect on the training of the

seminarians.

The

rarefied hothouse

atmosphere of the

seminary, almost hermetically sealed off from any contaminations that might be injected into it, like microbes, from the outside world, was susceptible of receiving only such influences as the reigning hierarchy considered fitting. Now in the days of Camilo the hierarchy was pre¬ dominantly Conservative . . . Liberal sympathizers were few. In the final years of the forties old Archbishop Perdomo was doddering into senility and no longer exercised much influence over Church affairs.

CAMILO TORRES

52

He lived in a spacious apartment in the new seminary building, pottered about amongst the minor seminarians regaling them with lollies which he drew forth from deep pockets hidden inside his worn cassock, and when finally his life petered out, he was launched on the faithful of Catholic Colombia as a saint. Holy cards circulated stamped with his effigy. His apartment was closed up pending his eventual canonization. Everything must be left exactly as the vener¬ able primate had left it until some apostolic visitator might one day be sent from Rome to investigate any forthcoming miraples. The Con¬ servative bishops had adopted the most expedient tactic. They had frozen the dangerous, liberalizing archbishop into sanctity and were finding him an innocuous niche. It remained only to secure the vacant see for Conservatism. The obvious candidate for the archbishopric of Bogota was Monsignor Concha Cordoba, Bishop of Manizales. Concha was by far the most learned and distinguished prelate in Colombia: son of a former President, widely travelled and fluent in many languages, in a word a highly pedigreed bogotano. But on one important point he was unacceptable. All his life he had stoutly refused to be a stooge for Conservative Party politics. Laureano Gomez had never been able to use him, as he had used many a bishop, as a flag to wave against his Liberal opponents. Concha had always taken a stand and urged the priests under his charge to avoid putting themselves at the service of Conservative politicians who would employ them to win votes in the name of the Catholic faith. As a result the resentful Laureano, now in the presidency, would do all in his power to keep Concha out of Bogota. This would not be difficult, as he had an alternative candidate up his sleeve, Monsignor Crisanto Luque from Boyaca. Luque was a rabid Conservative, as well as long-time friend of the Gomez family. He would be the perfect man. He was pompous and not too bright, an easy man for Laureano to manipulate. And he had another ad¬ vantage over Concha: he was more than six feet tall and of fair com¬ plexion, a most decorous figure to grace public platforms and official banquets. Concha, on the contrary, was short and squat and ugly, not at all the prepossessing figure required for the post. So Luque it must be.

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

53

His appointment could be worked by having recourse to the Colombian Government’s concordat with the Vatican. Laureano, a few years before, had fought hard to see that the concordat was left unaltered, and now he would invoke its article number fifteen: “The Holy Father, as a special mark of deference . . . agrees that, before providing archbishops and bishops to fill vacant sees, he will first seek the approval of the president of the republic.” The year was 1950, Holy Year, a time of pilgrimages to Rome. At the head of the official Colombian pilgrimage Laureano sent his foreign minister bearing a precious gift for the reigning pontiff. No doubt the aristocratic Pius XII felt deep emotion as he took into his hands an immense sparkling green stone—the biggest emerald in the world!—symbolizing the unconditional adherence to Rome of this very Catholic country. Beneath the stone lay a white card on which Laureano’s minister had printed his rather unsubtle recommenda¬ tion: “Archbishop of Bogota,” the Holy Father read, “Crisanto Luque.” Pope Pius approved the suggestion, and the big, dull, pom¬ pous man from Boyaca was shortly named to the primatial see. No sooner had Luque taken possession of the archdiocese than he began to push aside the “liberalizing clerics,” as he called them, who had been given a free hand in the days of Perdomo. The rector of the seminary, Monsignor Dfez, a humble and diligent old scholar, sud¬ denly found himself without a job. In the rector’s chair sat Jesus Martinez Vargas, by no means a scholar but certainly an unswerving servant of the new archbishop. Martinez Vargas set himself the task of seeking out the seminarians with Liberal tendencies and weaning them from this pernicious doctrine. One student under examination for sacred orders was recognized as “pious and serious” but objec¬ tion was brought against him for having “manifested a belligerent attitude regarding political matters in favour of the Liberal Party.” On this score Camilo was singled out for the new rector’s special attentions. The young man’s parents were notorious Liberals and the rector felt it his duty to recommend to Camilo that he should do all in his power to convert them. Maybe if he could get them to read El Catolicismo, the weekly diocesan newspaper, it would be a good be¬ ginning. At one stage he even suggested that Camilo’s conversion of

CAMILO TORRES

54

his parents and the patching up of their marriage be considered as a condition for his receiving sacred orders. Camilo laughed over this, as his companions too used to laugh heartily over the busy-body rector’s habit of sticking his nose into the students’ family affairs. “Are your parents separated?” he asked one boy. “Yes,” replied the student, “they are.” “Then we had better see what we can do to bring them together again.” “Difficult, Father,” retorted the impish boy. “You see Dad died ten years ago!” Camilo laughed all right; but the effect of the Conservative regime and the constant admonitions, plus the over-all enraptured mood of devotion in which he lived during those years, marked him pro¬ foundly, and he dedicated no little energy to helping his parents be “touched by God’s grace,” as he would express it. His mother, Isabel, was an easy target. Having recovered from the initial shock of his entry into the seminary, she had continued to dote on the boy, and paid him frequent visits until “La Restrepo,” as the students called her, became a familiar figure around the seminary. She brought cookies for Camilo’s friends and became a sort of foster-mother to boys from the country whose parents could rarely get to see them. By this time Camilo had become the centre of Isabel’s life. Her older children, Edgar and Gerda, were married and settled down. Fernando was in medical school in the United States. Her baby and apple of her eye was Camilo. If he wanted her to come back to the “practice of her faith,” then she had no real objection. She would do it to please him; and she waited for the right moment. The moment came when Camilo was helping to prepare some chil¬ dren for First Holy Communion in the parish of the Veracruz on Seventh Avenue. Isabel decided to give him a surprise. She secretly made her confession, and during the first communion ceremony Camilo suddenly saw his mother kneeling at the altar rails with her mouth open and her tongue waiting to receive the sacred white Host. The seminarian’s eyes filled with tears. His mother had come back to God and the Holy Religion.

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

55

Such was his zeal that he even urged his father, a professed atheist, to make “a spiritual renunciation, a giving of the soul, an abandon¬ ment of prejudice and social conventions.” “That is a step,” he said, “which you will not take except under the influence of God’s grace, and that is why I trust in my prayer . . . to win you that grace.” “You have given us everything,” Camilo wrote to “Caliz,” his “beloved Daddy” (papifo adorado). “You have given us everything except that which we most desire—yourself, your soul, your effort to live our mentality, your spiritual self-giving. You say that religion is a matter of sentiments. So if you have failed in your self-giving to me as far as religion is concerned, then it is because you failed to offer me your sentiments. . . . That would imply a spiritual self-giving that I know you are incapable of. My mother didn’t want to make that self-offering either, until she came back to practical Christianity. ... He who teaches self-giving has touched her heart.” Calixto was understandably annoyed at his son’s moralizing tone and reminded Camilo, ironically, that Isabel, who had always accused him of failing to support the children, continued to do so even after “he who teaches self-giving had touched her heart!” Finally the doctor, more than slightly nettled, reminded Camilo of another thing: that he had “just to please you, attended a retreat, punctual at all the talks, Masses and meditations without fail.” For a stalwart anti-clerical like Calixto this was no mean feat, and showed the extent of his son’s efforts to proselytize him. The seminary had, in fact, transformed Camilo. On the rare oc¬ casions that his old friends met him they remarked that the dare-devil, fun-loving boy they had known was converted now into a veritable Alyosha, the monkish younger brother of the Karamazovs. Even his religious superiors detected in him a tendency to be scrupulous (which in spiritual jargon meant over-scrupulous) and at one stage his prefect advised him not to take the rule so seriously, at which Camilo immediately became the seminary prankster, to such an ex¬ tent that the prefect chided himself for having over-emphasized his point. He did his best to lead Camilo back to a middle course and a less extreme notion of the demands of the spiritual life. Despite all its idealizations, Camilo’s spiritual striving was some¬ thing real for him at that time, indeed it was the central reality of his

CAMILO TORRES

56

life. The years in the seminary preserved in him something of the innocence of childhood, and it was with the seriousness that only childhood knows that he went about cultivating humiliations, poverty of spirit and abandonment. It was a cult of the heroic, almost as if failure were a good in itself, something to be sought after at all costs so that one could scorn the lives of successful men and embrace sub¬ lime defeat as the key to all interior advancement. His first great humiliation (as he remembered it) came the day he put his hand to a pick and shovel with some of the country boys. They went down together one afternoon to dig a little artificial lake in the seminary garden—a pool they had conceived as a miniature replica of Lake Genesareth. After half an hour of pick-swinging Camilo was exhausted, yet the others kept at it with a will. Camilo, who rather fancied himself an athlete, was obliged to recognize his physical in¬ feriority alongside the husky peasants’ sons, and his pride was wounded. Yet the desire for humiliation is a slippery kind of virtue and can lead its aspirant into subtle self-deceit. Somewhere inside Camilo there arose a double-edged desire: to forsake the privilege of his birthright by descending to the level of the common man, and hence learn to handle a hoe and a machete. Like most Latin American males Camilo was a machista (he-man), but as a seminarian with lofty ideals that machismo had to be dressed up as virtue. It was that same machismo, maybe, which caused him to guard a secret confided only to his most intimate friends on condition that they would not laugh: namely that his “favourite saint” was Therese of Lisieux. He was naturally coy about admitting his admiration for the young nineteenth-century French nun who had become known in the Catholic world as “the Little Flower.” Her hidden and un¬ spectacular life had drawn no attention until, after her premature death, the Church had published her spiritual writings under the title The Story of a Soul. This book became the favourite reading of many seminarians, as it was Camilo’s. Therese had been the spoilt child of a bourgeois family and her life of penance was a natural reaction against her privileged status. Camilo’s situation was not so different from hers. He was embarrassed at being singled out because of his family’s importance or his own acquired talents. Like Therese he

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

57

positively longed for slights and rebuffs, and like her he fostered a “devotion to the Child Jesus.” In his meditations on Therese’s wellknown “doctrine of spiritual childhood,” he was cementing into his personality that inborn ingenuous charm which would win him the affection of friends all his life. He did this quite unwittingly. For, although the cultivation of spiritual attitudes was tortuous and narcissistic, the seminarians had no sense of performing anything studied or recondite. The spiritual readings, the meditations, the examinations of conscience, the days of recollection were the most commonplace practises used to achieve spiritual progress in seminaries and religious houses all over the world. They were simply taken for granted and, in Camilo, they helped to form habits of discipline and introspection which his naturally unruly temperament needed, and which were to stand him in good stead. Having completed the prescribed philosophy readings at the end of 1950, he went up to the seminary’s divinity school where he pursued an equally arid course in theology. He applied himself unquestioningly to the studies, won high marks in all his subjects and was elated to think that each passing year brought him closer to his priestly ordination. These same passing years were increasingly cruel and dramatic ones for the bulk of the Colombian people. The last vestiges of democracy had been stamped out, and Laureano Gomez inflicted on his fellow-countrymen what was ever afterwards remembered as a reign of terror. Montalvo, the man who had been Ospina’s Minister for Justice and might have been Camilo’s father-in-law if the Dominicans had not led Teresa Montalvo’s boy friend into the religious life, had uttered an historic threat a few years before. He had proclaimed to the Senate that the Conservative Party would “take control of the country, if needs be, by blood and fire!” His prophecy was now coming true. One witness described those times in the following words: My eyes have seen many sights. I have seen men coming into the cities mutilated, women raped, children flogged and wounded. I saw a man whose tongue had been cut out, and people who were lashed

58

CAMILO TORRES

to a tree and made to witness the cruel scene told me that the police¬ men yelled, as they cut out his tongue: ‘You won’t be giving any more cheers for the Liberal Party, you bastard!’ They cut the genitals off other men so that they wouldn’t procreate any more Liberals. Others had their legs and arms cut off and were made to walk about, bleeding, on the stumps of their limbs. And I know of men who were held bound while policemen and Conservative civilians took it in turns to rape their wives and daughters. Everything was carried out according to a preconceived plan of extermination. And the vic¬ tims of these bloodthirsty policemen were poor, humble country peo¬ ple who were members of the Liberal Party. Their wives, their old folk and their children were shot in the full light of day. The official police took possession of the property of Liberal farmers, killed the owners, requisitioned their barns and disposed of their money, their livestock; in a word, of all that had been the livelihood of their fami¬ lies. It was an avalanche of pillage and an orgy of blood. At times these atrocious crimes where committed under the cover of night, with the encouragement of high government officials. And all this in the false name of God, with holy medals jingling around their necks, and without remorse.

These horrible scenes took place in the hills of Antioquia, but they were typical of what happened all over the land. Whole families were dragged out of their homesteads, lined up and shot without even the pretence of a trial. The officers of the law reached extremes of sa¬ dism. They tossed babies into the air and caught them on the points of their bayonets. They cut off their victims’ ears and proudly ex¬ hibited these trophies back at police barracks. Army planes flew over the countryside dropping their prisoners as human bombs to strike terror into the hearts of the peasants. The masses retaliated no less savagely, and armed guerrilla bands formed spontaneously in almost every province. Once again the warlike people of Santander were amongst the first to take the initiative. Around the little town of San Vicente de Chucuri, Rafael Rangel, a local police officer, rebelled against the government and formed a civil resistance force. On the day of Laureano Gomez’ election, while the people were being led out to vote under coercion from government troops, Rangel rode wildly into San Vicente at the head of seven hundred armed men and left dozens

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

59

of Conservative soldiers and sympathizers lying dead in the town. Rangel’s guerrilla army grew strong in the extensive jungle area around San Vicente and the neighboring towns and along the banks of the Magdalena River. But the most belligerent and, from the government’s point of view, the most threatening guerrilla movement began in Los Llanos. The great wall of mountains, against which the city of Bogota shelters descends steeply on the other side and leads down into a vast, flat, sunburnt land known simply as Los Llanos—the Plains. The lawless cowboys who inhabit Los Llanos were the last men to meekly bend their backs under the Conservative whiplash. The plainsmen are no¬ mads, ever leading their herds in search of new pastures. Their life is a perpetual battle against a land of wild beasts and reptiles, scorched by a merciless sun. From their ranks the liberator Simon Bolivar had recruited his most intrepid warriors a century and a half earlier in the war of independence against the Spanish. In the torrid years of the Violence, then, they proved to be daring and fearsome guerrilla fighters. Overnight forceful leaders sprang up in their midst. Eduardo Franco, son of a wealthy Liberal land-owner, felt the call of the revolution and one morning, with a pistol tucked in his belt, he saddled his horse and rode off quixotically into battle. A buoyant and energetic man, young Franco admired the men of the plains for their tenacity and fighting spirit. They were his people; and they had risen up in revolt and were sacking towns and bringing the feared govern¬ ment police to their knees. He would fight by their side, and had hopes of bringing cohesion and political orientation to this immense, popular guerrilla movement. But the project was to prove impracti¬ cable, and the revolutionary impetus was frittered away in a thousand improvised and bloody combats under dozens of self-appointed guerrilla commanders. Franco himself organized a guerrilla force under his command in a place called Yopal. He and his men placed their confidence in the Liberal Party political leaders in Bogota and in the Liberal landlords of the plains. The landlords, in turn, counted on the guerrillas to de¬ fend their land against the violence of the Conservatives. But both the politicians and the landlords let them down. When

60

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the rugged cowboys and farm-hands who made up the guerrilla forces began to talk of revolution and better wages and donations of cattle as provisions for the men in arms, and even of dividing up the land, the gentry took fright; and the guerrillas, whom they had so recently encouraged and supported, were now suddenly denounced to the authorities as “gangs of bandits.” At the same time the Liberal political leaders in the capital made vague promises of support, in¬ sinuating that the guerrillas could rely on them for arms, and that a military coup was being planned in their favour—a coup which fizzled out in a wishy-washy general strike that never quite came off. The fighting men in the plains were learning some bitter lessons. When they went to the Liberal Party headquarters in Bogota with a plea for help, the party secretary, Carlos Lleras, a little, balding poli¬ tician safely ensconced behind his mahogany desk, replied patroniz¬ ingly: “We neither authorize the guerrillas nor disauthorize them; just tell the boys that our hearts are with them.” From Bogota, then, the guerrillas could hope for nothing. As one disillusioned Liberal wrote afterwards: “When the officially planned violence was unleashed on the nation and the country people were faced with the alternative of resisting or perishing and decided to re¬ sist, the Liberal Party chiefs, until then so valiant, so demanding, so discontent, took refuge in their comfortable homes or opted for cir¬ cumspection, moderation, politeness, cold-headedness, friendly over¬ tures and respectful memoranda.” Even when the government had closed down Congress, the Liberal parliamentarians never ceased to draw their salaries. But the people fought on. Not only in Los Llanos, but in other provinces too; especially in the province of Tolima, guerrilla bands began to constitute a real menace to the government. Tolima con¬ sists of big land-holdings along the Magdalena River and small coffee plantations that climb up the ridges of the central mountain range. Against the mestizo people who live there—cheerful, easy¬ going, peaceful folk—the regime committed the most terrible atrocities. Forty of Tolima’s forty-two municipalities felt the impact of the Violence. As a natural reaction, armed men from the fields joined together into marauding bands and defended themselves and their townspeo-

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

61

pie as best they could. If the enemy showed no mercy, neither did they. In the provincial capital an old music professor was mistakenly apprehended and, when asked for his identity, replied that he was the director of the conservatory. They shot him dead on the spot. To these unlettered men the word “conservatory” sounded suspiciously like something else. The guerrillas of Tolima came under the influence of the Com¬ munist Party and thus received a modicum of political orientation and indoctrination in the class struggle. On the whole, however, as one leading Communist admitted later, “the revolutionary intellectuals stayed in town.” From the safety of the city the Communist cadres sent out directives, and the Tolima guerrilla fighters took over tracts of land in isolated regions and formed armed militia for self-defence. Thus began the Independent Republics within the heart of Colombia, rural zones which would be attacked and bombarded by successive governments in the years ahead. Hundreds of thousands of dead bodies were scattered over the land, many of them hacked to pieces, and deep, incredibly deep, was the wound which the Violence left in the soul of the Colombian peo¬ ple. But just as the upper classes had hoped, under the Gomez regime business was brisk. Wartime tariff controls had been lifted and the coffee exports brought in dollars for the middlemen who controlled the market. The Colombian peso fell to a third of its former value, but that created a problem only for the millions of working people, not for the merchants. The latter traded in dollars, and the dollar ran high. Textile manufacturers, tobacco companies, cement factories, sugar mills, all produced fabulous dividends. They gave a percentage in¬ crease over capital investment undreamt of in the United States or in the capitalist economies of Europe. No wonder that human life was cheap. “Assure the capitalist of 10 per cent,” a British journalist had said, “and he will go anywhere; make it 20 per cent and he will feel tempted; with 50 per cent, positively reckless; for 100 per cent he is capable of overlooking all human laws; and if you offer him 300 per cent, there is no crime he would not commit.” In Colombia the dividends were often well over 300 per cent. This affluence brought its own problems. Internal disputes were

CAMILO TORRES

62

felt within the ranks of the powerful oligarchy, and there followed an inevitable lobbying for larger whackings of the booty. Friction grew between high financiers and industrialists on the one side, and die¬ hard feudal landlords on the other. Laureano represented the latter, and the industrialists were tired of him. His excesses had caused the guerrilla armies to prosper almost beyond control. To govern effec¬ tively now the oligarchy needed a figurehead who would be at once more popular and more manageable. Laureano had to be disposed of. The man who began to engineer his overthrow was the very man whom Laureano himself had brought to power a few years before, the suave and unscrupulous Ospina Perez. Ospina led a campaign to dis¬ credit the regime—not at all a difficult task. At the same time he and his colleagues fabricated yet another caudillo for the Colombian peo¬ ple, this time an army general, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla. Through a labyrinth of intrigues, plots and counterplots the pro¬ gressive Conservatives, in cahoots with the Liberal politicians, led General Rojas Pinilla into the public eye, handling his publicity with the adroitness of Madison Avenue experts and making him mouth promises of pacification and amnesty for the guerrillas, until on June 13, 1953, somewhat to the general’s own surprise, they lifted him from recent anonymity into the throne of government. He came to power amidst general rejoicing. The oligarchy, who had ever decried military rule as the scourge of democracy, now recalled a noble phrase inscribed on the hilts of the swords of the Spanish conquistadores (no less!): “Draw me not with¬ out cause, nor sheathe me without honour.” The oligarchs had drawn the sword of martial law to suit their cause, and would sheathe it when it pleased them. The armed forces were hailed as the guardians of true freedom. Rojas Pinilla was the new Simon Bolivar. Crowds gathered in the streets singing the national anthem: “The Terrible Night Has Ended!” and Laureano Gomez slunk, once more, into exile. It was entertaining to see hitherto loyal partisans of the Gomez regime doing handsprings and lightning back-somersaults to join the throng of worshippers at the new altar of Rojas Pinilla. Archbishop Crisanto Luque was a case in point. Only a few weeks earlier, on the occasion of his elevation to the Sacred College of Cardinals, Luque

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

63

had stood on the cathedral steps in all his new scarlet splendour mak¬ ing loud professions of faith in the regime. On June 13, however, His Eminence quickly shuffled into a new posture more consonant with the political requirements of the moment. The very next day he sum¬ moned a committee of distinguished Catholic lawyers and had them solemnly proclaim the legitimacy of the new government. Laureano Gomez had been an old family friend; but so was Rojas. Besides, the cardinal was tired of being Laureano’s puppet. Rojas needed the Church’s support, and would therefore be easy for Luque to manage. The august prelate ordered a Te Deum sung in the cathedral, prais¬ ing the Almighty for having sent a new saviour to Colombia. In the press photograph taken on that occasion, the general leans on his prie-dieu looking a trifle bored (or is it harassed?); but the portly Ospina Perez who kneels beside him, his well-manicured hands de¬ voutly joined, wears an expression close to ecstasy. Thus with the joint blessing of the cardinal archbishop and Mariano Ospina Perez, the oligarchy had safely installed Rojas in the presidential palace. In those exhilarating days of the new regime Camilo was preparing for his priestly ordination. From 1953 to 1954 he was in his last year of theology studies and had learned the difference between Grace and Nature, the Natural and the Supernatural, Mortal Sin and Venial Sin, Actual Grace and Sanctifying Grace. He had also learned to solve “cases of conscience” in the confessional, and the classes of sacred rhetoric had turned him out as a passable sermon-preacher. He would soon be ready for the great day. Since his seminary course was drawing to an end, the moment had come to decide about his immediate future. To Calixto and Isabel it was clear that he should be sent to further his studies abroad. Al¬ though Isabel spoke romantically of keeping house for her priestly son in his little country parish—she envisaged herself feeding the fowls and gathering in the eggs—nonetheless, if anyone had seriously sug¬ gested that Camilo accept the menial and inglorious duties of a rural vicar, Isabel would have been horrified. After all, Camilo Torres Restrepo was not just anybody. He was at least as good as the Montalvo boys, and they were going over to Rome to be groomed for

64

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who knew what future ecclesiastical posts; and so were a lot more of the so-called cream of the seminary. Camilo could hardly be left out. Not surprisingly he felt inclined to study something in the line of social sciences. His friend Gustavo Perez was already in Rome and planned to go to Belgium to begin a course of sociology at the Catholic University of Louvain. Miguel Triana was not long back from Louvain with intriguing reports on that avant-garde and not-soorthodox centre; why, he related, the theologians there were going so far as to question Saint Thomas Aquinas’ five ways dor proving the existence of God! Camilo’s appetite had been whetted and he began to think seriously of joining Gustavo in Louvain. No one in the seminary seemed better qualified to study sociology. The Circle of Social Studies which he and Gustavo had pioneered was now flourishing and its members considered themselves his disciples, so much so that, when he did finally leave for Louvain, it was taken as a matter of course that he give instructions to the seminarian who succeeded him as co-ordinator of the group. “Objectively it has to be admitted,” he wrote with bogotano cocki¬ ness, “that the cultural and ascetic vanguard of the country is Bogota. And in Bogota the vanguard should be the diocesan clergy, which is the spinal column of the hierarchy.” He outlined the movement for social renewal which he had in mind. “It has to begin in the seminary . . . with those who are most convinced of the need to work in the social field. Our circle, I believe, should foment a more and more ardent spirit. Dispassionate study is not enough. The work of minorities is only efficacious when it is the result of a passionate and overwhelming conviction.” Then came a phrase which took his reader by surprise: “Violence can only be fought with violence.” Having jolted his reader into at¬ tention, Camilo explained and qualified his meaning: “Before the violence of our adversaries [and from the context it was evident that he was referring to the Marxists] to their violence in the spiritual terrain as well as in material actions, we have to counter with the only violence that is lawful for us—the violence of our convictions.” This concern for social problems was not peculiar to Camilo; it was in the air. To educate peasants, for example, Jose Joaquin

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

65

Salcedo, a businesslike priest from Boyaca, was busy organizing a giant net-work of radio schools with what would soon become one of the most powerful transmitting stations in Latin America. That very year, 1954, Salcedo had pushed through a contract between the papal nuncio and Philips Electrical Company for the importation of ten thousand radio sets. Another social project attracting a lot of atten¬ tion was that of Monsignor Agustin Gutierrez in the town of Fomeque, where, thanks to the monsignor’s educational program, the local peasantry were considered both very couth and very Catholic. In general, success in Catholic social actions was the order of the day and seemed to guarantee victory in the fight against communism and other social disturbances. Anyone who studied social matters was po¬ tentially in the ascendant. Camilo’s parents did not make any objection, therefore, to his choice of studies. Nor did the cardinal. And as long as Calixto was paying Camilo’s expenses, he would be no burden on church funds. The date of his ordination was brought forward to facilitate his travel plans and everything was arranged with the ease of an exception made for a prominent doctor’s son. Yet over this routine bit of string-pulling Camilo felt obliged to spread the mantle of virtue, and to do so he chose his favourite virtue, the acceptance of humiliations. “No one was going to send us abroad,” he confided to a friend. “You and I have had to bear the humiliation of asking to be sent.” There was nothing unusual in this mystification of an everyday mat¬ ter; it was simply the fruit of seven years in a seminary where all ex¬ periences were converted into something sublime. Nothing escaped the sublimation process, neither praiseworthy ambition nor human weakness nor even the quite natural business of falling in love. On that subject, for example, Camilo gave encouragement and ad¬ vice to one of his friends who was suffering temptations against his vow of celibacy. “We renounce a legitimate, even a sublime love,” he said, “in favour of our ideal, perceived by us as something speculative and rational, which our senses find cold, especially at the very moment when the senses are taken up enthusiastically by the other person. Even a pagan has to admit that the sacrifice of a real value (above all

66

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a tangible value) for a spiritual ideal which is purely intellectual is something proper to a MAN in the fullest sense of the word.” He exhorted his young friend to “make that ideal a concrete reality” in “the adorable person of Jesus, beside whom all that we renounce, though noble and sublime, is as dung.” He wrote long pages on the subject of “sacrificing girls who are objectively worthwhile” and making up one’s mind to “a total self-giving to Jesus.” If it weren’t for Jesus, he told his friend, “the giving up of a girl would be an act of monumental nonsense.” Such was the atmosphere of self-sacrifice in which Catjiilo got ready for his ordination. He was like a bride preparing her trousseau. Vest¬ ments had to be chosen, the reception planned, invitations sent out, commemorative cards designed and printed, no relative or old family friend overlooked; and despite the flurry of activity, he held himself as a man apart and dedicated extra time to meditation on the sub¬ lime mystery which he was about to undergo. During the ordination ceremony itself, on August 29, 1954, in the seminary chapel where he had so often knelt in prayer, he was sub¬ merged in a welter of emotions which he could not possibly disen¬ tangle or define. The next day his family and friends accompanied him in the chapel of his old school, the Lycee Cervantes, as he cele¬ brated the ritual of his first Mass. He made a handsome figure in the flowing vestments. His upright stance, his gentle voice and collected bearing added a special unction to the occasion, and there was scarcely a dry eye in the college chapel as his big expressive hands raised aloft the sacred Host for the first time. There were tears in his own eyes when he came out of the sacristy after the Mass. “I feel as if it were all unreal,” he said, “a kind of dream!” Dream days were over, however; a few weeks later he was off to Louvain. On September 25 a group of well-wishers gathered at the airport to bid him farewell. They had very clear ideas about his future. Calixto, to begin with, had no doubt that his son would be a distinguished cleric. Pride and emotion welled up inside the old doctor as he put his arms around Camilo, and he cried that morning as he had not done, he said, since his mother died. Isabel, who was accom¬ panying Camilo as far as New York, was thrilled that her son’s horizons were widening, and she too was sure that he would be an

THE CLOISTER AND THE VIOLENCE

67

outstanding success. Indeed the phrase of one family friend summed up the conviction of them all. “Dear Camilo,” he said, “we are sure that the highest titles of the religious hierarchy will be yours . . . for you are destined by providence to be a great prince of the Colombian Church.” Camilo, for his part, was excited and full of expectancy at what this new stage in his life might bring. He felt that it was going to be important and oblige him to assume some kind of special responsi¬ bility. But to the casual observer he was simply a lucky young man about to enjoy one of the privileges which society quite naturally showered on people of his status: overseas travel and experience. In any case, he seemed to hold out no special promise to the masses of Colombian men and women at work in fields and factories bitterly struggling to win back a shred of the meagre happiness which these recent night¬ mare years had tom from them. If by any chance they had seen Camilo board his plane, they would have shrugged their shoulders and gone back to their labouring.

Chapter 5

FROM LOUVAIN TO MINNEAPOLIS

When Camilo arrived at Louvain in October of 1954 the drab little university town was soaked in early winter showers, and, heed¬ ing his father’s repeated advice, he put his woolens on against the bitter weather. The big, old college building where he and Gustavo Perez had taken adjoining rooms was hardly the cosiest of student digs, and they were anything but satisfied with a meagre Belgian breakfast of coffee and a bun, and had soon installed in their rooms an electric stove and their own little larder of cornflakes and fruit juices and bacon and eggs. Shortly they began toying with the idea of setting themselves up in more congenial surroundings and thought of suggesting to Isabel that she come over to keep house for them. She was still in New York with her older son, Fernando, and al¬ though she did not want to wear out her welcome with him, neither did she fancy going back to Bogota for Christmas and facing an empty house. She had not made up her mind quite what to do, and in one of her letters threw out a few broad hints in Camilo’s direction about wanting to share his life “minute by minute.” She was thinking, she said, of “blowing what is left to me from La Granja and going over to see you.” It was obvious that the slightest word of encouragement from Camilo would be enough to have her with her mind made up and a visa in her handbag. By mid-October Camilo was tired of washing the breakfast dishes

FROM LOUVAIN TO MINNEAPOLIS

69

—a chore Gustavo invariably left for him—and wrote to New York suggesting to his mother that she come and save them from this gloomy student residence. Isabel, of course, protested that the idea had taken her by surprise and that she would have to “think it over and consider the expense.” Calixto it was, in fact, who had to consider the expense and his objections to the scheme provided a new cause for dissension and provoked fresh outbursts of La Restrepo’s fury. “He warns me,” she unburdened herself to Camilo, “that he is tired out and won’t be able to offer me his support much longer. It seems to me that your father has forgotten his Spanish: one thing is ‘support’ (something he has never given me, neither moral nor material) and quite another thing is a ‘just and obligatory pension’ which he owes me as his wife and the mother of his children.” She was tempted to give Calixto a piece of her mind, but Camilo warned her that she might regret it and she promised to be more temperate with her husband although she had no intention of letting him get away with that word “support.” “I mean to expunge it,” she said, “once and for all, from his head and from his vocabulary!” Calixto, flinching under the attack, sent her a cheque at once and, for fear of further accusations, carefully kept the stub as proof. Every¬ thing was soon arranged just as Isabel wanted. On December 15, Camilo was on his way up to Brussels with Gustavo to meet her plane. The Isabel who was about to alight, and would loom so large in their lives over the following years, had recently taken on a new role as a kind of spiritual advisor to Camilo and the writer of pungent little theological tracts. In this regard she hit her best form over the “In¬ cident of the Lost Breviary.” It had happened only a few weeks before when she was seeing Camilo off from New York on the last leg of his journey to Belgium. Suddenly at the airport he had noticed that he was missing his breviary, the little book of psalms and other Bible texts which was the official daily reading of every priest. He was distressed, and sent his mother and brother rushing off in the car to fetch the book, which he had left in Fernando’s apartment. By the time they got all the way back to Idlewild, Camilo had taken his flight for Brussels, and within

70

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a few days wrote a moving letter accusing himself of negligence for having left the book behind. God had chastised him, he said, for hav¬ ing been “dissipated” in New York. To these self-recriminations Isabel replied with a little gem of domestic theology. “How can you possibly believe,” she wrote, “that you did wrong in enjoying your trip, in seeing your brother again, in taking in new sights? And how can you believe that God, who is In¬ finite Goodness, Understanding and Wisdom, was offended by this and punished you for it by making us arrive late at the airport? And that for this reason you missed your breviary and couldn’t give us a final embrace? No, my son, my God is very different from yours. He is more human and much bigger-hearted. The fact that we didn’t get to the airport on time was simply due to the heavy traffic and mis¬ calculation on Fernando’s part. We were dreadfully upset, in the first place because of your breviary, as we knew what it meant to you, and then for sentimental reasons. But never for a moment did we think of it as a punishment from The Boss. I’m quite sure that this narrow concept you have of him is something you will correct in those civilized countries. Just remember that everything you admired and will admire, even works conceived and wrought by the mind of man, are but sparks of the Divine Brain and for that reason we should ad¬ mire them and give him thanks for enabling us to do so. You weren’t ‘dissipated,’ you were simply enjoying what he gave you.” That was the Isabel, now white-haired but no less spry, who ran across the tarmac to take Camilo in her arms on that wintry day in Brussels. He and Gustavo booked her into the Hotel Royale until she had time to choose an apartment to her liking. Meanwhile, the three of them planned a grand tour for the immediate vacations. Off they went in the little Volkswagen which Calixto made sure they got in time for Christmas and drove through snowy Austria and Germany revelling in all the tourist attractions—the Mozart in Salz¬ burg, the opera in Vienna, the German beer in Munich and the mid¬ night Mass at the Benedictine abbey of Maria Lach. Then they returned to Louvain to resume studies and set up house in the com¬ fortable flat which Isabel selected and organized for them. No other students did themselves half so proud as these two did, and the house

FROM LOUVAIN TO MINNEAPOLIS

71

became, naturally enough, a meeting place for the Latin American colony in Louvain. Isabel was the witty and gracious hostess who presided over these meetings, pouring coffee and cracking jokes. But she was also the rasping voice heard off-stage calling Camilo to go to bed when the student visitors lingered on late into the night. She was forever in¬ sisting that he keep regular hours, complaining at his being late for meals, warning him against lending the car, threatening reprisals if he did not obey. But all in vain. Camilo never went to bed early, was rarely on time for meals, lent the car to everybody—including an ir¬ responsible playboy who smashed it up—and arrived home at all hours with perfect strangers whom Isabel awoke to discover in the spare bed the next morning. Camilo was to live with his mother, off and on, from this time al¬ most until the end, and she was never easy to manage. Sometimes she was positively exasperating and he had to take a stand. On those oc¬ casions, she confided to her friends, her son looked at her with eyes of steel. But she would quickly cajole him back into good humour and, by and large, they got along like a couple of budgerigars in a cage. Once, after one of their tiffs, Isabel penned Camilo the following lines: “You have to know me and accept me the way I am. I am by no means your spiritual equal, because in the first place you are a saint and, as well as that, you have studied and continue to study the doings and sayings of the Almighty and, as hard as I may try, I will never be more than knee high to a grasshopper beside you. But don’t think I don’t understand you a little, at least, it’s just that I can’t un¬ derstand you completely. When you were a little boy you didn’t un¬ derstand me, and I put up with you with patience and love. Well now the tables are turned.” With a few words like that she would soon have him eating out of her hand and, even sooner, roaring with laughter at one of the thou¬ sand jokes they enjoyed together. In this contagiously joyful atmosphere and in the sitting room of that friendly little flat, the Colombian Team of Socio-Economic In¬ vestigation, the ECISE, was born. The ECISE idea had been con¬ ceived in Camilo’s conversations with Gustavo over breakfast during their very first month in Louvain. They were both coming into touch

72

CAMILO TORRES

with a surprising number of Colombian students who shared their concern for social matters and they wondered how to bring them to¬ gether. By the beginning of 1955 they had succeeded in doing so. For despite the apparent picnic mood of those first days in Louvain, Camilo had not been idle, and his dissipation, as he still tended to consider it, was tempered by the genuine effort he made to find his feet in the university life of a foreign country and culture. It was no easy matter. He enrolled in the School of Political and Social Sciences and began to follow the lectures, his head fairly swimming with un¬ familiar notions of mathematics, statistics, independent variables and micro-economy, dictated in the even less familiar nasal accents of French, which cost him no little effort to master. A course of Marxism was on the curriculum, so he dutifully wrote off to Cardinal Luque for permission to read such books by forbidden authors as might be prescribed by the faculty. The permission was given with the proviso that he should read those authors “under guidance.” Having been given the green light, he proceeded to immerse himself in the student milieu and discovered that not only were a con¬ siderable number of his fellow-countrymen to be found in the Uni¬ versity of Louvain, but so were many other Latins from all the countries on the South American Continent. Glancing up and down the tiered benches of every lecture theatre, he recognized the un¬ mistakable features of young men and women from his part of the world, and striking up friendships with one and another he discovered a doctor from Peru, an engineer from Chile, an agronomist from Ecuador, in short the whole gamut of the professions and nations with which his hitherto sheltered life had prevented him from com¬ ing into contact. Camilo was in his element, and opened out to re¬ ceive new influences. He might have wondered how it happened that such an everswelling stream of Latin Americans was flowing into Louvain. The explanation was simple enough. The Catholic Church had only quite recently discovered Latin America, so to speak, as that part of the underdeveloped world which belonged in a special way to her. As the European Catholics saw it, the vast majority of people who lived down there on the South American continent in their hovels and huts, cut¬ ting their sugar cane and munching their frugal ration of beans, were

FROM LOUVAIN TO MINNEAPOLIS

73

members of the Catholic Church. And if something were not done for them, and quickly, there was a real danger that they would “go over” to communism. To prevent this, young Catholic intellectuals must be trained for leadership and gain access to key positions in the Latin American governments of the future. Scholarships for Latin Americans were plentiful, therefore, in the Catholic universities of Europe, and the ancient portals of Louvain swung especially wide to welcome them. Louvain was an outpost of Christian Democracy and harboured the headquarters of the International Confederation of Christian Trade Unions. Not for nothing had Belgium been the scene of the Christian Workers’ Movement’s first battles for social justice in the thirties, and the young Belgian priest Cardijn had been the one practi¬ cally to force his way into the Vatican and convince Pope Pius XI that “the greatest tragedy of the nineteenth century was the loss of the working classes to the Catholic Church.” If this loss had occurred in Europe, it must not be allowed to take place in Latin America. And Catholic Belgium would be in the forefront of the fight to pre¬ vent it. While Camilo imbibed something of this Catholic crusading spirit, he also became aware of another aspect to the problem. In conversa¬ tion with his new friends he realized that many did not share his en¬ thusiasm for Christian doctrine and even nurtured profound and understandable prejudices against the Catholic Church and her min¬ isters. For that reason he played down the specifically religious angle, and when he and Gustavo convoked their fellow-countrymen to issue the first statement of policy of the recently formed ECISE team, they couched their ideas in the following terms: “We look for unity over and above party matters or ideological disputes. We prescind from what separates us in order to fix our attention on what we have in common. The youth of today does not want to waste its energy and scientific training on sectarian disputes. We are all agreed on the idea of a preliminary examination of the reality of our country and to that end we have organized a strictly objective investigation team to inform public opinion.” These were promising beginnings and reminded Camilo and Gustavo of their furtive readings of Leo XIII a few years before.

74

CAMILO TORRES

activities that had prospered and blossomed into the seminary Social Studies Circle. Once again they were pushing things along. Nevertheless, apart from the Sunday afternoon meetings of Colombian students, this first year at Louvain passed largely without incident. It included a Holy Week motoring trip to Spain—again with Isabel and Gustavo—and came to an end in June 1955 with high marks and fond farewells. Isabel went home to Bogota, and Gustavo off on a tour to New York. Camilo left for Berlin, where he would spend the summer. The following year, 1955-56, proved to be a much more fruitful one. By that time Camilo had got the measure of his new surround¬ ings and was at the heart of all student activities, especially those of the Latin American group. His mother’s return home left him free to participate more fully in student life, and such was the impression he made on the Belgian churchmen that they soon offered him the post of vice-rector in the Latin American College. The college’s grey building housed young priests whom the Belgian bishops were train¬ ing for work in South America, and there Camilo assumed his duties and took up residence. From that vantage point he began to rub shoulders with some of the most talented representatives of renewal in the Catholic Church. The young Belgian sociologist Father Francois Houtart, who had just founded FERES (the International Office of Social Investigation) and who had a special interest in Latin America, became his close friend. Invited home to weekends at the Houtart family chateau, the happy-go-lucky boyish South American priest had quite a startling effect on these straight-laced Belgian aristocrats, but after recovering from the first impact, they quickly took him to their hearts. Francois Houtart was only one of the many Belgian social special¬ ists who sought out and feted the Latin American. They were taken to study weekends by the JOC (Young Christian Workers’ Move¬ ment), to lectures by Van Istandael, the general secretary of the International Confederation of Christian Unions, to meetings of the Belgian Co-operative Society and a host of similar functions. The young vice-rector of the Latin American College was amongst the first to be invited to these extra-curricular activities, and he seemed to find time for them all.

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He also found time to attend lectures given by some of the con¬ temporary masters of Christian philosophy. Old Canon Jacques Leclerq, one of the most respected sages in Louvain, and indeed in all Christendom, held Camilo spellbound as he dissected the crass errors of Pope Pius the Ninth and propounded the doctrine of reli¬ gious freedom. Truth has no rights, Camilo heard the venerable old man say; it is only men who have rights. All this was new to Camilo and impressed him greatly. Professor Charles Moeller was another lecturer who led him into unsuspected avenues of thought. With a theologian’s eye Moeller analyzed the works of contemporary writers—Camus, for example, and Julien Green—and Camilo, who had been told to avoid these un¬ savoury authors, now discovered that their novels contained unsus¬ pected insights into Christianity. He also came under the influence of Father Gustav Thils with his lectures on “the great failure of the Christians of the twentieth century —their allowing the world to be built and unified without them, either without God or against Him.” Thils proposed that “the Church could become again what it had once been, the spiritual centre of the world.” These eloquent exponents of Christian thought were disciples, in their turn, of the French Thomistic philosopher Jacques Maritain, who, in his celebrated work Integral Humanism, had proposed a “new Christendom” as a working alternative to either what he considered the “totalitarian state” of Marx or the sacrum imperium of the Middle Ages. “It is not a question of suppressing private interests,” he had written, “but the purifying and ennobling of private interests.” Maritain’s reflections on this subject had been crystallized in the thirties as a challenge to the “integrist” doctrine of the Action Franqaise: but by the mid-fifties they had grown stale and were entering into their last agony. However, to Camilo, only now beginning to shake off the cobwebs of Catholic Colombia and her feudal hierarchy, all this sounded refreshingly new. He discerned no death rattle in the voice of the Maritain philosophers as they expressed their belief in a “third way” between capitalism and communism. On the contrary, it seemed to him an ideal answer to the world’s problems, and he wrote it into several essays which he produced during those years.

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Outmoded though their teachings may have been, the philosophers of Louvain were paradoxically in the vanguard of Christian thought in Europe. Compared with the monolithic concept of centralized Roman power which flourished in the Catholic Church under the autocratic Pius XII—the Pope who by this time had set himself up as the ultimate authority on every subject from midwifery to the atom bomb—the freedom of thought which the Louvain professors allowed their pupils was a welcome contrast and did, in fact, get its proponents into hot water. For example, when they dared to criticize the Holy See for having quashed the Priest-Worker Movement, men like Moeller and Thils were immediately relieved of their professorships, at least for a time. The experiment which went down in history as the Priest-Worker Movement had thrived in France and influenced Belgium during the post-war years. Camilo came in on the tail-end of it and was enormously affected by the spirit of commitment to the working masses which this movement had aroused in the more generous ele¬ ments of the French and Belgian clergy. These men had not written books of theology or expounded any new Christian philosophy. They simply lived with the workers, sharing their lives and problems. When they published documents, they were merely recording ob¬ served facts, such as the indifference of the masses to the Christian faith, in the form, at any rate, in which religion had always been pre¬ sented. Once again, as in his seminary days, Camilo did not restrict him¬ self to the lecture hall with its debatable theories and a priori asser¬ tions. He became engaged in activities with flesh and blood people. He rarely missed a chance to help out at weekends in a parish of coal miners not far from Louvain, and would go back to his books ponder¬ ing on what he had seen and heard: the hardships of the miners’ lives, their pastor’s anguish for them and his efforts to improve their lot. For the pastor of this mining town was a firm convert to the PriestWorker Movement. A striving after evangelical poverty typified the priest-workers. Discarding all luxury items, they made a desperate effort to bridge the gulf which separated them from what they called the “de-Christianized masses.” Under their influence Camilo felt embarrassed at his own

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bourgeois status and decided to sell his car and live as cheaply as pos¬ sible to avoid causing scandal. He wrote of these decisions to his mother, who let off great steam about the childishness” of such behaviour. If Jesus Christ were alive today, she felt sure that he would not be going about on a donkey; he d have bought himself a Volkswagen! And as for slumming in the Latin American College, doing his own washing and so forth, “that might be very nice and edifying to read about in the life of a nineteenth-century saint, but it sounds a dreadful bore!” Paying no heed to Isabel’s satirical thrusts, Camilo got rid of the car and did his best to cultivate a spirit of gospel virtue. “Of course the main thing is interior poverty,” he said. “But we should give wit¬ ness to that poverty by our external behaviour. In the atmosphere created by social injustices and Marxism, any half measures on our part are looked upon as hypocrisy.” He felt attracted to the paradox, the “mystery” as he called it, of great things brought about by “simple means, means that are humanly speaking inadequate . . . even crazy, like the cross of Jesus.” “For example,” he wrote, “what’s the use of having a car which enables us to visit a greater number of people, to undertake more and more socalled pastoral activities, if the very fact of having the car makes it impossible to establish real contact between each one of our brothers and the person of Jesus?” In confidence, to a priest friend, Camilo laid down his principle in this regard: “To be always trying to do away with superfluous things.” Nevertheless, it was never a question of poverty for poverty’s sake. In his copy of The Poor of Yahweh, a little book by the French priest Albert Gelin that everyone was reading in those days, Camilo under¬ lined the following passages: “Poverty is above all a scandal which ought not to exist” and “The great prophets of Israel were the champions of the weak and never tired of denouncing oppression in all its forms.” If that was good enough for the great prophets, he would attempt to be at least a minor prophet in the battle against poverty and injustice. A chance came on his first visit to Paris in 1956 when he met a remarkable man engaged in work amongst the poor, the famous Abbe Pierre. Abbe Pierre saw the slum dwellers of the city, who were the

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outcasts of society, obliged to nourish and clothe themselves pre¬ cisely with what society cast out. In an effort to draw people s atten¬ tion to this scandal, he mobilized the bas fonds of Paris into regular platoons of scavengers who rooted about amongst the offal of the city in search of anything which might serve them. Camilo volunteered to join the group on one of their hunts through the trash cans of Paris. It was a brief experience, but a telling one. Behind the elegance of the City of Light, Camilo had uncovered, on his very first visit, a world whose existence was undreamt of by the tourists. This kind of novel experience was the fruit of Carrrilo’s own per¬ sonal initiative. His friend Gustavo shared his interest in social prob¬ lems, of course, but with this difference: while Camilo liked to get up to his neck in the particular problem, Gustavo preferred to study it at a distance. Camilo would get himself inextricably involved in peo¬ ple’s lives, while Gustavo was busy at his desk. During that first year in Louvain, for instance, at the hour when Isabel was shouting at Camilo to go to bed, Gustavo would long since have retired to his room, completed his required reading and turned out his light. Camilo, on the other hand, would likely as not tell yarns until dawn with some fellow-student who was helplessly in love or hopelessly broke. Gustavo was tall, like Camilo, and if anything better-looking. He was always immaculately groomed, in contrast with the dishevelled appearance of his friend. He was a man to weigh his words and care¬ fully plan his every move. Camilo, instead, was spontaneous and haphazard. The only time Gustavo ever saw the easy-going Camilo with his temper roused was on one of their trips together. “You are always planning everything to suit yourself,” Camilo complained, “and we finish up doing what you want to do!” A very real friendship, however, existed between the two men, and the briefest of holiday periods, like Holy Week or All Saints, saw them making tracks for Paris or London, Rome or Berlin, brandish¬ ing propaganda on their ECISE group and sworn to convert any Colombian student who fell in their path to the cause of teamwork and socio-economic investigation. They set up ECISE committees practically all over Europe. By this time the ECISE had drawn up a little manifesto—largely Camilo’s work—which enunciated the following principles:

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1. The most important crisis in our country is the crisis of the human element. 2. The most effective way of meeting this crisis is the grouping to¬ gether of young people around two fundamental norms: Science, in its social ramifications, and Altruism in the service of society. The manifesto then called for “scientific and ethical formation.” This insistence on ethics, altruism and the suppression of personaladvantage motivation was an ever-recurring leitmotif in the conversa¬ tions and writings of Camilo. It manifested the “purity of intention” which his Christianity and the seminary had inculcated into him, and was one of the few factors which distinguished this ambitious little program from dozens of others which had been put forward to solve the country’s problems. For the rest, the technical aspects of the ECISE were fairly commonplace: scholarships for promising stu¬ dents, contact with, and co-ordination of, investigation institutes, execution of projects through political and administrative channels “by all licit means available,” the financing of the whole movement, the establishment of central offices and the publication of a regular news bulletin. Apart from its plea for altruism and the rather curious reference to “all licit means available” there was one other ingredient in Camilo’s ECISE idea which seemed original: the “infiltration of our members into those political and administrative organizations which offer re¬ sistance, in order to orientate them towards the patriotic and scientific goals which we have in mind.” This rather sinister-sounding “infiltra¬ tion” was a heritage from the Catholic Action ideas floating about at that time; movements like the JOC spoke of gaining “contacts” in any given milieu with an eye to exerting influence and pressure. The sons and daughters of Colombia’s upper and upper-middle classes, dotted around the universities of Europe, received the ECISE manifesto and Camilo, especially Camilo, with open arms. Committees were formed in Paris, Rome, Madrid and London, as well as at the central headquarters in Louvain, under Camilo’s direc¬ tion. Only in Berlin did the ECISE scheme get a cool reception. Camilo made several visits to Berlin, where he brushed up his

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German, already reasonably fluent thanks to his years in the German College of Bogota, the first of his numerous high schools. However, the special attraction in Berlin was not the German language but a first contact with the communist world, which Camilo achieved by simply taking the subway to the other side of the city. There, in East Berlin, he found a group of Colombian students, amongst them his old schoolmate Luis Villar. Luis and Camilo had drifted apart over the years and were glad to renew their friendship. Asiduous students of Marx, Luis and his colleagues were critical of the Christian ethos which so inspired Camilo, and showed little interest in the high-flown optimism of the ECISE manifesto. They had more radical views on social change. Camilo, on his side, could not avoid making a comparison between the serious dedication of his Marxist friends and the frivolous carousings of many Colombian students he knew in other parts of Europe. He recalled the accounts of wild Colombian revels in Rome which had led on one occasion to the tossing of a student out of an eighth-floor window, and thought that such a thing could never have occurred in East Berlin. In a letter to one of his priest friends in Bogota, he contrasted the mystique and austerity he had encountered in the Communist world with the im¬ morality and comfort of capitalism. Just as the barbarians had purified the decadent Roman Empire, he wrote, so would the Com¬ munists purify the capitalists. From Berlin he drove back to Louvain turning these thoughts over in his mind, and with no new members for the ECISE group. His second year in the School of Political and Social Sciences was to end with the examinations scheduled for June 1956, and Camilo had to think about specialization and the choosing of a theme for his licentiate. He chose urban sociology and determined to write his thesis on the socio-economic reality of his own home city. Thus he would be able not only to apply the sociological techniques he had learned, but also, as he said later in the introduction to his thesis, “make con¬ tact with the social group which constitutes the greater part of the diocese in which I am called to work.” Camilo’s prime motivation was his pastoral ministry, for he had by no means lost that fervour for his priestly apostolate which had so long been uppermost in his thoughts.

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The projected thesis posed a new problem: the obtaining of adequate statistical data on Bogota. Camilo decided to make a journey to Colombia during the summer vacation months and, while gathering material for the thesis, he would be able to carry out another impor¬ tant mission: the establishment of the executive committee of ECISE in Bogota. A ripple of expectancy was felt amongst his circle of friends, especially in the seminary of El Chico, at the news of Camilo’s forth¬ coming visit. They had not seen him for two years. From the moment his trip home was mentioned, Isabel, instead of showing enthusiasm, as Camilo had expected, advised him to think twice about it, as once he were in Bogota, the cardinal might make him stay and thus prevent him from “crowning his career” with a doctorate from Louvain. Isabel had no high opinion of the cardinal ever since the day she had recommended to him that the archdiocese import some of the Belgian trainee priests from Camilo’s Latin American College. His Eminence baulked at the idea and Isabel commented later that “the cardinal is not too intelligent, but he is very foxy, and he gave me the impression that the only foreign priests he wants to bring to Bogota are stick-in-the-mud Spaniards.” “Nor do I have any intention,” the cardinal had gone on without much tact, “of sending any more priests to Europe. They only come back with swollen heads and looking for important posts. . . .” Isabel hastened to assure him that he need have no fears for Camilo, and that her son would be content with any poor, rural parish. She began going through her house-keeping and fowl-tending routine, when the cardinal interrupted her to say: “Oh, Camilo is another question. For him I have in mind something really big!" But Isabel remained unconvinced and wrote off her warnings to Camilo. A little later the tone of Isabel’s letters became much graver, and not only did she urge Camilo not to come home, she even seriously considered leaving Colombia herself and wondered what Camilo would think of her running a boarding house for students in Louvain. She could give painting lessons on the side, she said, and make pottery. This sudden panic of hers was caused not by her suspicions

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of the old cardinal, but this time by a recent event in public life which had sent shivers of horror down everyone’s spine: the massacres that had taken place in the Bogota bullring on a Sunday afternoon in February of 1956. The bullring tragedy was the beginning of the end for the military regime of General Rojas Pinilla. On February 4, as the spectators in the Plaza de Toros waited for the first toreador to strut into the arena, they suddenly found themselves menaced by toughs who sprang up at all points of the amphitheatre, as if at a prearranged^signal, with cudgels and knives drawn, ordering them to give three cheers for the general. Some put up resistance and fierce skirmishes broke out. Within seconds beaten bodies came tumbling down over the heads of the stunned and terrified crowd and fell bleeding into the sand below. Several were carted out dead, and dozens badly wounded. The oligarchy which had brought Rojas to power as a temporary measure and, by 1956, was busy plotting his downfall, quickly laid this crime at his door. The previous week, at the first bull fight of the season, a welltimed political demonstration had set the scene for these events. When the leader of the Liberal Party, Alberto Lleras, had appeared in his box, a round of applause went up. In contrast, the arrival of Rojas’ daughter and her husband had provoked a burst of whistles and cat-calls from a section of the crowd. Rojas was infuriated at this affront to his daughter, and suspected foul play from the politicians. He threatened to take measures. History has never revealed which group was responsible for what happened on the following Sunday afternoon, but the press presented the tragedy to the Colombian people as a typical act of brutal repres¬ sion by the proud and ruthless tyrant. Less than two years earlier, when an equally mysterious chain of events led to the shooting of a throng of student demonstrators in the main street, both the Liberal and Conservative Party leaders went hurrying round to the palace with protestations of sympathy, solidarity and unconditional support for the general. But now, intent on dethroning Rojas, they resurrected the student killings of June 1954 as further proof of his tyranny. The ruling classes had concocted the martial law of General Rojas as a last resort when the so-called constitutional government, with its

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facade of democracy, proved incapable of stemming rivers of blood and violence. But this was exceptional. The Army was a police force designed to protect the upper classes’ interests; but it normally ful¬ filled this function out in the street, not from the throne of govern¬ ment. Uniforms were unsightly in the palace. They made the customary dictatorial tactics of Colombia’s governing families appear all too blatant. Worse still, with the passing years Rojas had seized a certain measure of real power and began to promote the economic ambitions of a group within the rising middle class. He had got far too big for his military boots, and must be put in his place. At first Rojas had served his masters well, and a special com¬ mittee, presided over by Ospina, had given him respectability by de¬ claring him constitutionally elected for the period 1954-58. His jovial manner won him the sympathies of the public and thousands of guerrilla fighters in the plains flocked to hand in their weapons at the promises of amnesty and peaceful settlement. Rojas made a personal visit to Los Llanos, and one of the most feared guerrilla commanders, Guadalupe Salcedo, came riding with his men into Yopal to meet him. When the general strode out magnanimously to offer the warrior his hand, Salcedo proudly shook it without getting down from his horse. The people were elated. Eduardo Franco, who had escaped into exile across the Venezuelan border, came back to Colombia and, along with many others, looked hopefully towards the government of the back-slapping general. Large sums of public money were poured into Los Llanos for the rebuilding of homes and the settling of farmers back on the land. But there was no question of dividing up that land as they had hoped. The guerrillas had fought in vain and, tired out after years of fruitless campaigns, let themselves be deceived by the terms of the Rojas truce. After they had buried and mourned their dead, they were no better off. They welcomed the relative peace which descended over the plains, but they soon saw how little things had changed. And in 1955 they saw the punishment meted out to those country people in other parts of Colombia who refused to accept the bait of peace at the government’s price. Early that year a vast region of the Tolima province was declared a “Zone of Military Operations.” The troops began invading the land and rounding up prisoners in an effort to wipe out the remains of the Independent

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Peasant Republics. The oligarchs were well pleased with Rojas and his successful “pacification” of the country. However the power-hungry new middle class which Rojas repre¬ sented, if allowed to get a foothold, might threaten the big industrial¬ ists who held power in Colombia. Rojas was no industrialist. Conservative both by tradition and affiliation, he was more interested in building up big cattle ranches and cane fields than he was in the promoting of industry. As a result, his economy depended heavily on primary products and was liable to suffer from the least crisis in the international market. During the first years of his government, Rojas was favoured by record prices for coffee, always Colombia’s staple export. But this boom did not last, and the country soon fell into debt. With that, the bourgeoisie panicked and increased the debt by pull¬ ing their money out of Colombia to invest it safely overseas. Ospina Perez and his clique immediately began to move against Rojas. Ospina represented the industrial interests of big business and he needed a government which would foster investment within the country. Rojas had been good for a while. He had imposed law and order and had also built a network of roads and bridges, airports and irrigation channels, which would be put to good use by the oligarchy. But now he must go. Big business controlled the press, of course, and quickly began churning out news reports and scandals destined to discredit the Rojas regime. They played up the bullring incident, and dug photos of the student massacres out of their files to reprint in the daily papers. The unthinking urban masses forgot that several of the newspaper proprietors were the very men who, as presidents of Colombia, had caused hundreds and thousands of deaths all over the land. So short was their memory that they could recall only a few dozen deaths, those brought about recently in the city under Rojas. Popular feeling was quickly whipped up against the general. Cornered at last, and desperate, Rojas endeavoured to put a brake on the manipulators of public opinion. This led him to lay hands on that most sacred of all sacred cows, the freedom of the press. The oligarchs cleverly trapped him into a position where he had no alterna¬ tive but to decree the closing down of the biggest daily paper in Colombia, El Tiempo, owned by the Liberal ex-President Santos.

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Public opinion, world opinion, came crashing down on Rojas’ head and tolled the death knell of his military regime This was the moment that Camilo had chosen to announce to his family that he was about to pay them a visit. No wonder they were con¬ cerned. They were as much affected as anybody by the terrifying antiRojas propaganda and felt that not even ordinary citizens could be sure of being left to live in peace. Camilo’s brother, Fernando, who had graduated and set up his medical practice in Bogota with high hopes the year before, now decided to flee the country. He and his Austro-American wife felt that prospects were brighter in the United States. Isabel had become a regular campaigner against Rojas, and she and some of her cronies occasionally drove through the city scat¬ tering anti-government leaflets out of the car windows. A few months earlier she had stalked down Seventh Avenue in the front line of a protest march. Old Calixto, too, though hardly a protest marcher, was incensed by the government’s immorality and favoured the political coalition which was being hatched to overthrow Rojas. But he feared the Conservatives, who seemed to him to continue faithful to their motto of “the Party over and above the country.” However, undeterred by his family’s forebodings, Camilo came home. His parents’ gloom lifted with the arrival of their cheerful and optimistic son. Camilo told them that, as far as he was concerned, the Rojas problem had to be solved by others. He and his friends considered that it was “morally impossible to collaborate with the dictatorship” and resigned themselves to making long-range plans. “It was curious to observe,” he recalled later, “that the attitude of those of us studying abroad was the same as that of the ones who had stayed at home. All of us, thanks to our freedom from immediate responsibilities, adopted a global, all-embracing view of national problems and their solution.” That all-embracing view had been summed up in the ECISE docu¬ ment, and Camilo lost no time in renewing old friendships and making new ones amongst the cream of young professional men and women in Bogota with a view to establishing the executive committee. He was invited all over the place, and during the months of July and August outlined his plans for “authentic and integral development” in dozens of drawing rooms and small lecture halls.

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His plea was for moral renewal and technical know-how, in order to break what he called the two vicious circles which held the country bound: the economic circle and the cultural-political one. He described the first of these in the following way: “We have a very low standard of living. This is largely due to insufficient production; insufficient production is due to lack of capital; and the lack of capital is due, in turn, to our poor productivity. And why is our productivity poor? Be¬ cause our technical resources are few. The education of technicians requires capital. . . .” And so the argument went on, chasing its own tail. The basic premise was the need for more capital investment, both foreign and national. From there Camilo came back, by a string of tortuous reasonings, to his conclusion, which was where he had be¬ gun: “what we need are technicians.” “We probably won’t solve the immediate economic problems,” he modestly admitted. His was a long-range project. He lamented that the second of his circles, the cultural-political one, was going to be a tougher nut to crack, and suggested that political action be postponed for later. “Political action,” he said, “could be the culmination of previous action in the economic, social and cultural spheres.” His young audience lent him a sympathetic ear and agreed to set up the committee. Officeholders were appointed and a program of activities discussed. There was a lot of good will and enthusiasm, but in fact, on Camilo’s return to Europe, the ECISE group in Bogota became just one more wordy little study circle. When Camilo went up to the seminary to give what the students jokingly called his “vicious circle bit,” he made a very good impres¬ sion. The seminarians and his fellow-priests looked to Camilo as one of the brightest hopes in the Colombian Church. He had gone off to Europe full of promise, but still a fledgling. Now he had come back sucking a pipe and discoursing on “underdevelopment” (a word some of them were hearing for the first time) and when he reminisced about his trips through Europe, it was obvious that he was as at home in Paris or Berlin as in his own back yard. He had lost none of his simplicity, but had gained a kind of worldly wisdom which quite fascinated these wide-eyed young clerics. Higher church officials also eyed him with interest and felt that he was a young man going places. Monsignor Mendoza, secretary of the

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newly formed Latin American Bishops’ Council (CELAM), asked him to help in the organization of the Vatican pavilion at the Brussels World Fair scheduled for 1958. The old cardinal, who had a soft spot for Camilo, nodded approvingly as the enthusiastic young priest out¬ lined plans which he and Gustavo had been brewing for a future social investigation centre under the aegis of the Church. When Camilo presented the scheme to some of the rising priest-technocrats busy modernizing the Bogota diocese from behind their new metal desks, he found them highly receptive. “It sounds good,” they said. “We’ve got to beat the commies at their own game.” Plans were afoot for a new style of church in Colombia. During those brief weeks of mid-1956, while Camilo was busy making his long-range plans, others, as he had hoped, were taking care of the more immediate matter of toppling the general. Chief among the plotters was the debonair politician and brilliant journalist Alberto Lleras Camargo. Alberto Lleras was no newcomer to the scene. For several decades Colombians had watched him nimbly changing his political colours and trimming his sails to catch every prevailing political breeze. From founding member of the first Communist cell in the twenties, he rose to a cabinet ministry in the thirties and to the presidency itself in 1945, as a stop-gap between the out-going Liberal Lopez and the in-coming Conservative Ospina. Recently he had been serving United States interests in Latin America as secretary to the Pan-American Union (predecessor of the Organi¬ zation of American States). This post in Washington had kept him clear of Colombia during the worst years of the Violence, and now, recently returned with international connections and prestige, he could claim to be unsullied by the dirt of recent local events. He was immediately named leader of the Liberal Party, and the entire panoply of bourgeois resources was placed at his disposal. The wealthy manipulators of power in Colombia had recognized in Lleras the ideal man to handle the rather tricky business of getting rid of Rojas. The trickiness of the business should not be exaggerated. All that was required was a temporary truce between the Conservative land¬ lords and the progressive industrialists for the purpose of removing the upstart general. Such a truce was easy to arrange between the

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leaders of both political parties. The only mild snag was the cantan¬ kerous temper of the leader of the Conservative Party, old Laureano Gomez, the man whom Rojas had replaced and who now fumed with rage in his exile in Spain. Gomez would never forgive those erst¬ while colleagues of his who had rushed to bum incense at the Rojas shrine. There was hardly a Conservative in the camp who had not been party to the rise of “the usurper,” as Gomez called the general; and the Liberals were even worse offenders. Alberto Lleras was the one politician with what old Gomez considered a clean record. Not only had Lleras not been involved in recent affairs, he was also fondly remembered by Gomez as the man who had bridged the gap between Liberals and Conservatives in 1946. He would now bridge it again. So it was that, during the month of July 1956, in a sunny little Spanish town, Alberto Lleras was putting his considerable diplomatic charm and his toothy smile to the task of wooing the haughty old ex-dictator. After several days of convivial conversation and good red wine, the two politicians signed their pact, a document which has gone down in Colombian history as a masterpiece of hypocrisy. The document maintained that all the violence and crimes inflicted upon Colombia were due to General Rojas and his followers; it protested against “the violence exercised by government arms” (as if the Gomez regime had never countenanced such behavior!) and decried the “disregard for morality and law unknown to earlier generations”; it demanded a return to “democratic institutions” and “juridical normality,” those legalistic tags with which the two traditional political parties had ever dressed up the dictatorship of the ruling few. In a word, the document called for the union of the two parties. Those very same leaders who, until this, had urged their adherents to kill and die for their party, now stepped over the bodies of almost half a mil¬ lion peasants slain for their cause and, all unabashed, published photos of their cordial embrace in a distant Spanish seaside resort. At the merest threat to their purses, the Liberal and Conservative oligarchs had come to a smiling agreement. In Bogota news of the Gomez-Lleras pact was well received by Camilo’s family and all their circle of friends, whose political

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opinions were totally conditioned by the oligarchic press. Needless to say the newspaper accounts did not present the pact in its true light as an alliance of the rich against the poor; nor did the readers stop to analyze the insidious motives behind the new coalition. All they knew was that it was high time they closed ranks against the military dictatorship and put an end to useless party disputes. A year earlier Isabel had summed up the general concern of the upper and middle classes in one of her succinct phrases: “We are heading at full speed towards communism,” she said, “in other words, towards the abyss.” Now the coalition was proposed by Lleras as the only viable, nonrevolutionary answer to the problem of the dictatorship and, as such, it was welcomed with open arms by the bourgeoisie. Camilo and his generation viewed all this political manoeuvreing with feelings of aversion, but did not seriously doubt that the pact was an arrangement designed to open the road back to democracy. In any case, Camilo’s political education was nonexistent, and his interest lay elsewhere. He was concentrating his efforts on the training of young technicians equipped for social action at the grass-roots level. He had already begun digging at those roots. His short stay at home was a whirlwind of activity. “He seems to find time to pop up everywhere,” one of his young friends remarked. “You find him in the most luxurious salons of Bogota and in the humblest shacks of the southern slums. One day I said to him: ‘In such-and-such a gaol there is a political prisoner dying of tuberculosis. They won’t let any¬ one in to see him. We’ve got to do something. . . .’ That very after¬ noon Camilo rushed down to the gaol and managed to get inside. When we met later he commented: ‘In Colombia the cassock opens all doors. They let me in at once and were most polite. I went right through the gaol—several prisoners made their confession to me. And I was able to see how completely abandoned those men are!’ ” The jailbirds’ plight deeply moved Isabel too, and she had become a tireless fund raiser and committee organizer for prison relief. Stim¬ ulated by Camilo, she actually began visiting “the poor unfortunates,” as she put it, “taking them whatever material things and spiritual com¬ fort I can.” She was thrilled that Camilo fitted a visit to gaol into his busy program. “The poor devils can see that God’s ministers are with

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them,” she said, “and that religion can be used to protect them and not only to persecute and kill them in the name of Christ.” With those words Isabel revealed her persistent contempt for the majority of God’s ministers. She was glad to think that her Camilo was one of a new breed. He came home one day to find her chatting to a pale young man with lank hair and spectacles. “I’d like you to meet my own personal atheist,” she said. Such a provocative introduction could only lead, as no doubt Isabel intended, to a discussion, and one which became heated as this young amateur writer, Rafael Maldonado, shot out barbed comments on the Christian myths which he evidently ridiculed and despised. He quickly dubbed Camilo “a typical bourgeois intellectual. . . intent on justify¬ ing the world and the class you represent.” However, Camilo rather cut the ground from under his feet by allowing himself to be drawn into serious debate and came out with some bold theories on social change which made a “great impression” on Maldonado (so he con¬ fessed later) “the more so as they were the views of a Catholic priest—and a Colombian one into the bargain!” Maldonado took the bull by the horns. “Do you consider,” he asked, “that Latin America is a colony subjected to North American imperialism?” Camilo, also taking it by the horns, replied: “Without hesitation I say: economically, yes. And what is more,” he went on, “the capitalist countries don’t hope that, by means of their system, our countries may one day achieve economic independence. On the contrary, they want to keep us tied to their system in order to take advantage of our cheap labour and our primary products at laughable prices.” Young Maldonado was surprised, but still disbelieving. He led the priest on, plying him with further questions, bent on unmasking all his concealed religious myths and alienations. Camilo acquitted him¬ self well, but at last Maldonado drove him into a comer demanding straight answers on revolutionary activity. Camilo began to hedge and took momentary refuge in some of his Maritain doctrine. “In the first place,” he said, “the capitalist system in itself is not to be condemned. Christianity is such a powerful force that it is capable of humanizing any system, even the capitalist one. What the Church

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has condemned is the danger of abuse which this system implies. In the second place, we believe that Catholics can opt for the abolition of that system without the revolution being necessarily synonymous with bloodshed.” “And now could I ask you,” Maldonado came back at him, “exactly how long do you people expect to take to bring about this so-called bloodless revolution?” ■' The supercilious ring in the young man’s voice got under Camilo’s skin. Maldonado noticed his sudden irritability and gleefully said to himself: “No wonder he’s getting hot under the collar. In reply to this one he will inevitably have to define and commit himself—after such a tactful defence of the Christian ideology!” But Camilo was still in control of the situation. “Do you want me to reply as a Christian?” he asked. “Or as a political leader? If it’s as a Christian—and above all as a priest—I can only give a negative an¬ swer; in other words, if bloodshed implies hate for any class whatso¬ ever, then we can have no part in it. Now if you ask me as a political leader, I reply that I am not a politician nor do I think I should be, and so I can’t give you an answer.” He paused, obviously dissatisfied with his own handling of the matter. He then added: “I believe, however, that a Christian political leader should not beg the question. In any case he could never answer it in the abstract. He would have to take into account the very con¬ crete historical circumstances in which the question was raised.” The tussle went on for several hours, Maldonado running Camilo up against walls and standing back amazed at his victim’s ability to wriggle free. Camilo was the defender of the Church who disarmed his opponent by admitting her weaknesses and errors. He was the subscriber to dogmatic formulae who would suddenly swing round and declare that an ultimate moral decision depended not on absolute principles but on “concrete historical circumstances.” His ideas, if not very clearly defined, were all the more fascinating—and disconcerting. He was difficult to come to grips with, not because he shirked the issues, but because he was not doctrinaire. He was groping, looking for answers, ready to learn even from his adversary. Maldonado had never met a priest like Father Camilo Torres Restrepo. “Would you be prepared to say all this in public?” he asked.

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“Of course I would,” replied Camilo. “The truth should not be reserved for a privileged few.” Thus the spoken dialogue between Rafael Maldonado and Camilo was recorded and published in booklet form. The little volume en¬ titled Conversations with a Colombian Priest circulated in Bogota a few months later, and Camilo had a brief season as a minor celebrity. Suddenly it was mid-September and Isabel was reminding him that it was time he started packing his bags for the return to Europe. He hastily gathered together material for his thesis, which was after all the main purpose of his visit home, and was soon ready to leave. When the time came to see him off, Isabel began to feel sorry for herself and badgered him into letting her go and keep house again in Belgium. To Camilo it did not sound altogether a bad idea. She would go over at the beginning of the following year; he would leave the Latin American College, and they would take an apartment in Brus¬ sels. This meant that he could more easily attend to his work on the World Fair pavilion and, being a few miles removed from the student milieu at Louvain, might be left in peace and quiet to get his thesis written. That was the theory. In practice it did not work out that way. Isabel went over all right, and they did take an apartment in Brussels, but Camilo did not let up on his ceaseless round of student activities and the organization of his ECISE groups in several countries. On top of that he was running to committee meetings for the setting up of the Vatican pavilion. As a result, in February of 1957, for the first time in his life, he failed his exams. He failed miserably, and felt it. “That will teach me,” he wrote to a friend, “not to get overconfident.” In May 1957, Isabel went home again and Camilo moved back to Louvain and took a room in a student residence conducted by a formi¬ dable matron called Madame Helene Morren. Madame’s establishment was run on the strictest lines, and she felt herself highly responsible for her young charges. She frowned on Camilo’s habit of letting himself be encroached upon by the students. His mail was voluminous, she noted, the telephone constantly rang for him and visitors called on him day and night. He was a charmer, no doubt about it, but Madame Helene decided not to let herself fall

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under his spell. Instead she took it upon herself to give him a piece of advice. “Look here,” she said, taking him aside, “you say the students need a brother. That’s all very well. But they also need a big brother, and that’s what you should be for them. . . .” But the good lady’s counsels were drowned in Camilo’s peal of laughter. She gave up. He had cast his spell upon her, whether she liked it or not. Life at the Maison St. Jean, as the residence was called, did in fact permit Camilo to organize his timetable better and get down to the grind of knocking all his loosely gathered notes and statistics on Bogota into the form of a thesis (or memoire) for his licentiate. Ma¬ dame Helene’s husband, Lucien Morren, helped him with the drudgery of compiling complicated mathematical tables. But it was his professor, Yves Urbain, who directed the thesis and who left his mark on Camilo and on a whole generation of students in the Faculty of Social Sciences. Yves Urbain was a self-made man. He was a Flemish coal miner’s son turned university don. His manner was brusque and he would stand no humbug. But the students liked his lectures. They were full of facts. No airy-fairy theories for him. He knew a lot about the Congo and was sensitive to the problems of the so-called underde¬ veloped countries. On any social or economic matter he had amassed an enormous quantity of data, cases and statistics and could quote them chapter and verse. Camilo’s thesis—A Statistical Approach to the Reality of the City of Bogota—reflected the influence of the master. Under Urbain’s direction and never flagging discipline, Camilo produced a workmanlike memoire. He laboured under the disad¬ vantage of statistics which were not altogether reliable, but he welded them together into a thorough description of Bogota, its history, growth and present socio-economic conditions. The document was purely descriptive. Neither Urbain nor any other professor at Louvain had given Camilo the instruments he needed for analysis and criticism. He depicted the tragic state of the working classes in his home city, observing the phenomenon of wages which, though nominally rising, were of ever-decreasing real value. He wrote that consumer goods were produced to meet a luxury

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market while the needs of the common man were neglected. He ob¬ served that there was no heavy industry being built up in his country. The picture he painted was grey and dismal, for it provided no dis¬ covery of the causes of these ills and therefore no solution. He spoke of the working and middle classes. There was no mention of the upper class. He defined the working class as those who are employed in manual labour; the middle class, as those employed in intellectual activity. There was no reference, in his scheme, to the economic factors which determine class. He did not raise questions like: in whose hands were the factories? or who reaped the financial dividends of industry? The experts, he said, “generally explained the low standard of living in the underdeveloped countries by faults in the socio-economic structures of those countries, especially the lack of basic investments, of demand for goods, of skilled labour, of trade unions, etc.” Here and there Camilo betrayed a sneaking suspicion that the explanations generally given were not altogether satisfactory. But so far he had no better explanation to offer. All in all the memoire was a success. Not only did it earn Camilo his licentiate when he presented it to the faculty in July of 1958, it was also the first full-scale study he had tackled and, as such, was a jumping-off point for further investigations. It had helped him to see how Bogota ticked. He was anxious now to get to work on the spot and find out exactly why Bogota ticked that way. The writing of the thesis, however, was by no means the most significant event of his last two years in Europe. Other happenings would have a greater influence on his future. And of these maybe the most influential was his meeting with Guitemie. Guitemie was Marguerite Marie Olivieri, a young Corsican girl studying in Paris. He met her there in 1957 with his Colombian friends and she immediately invited him to visit some North Africans in an outlying quartier. On a Sunday morning Camilo accompanied her to Villejuif, one of the poorest bidonvilles of Paris. In that shantytown lived a whole colony of impoverished families, victims of one of the fiercest colonial wars of modem times, the battle of Algiers. His new friend Guitemie formed part of a team dedicated to helping the Al¬ gerians. In this community of students, priest-workers, North African mis-

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95

sionaries, young professional men and women, all banded together to share the problems and sufferings of the refugees, Camilo im¬ mediately felt at home, just as he had with the Abbe Pierre’s rag¬ pickers on his first visit to Paris the year before. But he soon noticed a fundamental difference: the Abbe Pierre was working to house and clothe the poor, not to subvert the state; the Algerians, on the other hand, were waging a war to the death against a powerful Western colonial government. And the capital of that government was Paris. By the time Camilo met the Algerians the struggle was nearing its climax. French presidents, one after another, had drained public finances to maintain a huge repressive army in Algeria, and yet the liberating forces were growing in strength. The National Liberation Front was beginning to turn the tide against the French. Camilo found himself immersed in an atmosphere where all the talk was of revolu¬ tionary war and the hope of victory. Sooner or later the battle would be won. No regular army, no matter how powerful, could with¬ stand indefinitely the attacks of the guerrillas and of the Algerian people mobilized behind them. In Paris their exiled compatriots ex¬ ploded mysterious bombs almost every night. For the first time Camilo sniffed, although remotely, the exhilarating air of battle and dis¬ covered that even young bourgeois intellectuals had a role to play in the revolutionary struggle of exploited peoples. Guitemie had, at least. Camilo watched her as she moved about amongst the people, helping to solve immediate problems of lodging, employment, sustenance. Talking with her, he found that she drew her inspiration from her deep Catholic faith. Constant prayer and communion with the Lord gave her strength, she told him; and he

became aware of how strong she was, though so small and pale. Her convictions on the liberation war were expressed in the language of Christian mysticism. “All human sufferings,” she said, “have to be purified in God, elevated to Him.” For Guitemie this was no pious platitude; it was real. Besides, common sense and good humour were evident in everything she did. Camilo learnt—from others, not from Guitemie—that she was the daughter of wealthy parents who lived in a luxurious chateau at Ver¬ sailles. She had left home at seventeen, they said, to join the liberation

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army in Algiers and fight in the front line against the French. This beautiful young woman, with her fiery Corsican temper, made strange, almost imperceptible inroads on Camilo. She heightened his sense of priestly mission, of his supernatural vocation. She considered him a man set apart. At the same time she in no way inhibited his spontane¬ ous human openness and joy. Above all, he admired how efficiently she channelled her own innate driving power into the work for the Algerians of Villejuif. In the spring Camilo once more took the train from Brussels to Paris and joined Guitemie and her student friends on the pilgrimage to Chartres, which had become a Catholic feature every year at the Feast of Pentecost. For two days young people from the universities and high schools of Paris wound in an endless column across the plains of the Beauce. Far away on the horizon the green-grey hull of the cathedral lay at anchor, her Gothic spires rearing up like masts, and Camilo felt part of a Christian army as he marched, singing, through the ripening wheat fields. The student groups halted en route and sat together in the long grass sharing their bread and wine and Breton cheese, reading aloud from Bible passages on Moses and the Jewish exodus, of long marches full of hope towards the promised land. Camilo and Guitemie could not but think of the Algerians and their long march from slavery and oppression. The age-old religious epic took on new meaning for them. When they rose up and went on their way the country air was filled with the sound of the stirring hymns they sang. They camped over¬ night in the loft of a wayside bam and arrived next day at Chartres for the vast assembly round the altar of the ancient cathedral. During the solemn liturgy of the Mass celebrated as the culmination of the pilgrimage, some ten thousand youthful voices rang through those medieval vaults and resounded in Camilo’s memory long after he had gone back to Louvain. He marched a second time in the pilgrimage to Chartres the follow¬ ing year. This was to be his last spring in Europe, indeed the last springtime of his life, as he would soon be going back to a land where the seasons of the year were unknown. Camilo’s mission was waiting for him now in the eternal tropics of burning sun and dull, unending

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rain. He was carrying home a mixed bag of memories, doubts and convictions. But of one thing he felt more convinced than ever: the Christian faith was “a force capable of humanizing any system.” He was proud to be a herald of that force, a priest of the revitalized Church, which he had discovered especially in France. His French Dominican mentors of years past had been the first to open his eyes to the appeal of the gospel message. The unforgettable pilgrimages and his friendship with modern-day apostles like Guitemie had con¬ firmed him in his belief that “the Church could become again what it had once been, the spiritual centre of the world.” His European days were running out and Camilo did not want to waste one minute of that last summer. No sooner had he danced for joy and relief at getting his memoire finished and approved in July, than he was off across Europe with Luis Villar. They met up in Berlin and travelled through Czechoslovakia to Belgrade. The independent Yugoslav communism was a source of interest to both of them, and they saw something of the “workers’ councils” and studied the ex¬ periments in autonomous industry which were being evolved in Yugo¬ slavia. October found Camilo back in Louvain as secretary to the first con¬ gress of Colombian students in Europe. It was Camilo, of course, who had organized the congress in which he launched his ECISE groups on a grand scale with a handsome bulletin, secretariats in various countries and a reception at the Colombian Embassy in Brussels dur¬ ing which the ambassador heaped lavish praise upon the organizers and the delegates from all over Europe. Then, on October 8, not without mixed feelings of regret and ex¬ pectation, Camilo said good-bye to his European friends and flew back to the New World. As Camilo was putting these finishing touches to his overseas education, Alberto Lleras Camargo had climbed deftly back into the presidential chair in Colombia and arranged a new-fangled pseudo¬ democracy very much to the oligarchy’s liking. His pact with Laureano Gomez had brought quick results. Less than a year after it had been signed, crowds were cavorting in the

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streets of Bogota to celebrate the “glorious May days” of 1957 in which Lleras had engineered a festive, bloodless coup against the general. While the clergy called down fire and brimstone on Rojas’ head, Lleras had put a giant spoke into the wheels of his govern¬ ment by bringing out on strike not the workers but the bankers. He had paralyzed commerce and industry just long enough to pull the economic stumps from under Rojas, and down he came, with a dull thud and a great loss of dignity. They bundled him into a car and drove him off to the airport, headed for exile in Spain. Laureano Gomez was already on his way back from Spain. Then followed a political opera bouffe in which the regular per¬ formers—those same politicians who had chanted Rojas’ praise four years earlier—now dedicated their best arias to eulogizing Lleras and his exploits against the tyrant. They sang of his triumph as “Colom¬ bia’s Second Independence”—a mathematical slip, as they had used the same phrase about Rojas! The culminating farce was a dramatic duet with Gomez begging Lleras to accept the presidency, and the latter coyly refusing and then finally succumbing before “the pres¬ sure of popular opinion”: in other words, under the baton of the oli¬ garchic press the mob comes on singing a chorus to embolden the feigning Lleras, who eventually overcomes his reluctance and accepts the high honours of state. The whole show was decked out in democratic trappings. Lleras devised a two-party government system which was to share the bureaucratic spoils of administration for the next twelve (later ex¬ tended to sixteen) years. All opposition to this system was declared illegal, and—his crowning gem!—the project was submitted to a plebiscite in which the whole block deal was voted without any pos¬ sibility of discussion. After that, the so-called elections were held in May of 1958 with virtually no opposition candidate, save the repre¬ sentative of an insignificant splinter group from the extreme right wing of the Conservative Party. In August, Lleras assumed govern¬ ment, and the country echoed with paeans to his glory. The immense battery of propaganda—the press, the radio and television, the Church and the schools, county councils and provincial assemblies—were still extolling the virtues of the new National Front Government when Camilo set foot at last, and permanently, on his native soil.

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99

Camilo arrived in mid-January. He had not come straight home. He stopped off in the United States for three months to follow lectures in sociology at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where his brother Fernando, who was on the staff there, got him an honorary fellowship. Camilo’s teacher during those months was Theodore Caplow. Pro¬ fessor Caplow, very much a son of the optimistic Roosevelt genera¬ tion, scorned the “archaic theories” of Karl Marx and insisted on the importance of industrial and occupational sociology, his specialties. He showed how the social sciences, if well studied and applied by employers, kept the workers content and production high. He did not question for a moment the intrinsic morality of the capitalist wage system. He simply asserted that industrial problems were being happily solved by such devices as professional associations, unionism and growing facilities for education. Caplow’s rosy world filled Camilo with enthusiasm and he wrote off excitedly to his friends: “This man is magnificent! the American edition of Urbain!” Camilo was still a naive and uncritical admirer of the type of empiric science which he had been taught. His praise for what he called “American sociology” knew no bounds, and he did not hesitate to invite Caplow and other American professors to lecture in Colombia during the coming year. He felt entitled to take this initiative, as he had decided on an academic career for himself. “I’ve made up my mind,” he wrote to a friend, “to dig myself right into the university. When I get back I won’t do any work as a sociologist except within the university.” Now he was back, and the future lay open before him. He was as personable a young man as the Colombian oligarchy had ever pro¬ duced. His tall, strong figure, his fair complexion and laughing green eyes—his whole appearance, in fact, was highlighted by the long black robe he wore. This was the cassock which, he had found, “opened all doors in Colombia.” In any case he possessed surnames which already held many of them ajar. Besides that, his fluency in several languages and his broad general culture were highly prized acquisitions. But over and above all this, he had a frank good nature and a wide and ready smile capable of thawing the iciest anti-clerical

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and even of opening those few doors securely shut against the clergy of his Catholic homeland. Camilo wore these assets as carelessly as his half-unbuttoned cas¬ sock. Far from preening himself, he got so busy he hardly remembered to brush his hair.

Chapter 6

THE UNIVERSITY CHAPLAIN

The one event which, more than any other, was to have a profound bearing on the future course of Camilo’s life happened just a week before he reached Bogota. On January 8, 1959, Fidel Castro marched triumphantly into Havana. The victory of the Cuban rebels was commented upon in the Colombian press, naturally enough, but its importance was minimized alongside the revolution of cheque books and rosary beads which the Colombian bishops and bankers had staged for the overthrow of Rojas. So conceited had the Colombian oligarchy become that they sincerely believed Alberto Lleras and his “revolutionary May day” escapades to be of incomparably greater importance for the history of Latin America than the triumph of Fidel Castro. However, history itself soon proved them very mistaken. In Colombia the first to respond to the historic call of the Cuban experiment were the university students. It was into the university world that Camilo plunged on his return home, and his action in the university formed and developed him in the years that followed. Like many of his generation, he came to political maturity in the shadow of the Cuban revolution. The advent of Fidel Castro was not, of course, an isolated histor¬ ical accident. It came as a reply to the long chain of frauds and deceits which the Cuban people, no less than the Colombians and indeed all

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the oppressed masses of Latin America, had suffered for centuries. It was inevitable that the old, patched wineskins of the oligarchic regimes would burst at one of the seams; and Cuba was that seam. The Cuban phenomenon took the Latin American ruling classes and the U. S. State Department unawares. They had not reckoned on its being a genuine revolution. Their short view of history had belittled the currents of real change which were running deep in this southern continent. Yet there was evidence of those currents everywhere. They could be discerned, for example, beneath the agitated waters of recent student activities in Colombia. For the student scene had changed since Camilo’s days as a raw freshman at the National University. From that time right up until 1957, the student organizations had set their sights fairly low. Their cry had been for greater autonomy, bigger slices of the budget, pro¬ fessors elected on academic merits, a student voice in university ad¬ ministration and so forth. These student goals were the expression of real defects in the Colombian university system and were by no means obsolete. They were still very live issues. But with time the students began to lift their eyes to a much wider horizon and saw that they had a part to play not just within the university but within society as a whole. In a country where most citizens could neither read nor write and were deliberately kept in servile ignorance, the students were a privileged minority. That privilege cast them willy-nilly in the role of a sort of national conscience and, as such, they had no right to restrict their efforts solely to the obtaining of better student conditions. To do so meant to pamper themselves as members of an exclusive club. During the Rojas regime the liberal press encouraged them in their struggle for short-range objectives and urged them into street fighting and riots. The students, led foolishly on, were defenceless victims of the Rojas troops. More than a dozen of them were shot down in June 1954; yet they came out again to face the rifles in the farcical May days of 1957. When the smoke of these futile battles cleared, the stu¬ dents experienced a kind of dreadful hangover. The scales began to fall from their eyes. They had let themselves be used as mindless front-line fighters in the oligarchy’s army. And all they had done was help Lleras and company rig up a sophisticated political machine

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which was a pretence of democracy. From now on they should fight not for the pretence but for the real thing. By a curious coincidence, evidence of that new awareness amongst the students was seen in those first days of January 1959. Their most attractive and passionate leader, Antonio Larrotta, stood on the car¬ cass of an upturned bus in the Plaza Bolivar haranguing his listeners on the “economic dictatorship” of the Lleras government, which had just decreed a rise in city bus fares. Larrotta’s energetic leadership was rewarded by a temporary success; Lleras stepped down and the urban workers were saved from that threatening ten-cent rise. It was no great victory; the fares would soon be soaring. But the incident marked the students’ first break out of the closed shell of their own specific interests. They had begun to join in the struggle of the working masses. The bus-fare campaign had begun on January 7, while the jubilant rebels were still rolling into Havana, and the date would be remembered in student circles. Antonio Larrotta soon founded the Worker-StudentPeasant Movement (MOEC) as an effort to broaden the popular base of future struggles. He became an ardent disciple of the newly born Cuban revolution, at first almost alone. The student masses were still shaking off the torpor of their long hangover. They were resentful and disillusioned, but not yet active. However, the odyssey of the Cuban people over the following two or three years would win Fidel Castro thousands of youthful admirers in the universities of Latin America. Some were destined to become much more than mere ad¬ mirers; amongst these, Camilo. S

Camilo had no presentiment of this in the early days of 1959 as he enquired about the chances of getting a university post. He lost no time in visiting an old teacher of his, Father Enrique Acosta, now student chaplain at the National University. Enrique was that jovial roly-poly priest who had conducted Camilo’s disgruntled father on an inspection tour of the seminary years ago and whose good-natured prattle on that occasion had done much to calm old Calixto’s worse fears. He had later been Camilo’s professor in the seminary and they got along well together. Enrique was delighted to see his old pupil again and felt that Camilo had fallen into his lap like manna from

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heaven. He figured that if he could get this bright young spark to work with him in the chaplaincy it might solve many problems. For although Enrique was readily welcomed in Bogota’s drawing rooms, he felt completely out of his depth amongst the students. Of course he had his little following. He was always a sure success at the nurses’ school where his sex talks made a great hit. But apart from that, the bulk of his young flock avoided him like the plague. He must have known why. The well-known fact that he was personal chaplain to the presidential palace and intimate confidant of the President, Alberto Lleras, was scarcely geared to winning him friends amongst the pupils of the National University. Camilo, with his youth and his winning ways, would be just the man to break down the accretion of prejudice which clung like barnacles to Enrique Acosta and the chaplaincy. The cardinal was agreeable, and Camilo was appointed assistant chaplain. He was as pleased as Enrique. The idea of working at the Na¬ tional, as it was called, was much more to his liking than an appoint¬ ment to one of the private, Church-run universities. Not that his enthusiasm for the Church had waned. On the contrary, he looked upon his new task as an apostolate of the Christian faith. But he be¬ lieved that God’s message should be planted in secular institutions, like leaven in the loaf, through the example of Christian witness. Furthermore, he considered that to be able to witness to Christ in a secular society, it was not enough to fulfill the purely spiritual func¬ tions of a chaplain; one should gain admittance as a qualified pro¬ fessional. So as soon as he heard that there was a vacancy for a lecturer in sociology at the School of Economics, Camilo gladly signed on. Everything was turning out just as he had planned. He was not to be bound down by humdrum parochial duties. He would live with his mother—which suited Isabel down to the ground —and could start right away at the National. The students who resumed classes early that year at the White City, as they affectionately called the ensemble of bright faculty buildings, soon became aware of a strange new figure on the sweeping green campus. It was a jaunty figure, striding about in black skirts. The sight of men in black skirts had normally been reserved for the girls who gravitated towards the Catholic chapel, and maybe for their boy

THE UNIVERSITY CHAPLAIN

105

friends who trailed in after them. Curas were strictly for church. But this cura seemed to turn up all over the place. However, his cassock proved more a hindrance than a help. Most students were immediately on their guard and wondered what he was up to. The more radical fellows could not stomach priests in any shape or form. Their opinion of “that Lleras ass-licker” Enrique Acosta could not have been worse; and this new cura was Acosta’s assistant. Nor was Camilo accepted by the boys and girls who had come from “good Catholic homes” and had been taught to regard the clergy with exaggerated awe and respect. They were thrown off balance by this quite unpriestly priest. Why, he ate in the cafeteria with the students and was heard telling a few jokes in doubtful taste. As for the great indifferent student masses, they did not take much notice of him at all. A priest, for them, was just another priest. This state of affairs persisted for a short while. Then all at once, almost in spite of himself, Camilo broke the ice. It happened on a Tuesday in the first week of March. The bus-fare dispute had not yet been settled and the city’s streets were full of pro¬ testing mobs. Antonio Larrotta’s student followers continued to harass the government, overturning buses and burning cars in the centre of Bogota. A crowd of them had gathered at the entrance to the White City and were voicing their grievances through a loud¬ speaker when they suddenly spied the new cura making his way across the lawn. At the same moment Camilo spotted them and dived for shelter. “I’d better keep out of trouble,” he said to himself. “After all, I’ve only just arrived in the country.” But it was too late. He heard a student voice calling at him over the loudspeaker: “What does the chaplain have to say?” There was nothing for it but to face the music. He bowled up to the group as breezily as he could. “What does the Church have to say about the student movement?” they asked. He hesitated, then said: “The Church is in agreement with the movement provided it is a just movement.” No sooner had he said it than he realized, as once before, that he had bungled. He had not sounded very convincing, to put it mildly.

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“Look,” he added, “do you just want to submit to the Church’s judgement on this matter?” (They wondered if he was trying to be funny.) “Or would you also like to hear my own personal opinion, independently of the Church? If so, then I’ll give it to you.” There were expectant cries of “Yes! Let’s hear it!” “Well it seems to me,” Camilo said, “that what you students have done—I’m not discussing whether it was good or bad, mind you—what you’ve done could have been done equally well by people with less professional skill. You don’t have to be in second or third year of a university course in order to be able to overturn a bus or bum a jeep or throw stones.” This was disconcerting. They were not quite sure what this cura was getting at. “I know that these demonstrations against the increased bus fares,” he went on, “are meant to be a sign of solidarity with the working class. But I can think of better ways in which the students could help the workers and the less privileged classes in general.” This was followed by a spontaneous “How?” which Camilo took on its face value as a genuine desire to learn. He opened up a discus¬ sion with them on how they might put their knowledge at the service of the workers, each student according to his own specialization. They reacted enthusiastically to this suggestion and began talking of “a great Workers’ University” in the National, with the students giving night classes to workmen. Ideas came thick and fast as they followed the chaplain over to his office and sat around for hours thrashing out the details of this scheme. Camilo listened with delight. This was a pleasant contrast with the apathy he had found in the Bogota ECISE group on his return home. The young professionals he had left in charge of the ECISE three years ago had been caught up in the rat race for money and prestige. They were all elbowing their way up in the world and had no more time for the utopian dreams of their student days. After drawing up statutes for the ECISE and publishing an occasional news letter, they had shelved the whole thing. As for technical assistance to the under¬ privileged, in that regard they had accomplished nothing. Camilo hoped that this younger generation would be different. Perhaps they would accept the challenge that his contemporaries had refused.

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“Let’s invite the whole student body to a great general assembly,” someone proposed. The motion was carried and the date fixed. When the day came, just thirty turned up. It occurred to Camilo that maybe one generation was much the same as another. But there was really no reason to be discouraged. It was absurd to expect an exuberant crowd of youngsters to keep all their reckless promises. He felt he could count oft the hard core of thirty, as many of them were known to him already in the School of Economics, where they were his pupils and were fast becoming his friends. They had gone to his first lecture full of preconceived notions about curas and wary of any ruses this one might pull in an effort to win them. They were wide awake to those modernized clerics, all smiles and hair oil and smutty stories, desperately letting it be known that they were moving with the times. The priests could not fool them by simply dressing up the old product in a new packet. But they could not fit Camilo into any of their categories. He was obviously not look¬ ing for fans. His subject was methodology, and he walked in and gave the class seriously, mapping out his program for the year. He told them of his concern for investigation in the field and made a few goodhumoured quips about people who tried to learn sociology solely out of books. In his opinion one should get out and observe reality. His special interest, he said, was the low standard of living amongst the workers in Bogota which had been the subject of his thesis, as well as the problem of mass migration from the country to the city. He wanted to study these phenomena by making contact with people in the popular quarters of Bogota and would welcome any collaborators. That was all. Without resorting to any fancy tricks, he had presented his case and himself. They could take him or leave him. They took him. One short session had been enough to show that this cura was different, the genuine article. They sought him out after class and volunteered to help in the investigation. Many of them, as good as their word, went along to that initial meeting of thirty. There a definite plan took shape. For a start they would limit their scope to one single project, and after some discussion a district known as Tunjuelito was selected for their experiment. They considered it a typical example of urban dwellers living on the fringe of industrial

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society. Thus, the following weekend the astonished inhabitants of Tunjuelito peered out of their shacks at the hooting of a horn as Camilo and his carload of boisterous students rattled through their muddy streets. Tunjuelito was well chosen. It was the southernmost human out¬ post of Bogota, and its tumble-down dwellings were inhabited by thousands of country people who had sought refuge in Bogota from the violence that had driven them from their lands. Some of their men and boys found occasional labour in the brick ^kilns nearby, and sweated hard over the furnaces. Others rode the crowded dilapi¬ dated buses into town every day at dawn in the hope that some factory foreman might take them on, if only for a few hours. Men and boys alike clamoured at truck terminals to unload heavy cargoes on their backs. They scrounged all day, peddling lottery tickets or contraband cigarettes or unlicenced trayloads of cheap junk—pencils and combs and mirrors—or just thieving what they could to bring home a few pesos at night to their wives and mothers and children in Tunjuelito. Camilo’s young collaborators were shocked at what they saw. They had rarely ventured beyond their clean middle-class villas, and if they had sometimes driven past the shantytowns, the half-naked children running from under the car wheels seemed somehow picturesque. Now the veil was lifted and they found how cold and hungry those children were. Tunjuelito uncovered its human face and revealed the sickness and despair of a people who had no reason to hope for happi¬ ness, except perhaps in that vague future heaven the curas talked about. The students discovered that the makeshift shelters thrown up against the rain hid a thousand tragedies. That first Saturday they drove home less boisterously, and someone broke the silence to re¬ mark: “Until now we really didn’t know the meaning of the word misery.” But they did not lose heart. Fired by Camilo’s contagious opti¬ mism, they went back faithfully week after week to see what they could do to help. This was much more than a sociological investiga¬ tion. Friends from other faculties lent a hand, and on Saturdays and Sundays Tunjuelito hummed with activity. Medical students looked down throats and jabbed needles into arms; art students and would-be engineers drew plans for sewers and parklands; future lawyers handed

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out free advice on how to avoid legal hurdles and disentangle red tape. The inhabitants of Tunjuelito viewed all this with wry, un¬ spoken disbelief. They had seen too many promises made and broken. However, they accepted the help for what it was worth. Throughout the year 1959 and well on into the next the group’s enthusiasm continued unabated and the Tunjuelito dwellers warmed to the young cura and hjs juvenile companions, the children of “the High.” Camilo and the students met regularly to review their work and submit it to as critical a scrutiny as they could. At all costs they wanted to avoid any sign of paternalism. They insisted that their re¬ lationship with the people should be one of equality, that they had come to learn rather than to teach. They were, in fact, learning a great deal. But it was hard to avoid paternalism altogether. The people of Tunjuelito inevitably felt themselves to be on the receiving end of a handout from the sons of the rich. These unusual student activities and the young priest-professor who inspired them soon caught the eye of people high up in the Ministry of Education, and Camilo was invited to sit on a com¬ mittee for community planning. He and his fellow-committeemen, most of them young sociologists like himself or specialists in educa¬ tion, presented the ministry with a brief plan for self-help at the local level. This was taken up and, in July of 1959, with a great fanfare of publicity, the government announced the creation of an entity based on the committee’s proposals. Communal Action, as it was called, was presented to the public as a kind of universal remedy for all the country’s ills. According to official propaganda, the new body planned to send out technicians into the highways and byways to teach the lazy and quarrelsome Colombian people to desist from their fruitless feuding and roll up their sleeves to work on a fraternal community basis. The National Front administration virtually proclaimed that all reforms coming from above were useless. There was no point in the government’s intervening in matters like education, industry, wages or land distribu¬ tion. In any case Alberto Lleras did not believe in intervention; he was for free enterprise. With the launching of Communal Action he washed his hands of all responsibility for the chaos in which the na¬ tion foundered. He passed the buck to the masses; the people must

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pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. His Minister for Educa¬ tion solemnly pronounced that “the country was now mature enough to save itself on its own.” To Camilo all this smacked of demagogy. The modest project he had mapped out with his colleagues was never intended to perform miracles. “What is proposed,” he wrote off to Guitemie, “is the or¬ ganization, on a giant scale, of local communities in order to re¬ habilitate them thanks to their own organization. They say it is to be technical and apolitical, but you know what that means in a tropical Latin country like ours: political intrigues, bureaucracy and all the rest. Just imagine, they have put forward my name for director of the movement at the national level. I detest the thought of getting stuck behind a desk and becoming a bureaucrat.” As it turned out, Camilo’s suspicions were well founded. The offices of Communal Action were soon swarming with white-collar officials and technicians and experts, drinking coffee and drawing salaries and running about with satchels full of plans and projects— a new hive for the drones. But the practical results were very limited. They in no way justified the organization’s sizable budget, nor did they relieve the people’s destitution. The country town mayors and local bosses took advantage of Communal Action to keep the people in check, channelling discontent into public works and constructions. Little manuals or catechisms published by this new government agency betrayed its real purpose: to maintain and strengthen the status quo. It was the enemy of radical change. The model member of a Communal Action committee was described as follows: a man who practised his religion, loved his country, was prepared to sacrifice himself for the fatherland and, above all, to respect the nation’s laws and help enforce them. To ensure filial submission, in many cases the parish priest imposed himself as president of the village committee and peppered his sermons with broadsides against well-known local Communists. The clergy were thus helped to further their longfamiliar heresy hunts. Camilo was not named director of Communal Action but he did co-operate in implementing it where he could. True to his original ECISE idea, he believed in working from within all existing organiza¬ tions, whether official or private, in order to promote grass-roots

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education. In the ambitious proposals of Communal Action he saw a chance to mobilize people of good will on a large scale and he im¬ mediately began urging the creation of a body within the university which would link students and professors to the government’s selfhelp scheme. For that purpose the Inter-faculty Council for Com¬ munity Development was launched early in 1961. However, when Camilo recommended to his pupils that they participate in Communal Action projects, it was easy to see that his usually boundless zest was slightly qualified. Even in 1963, after the organization had been in existence for some four years, he would re¬ fer to it as “a seed” which might grow. Whatever hopes he had for it, meagre though they may have been, were based on the fact that it was an attempt to break down the walls of the White City and let the students loose on the world out beyond their “academic castles.” “There, amongst the poor and the humble,” he said, “we will discover values much greater than ours, despite all our years of study.” In those early months amongst the poor of Tunjuelito, Camilo and his bunch of young collaborators had discovered high moral values and a nobility which left them embarrassed, almost ashamed. Would any one of them, they wondered, have survived as these uncomplain¬ ing people did? The strength to forge a life and livelihood with noth¬ ing but bare hands and courage, to construct their homes, to level their streets, to fetch their water, to feed their children, to teach the young to create, to work, to build as their fathers did—all this was a lesson for the spoiled sons of plenty whose soft white hands had never held a workman’s tools. Camilo, more than any other, came to respect those people and put his complete trust in them, and if they abused that trust he did not hold it against them. News of Camilo spread around the poorer quarters of the city, and all sorts of hobos came knocking at his door to spin him a hard-luck story. One day an ex-convict appeared in a dirty overall at the chaplain’s office asking for Father Camilo. Camilo brought him in and sat him down to chat. He might have been receiv¬ ing the Education Minister. It turned out that amongst other occupa¬ tions of his varied career the man had tried his hand at cutting hair and Camilo decided to set him up in a barber shop. “I’m going to help you, Carlos,” he said, “and if you let me down,

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it doesn’t matter, understand? It doesn’t matter at all. I’d like you to understand that right from the start.” Carlos, the barber, was amazed to find himself the centre of atten¬ tion as Camilo’s student helpers rallied round to buy him mirrors and scissors and shaving creams and install him, with a freshly painted barber’s pole, in the swankiest hair-dressing salon Tunjuelito had ever seen. “Up till now I’ve had plenty of accomplices,” said the barber, “but this is the first time I’ve had friends.” Sad to say, the ex-convict’s past caught up with him' and one morn¬ ing the papers reported his untimely end. Carlos had been found stabbed to death in a field. Camilo and his friends were shaken by the news and read with some horror the newspaper accounts of the barber’s criminal record. Slightly stunned, they made arrangements for his funeral. It was drizzling rain the morning they gathered in the little chapel at Tunjuelito to give Carlos a full Christian burial. The young men and women stood silently around the coffin and Camilo, officiating, was more serious than they had ever seen him. Their friendship with Carlos was one of the countless shared ex¬ periences which created a spirit of camaraderie between Camilo and his Tunjuelito team. They formed an inseparable gang and looked for one another’s company at every spare moment. Guitemie, still in Paris, gleaned something of this from Camilo’s letters. “I love the university,” he wrote. “The work with the students is what I like most —after the work with the poor. We have a few really interesting groups of boys and girls. I’ve dedicated nearly all my time to this and to per¬ sonal contacts, which is my special weakness as you know.” The work with the students took in more than the weekend visits to the poor and the frequent study circles. It overflowed into riotous parties at Camilo’s flat. At times he threw the parties in Isabel’s ab¬ sence; at others, simply put up with her complaints. If she was in her best form, she joined the party and was rollicking good company. But with Isabel one never knew how she would be, so that Camilo was always somewhat on tenterhooks before springing one of these sur¬ prises on his mother. The parties went on well into the night, and just before midnight the young revellers, half-amused and half-intrigued, would see Camilo

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hop up, put on his discarded cassock and withdraw into an inner room to finish reading his breviary. He was the oddest cura they had ever come across. Most of the time they would forget about his priest¬ hood; no one ever called him “Father” after the first meeting, though they would have found such familiarity quite unthinkable with any other priest. Then suddenly, at a Mass amongst the Tunjuelito peo¬ ple or, as now, seeing him steal away to pray, they would be reminded that there was another side to their friend Camilo. Most of them were in the process of rebelling, rather self¬ consciously, against the Church and the indoctrination they had en¬ dured at the hands of priests and nuns in Catholic private schools. But despite themselves they had far from overcome their attachment to religious myths and ritual symbols. “Camilo,” one lad said, “I’d like to make my confession to you.” Camilo agreed, though he was obviously not overanxious. A few days later the youth remarked, rather sheepishly, that it really had not done him much good. He was just the same as before. When another young man came along with the same request, Camilo said: “Better not. Just keep trying to find your way. There’ll be time for the Sacraments and all that later on.” And if the time never came for the Sacraments Camilo was not the one to thrust them on anybody. He saw his own father come to the end of a good fife unwavering in his Voltairian prejudice against the Church. Calixto died at the close of the year 1960. During his last days, Camilo sat beside his bed as the long hours ticked away and the mur¬ mur of female voices rose and fell in an adjoined room. Camilo knew what his assembled relations were discussing. They were speculating on his father’s chances of eternal salvation if he should die without a change of heart and refusing the Church’s Sacraments. Camilo, they presumed, was in there doing his best to convert him. Other voices wafted in from the hall where his father’s colleagues were beginning to say nice things about him before he was even dead. They were commending Calixto’s long professional concern for improved infant nutrition and his campaigns for government milk subsidies. Then, over a second whisky, they slipped into a more anecdotal mood and reminisced about Calixto’s old Chrysler with its dubious brakes and

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how the doctor brought it to a halt by crunching into a tree each morning outside the San Jose Hospital. Their distant chortles broke into the still room. Calixto had closed his eyes and was breathing gently. His son, looking down at the balding head fallen heavily on the pillow, re¬ called the days of his childhood when he had played with his beloved daddy and his Umana cousins in the orchards of Duitama. Those were the far-off happy times when the family was still united. After the separation and with the passing years his old Herod had sometimes seemed a sorry figure. He had been lonely and a worrier. Yet tirelessly he had given his life to healing the sick and trying to improve chil¬ dren’s diets. His friends out in the hall did well to praise him for it. Camilo got up and kissed his father’s broad forehead before going out to face the roomful of aunts. When he came into the parlour all heads turned and several coffee cups froze in midair. Camilo quietly told them to set their minds at rest. “My father has made his peace with God,” he said, and smiled to himself at their sigh of relief. Camilo had learnt to relegate religious matters to where they be¬ longed: to the very private region of personal convictions. He no longer proselytized people as he had done his father years ago with immature and misguided zeal. He was careful not to mix the role of the chaplain with that of the friend, and he allowed no taint of a re¬ ligious crusade to colour any of his social works. They must be pluralist and open to all, as he had stated in the first ECISE platform. Within less than a year of his return home, the ECISE organization, which had fallen into abeyance, was replaced by a new group, the MUNIPROC (University Movement for Communal Promotion), which was set up with exactly the same objectives as the ECISE, and with no less promise. In fact Camilo felt that MUNIPROC promised much more than its predecessor, since its members had shown that they were not frightened of getting Tunjuelito mud on their shoes. In a slightly nostalgic mood, recalling the early fervour of ECISE meet¬ ings, Camilo made some rather sad reflections on his fellow-students of those not very distant days. The great concern for all-embracing long-range plans, he noted, had been snuffed out in the race for per¬ sonal advancement. “Once the dictatorship was over and the political parties and electoral campaigns were reinstated, the spoils of bureauc-

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racy were held out for the taking—fruit easily picked by the mid¬ century generation, as we were called.” Camilo expressed his fear that “our generation will go down in history as just one more that re¬ acted in a moment of nonconformity but, when the social structures threw out a few enticing crumbs, behaved like a good dog: stopped barking and lay down.” Camilo did not lie down. He became identified with the younger generation, who seemed to him less likely to fall prey to bureaucratic temptations. It was with them that he formed MUNIPROC and gave a solid base and an assurance of continuity to student participa¬ tion in community projects. The Muniprockers financed their own activities and thus kept themselves out of the watchful eye of official institutions like Communal Action. This meant that they were free to question some of the government’s slogans and facile propaganda and to help the slum dwellers do the same. Though not yet revolu¬ tionaries, little by little Camilo and his Muniprockers were becoming radical. One of the factors which united the group around Camilo, apart from their parties and their MUNIPROC, was their pioneering of the new sociology faculty at the National. Not content to accept forever the second-rate status of a department within the Economics School, Camilo and his colleagues began to insist on the need for a fully equipped School of Sociology. The head of the embryonic faculty and its future dean was a rising star on the national firmament, Orlando Fals Borda, who had won his doctorate in the United States with a brilliant thesis and was already holding down important posts in the National Front administration. The two of them, Orlando Fals and Camilo, gathered together whatever lecturers they could to staff the incipient school, but were hard pressed to find Colombians well trained in the social sciences. It seemed natural enough to import foreigners and the new faculty quickly became a haven for American sociologists plying their doubtful wares. Camilo was not even yet seriously critical of the functionalist school of sociology whose remedies for social ills—if it put forward any at all—consisted in patchwork and production-boosting within the given socio-economic struc¬ tures which it had no thought of altering. He was happy to invite his old professor Theodore Caplow as visiting lecturer and encouraged

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Fals in his plan to contract a whole team of American experts who were supposed to put the school on a solid technical footing. The im¬ portant thing was to promote a serious study of Colombian condi¬ tions, and if foreign money and imported know-how were able to solve an immediate problem, Camilo could see no harm in it. Right from the beginning he and Fals conceived the idea of a study of the Violence, and Camilo raised funds amongst wealthy friends of his to sponsor the investigation by means of a Peace Foundation. The sponsors hardly expected quite as raw a document on the Vio¬ lence as the sociology school would produce. Howevdr, the study did not appear overnight; for the moment the sociologists were still work¬ ing on it. Camilo’s activities over this period were many and varied. Any committee whose topic bore on social matters inevitably found the young priest-sociologist sitting on it. No discussion panel seemed complete without him. He helped to organize a nationwide university campaign on community development and the first student seminar on that subject in Bogota with delegates from every corner of Colombia. The recently founded School of Public Administration commissioned him to preside over its study on the social aspects of its work. The Ministry of Government contracted him to lecture in Com¬ munal Action courses. Camilo ran from lecture hall to board meet¬ ing, from study club to late-night party, from early morning Mass to working bees at Tunjuelito. He was often late, but he almost always did arrive. And during many a meeting a debate over some technical point of order broke up in suppressed laughter at the sound of a heavy breathing which gradually emerged as a gentle but audible snore. Everyone looked round to find Camilo slumped unconscious in his chair and his pipe fallen onto his lap. As if that whirligig of duties were not enough, Camilo made a point of cultivating his “special weakness” of being always readily and totally available to anyone who wanted him. “He just can’t say no to people,” Isabel once exclaimed. “Thank God he was not a girl. He’d have been the disgrace of the family!” It was hard for him to find time to prepare classes, with the result that his lectures were often less than satisfactory. And there was no time at all for serious reading and research. But Camilo picked up

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information on the run. He had no dreams of becoming the classic academic sitting amongst books and reviews in the quiet of his study. The amazing thing was that, in spite of it all, he did get a certain amount of writing done over those years. Gustavo Perez, for example, asked him to collaborate in a study for his Centre of Social Investiga¬ tions and Camilo, as usual, could not say no. After all, Gustavo had been his companion on many an early venture, although on their re¬ turn from Europe they had followed quite different paths. Gustavo had gathered round him a team of technicians and began producing little booklets full of statistics on social and socio-religious themes. In a short while he had become the Latin American representative for Father Frangois Houtart’s International Office (FERES) and was handling considerable donations from the German Government and the German Church. Camilo rarely saw his old friend. Gustavo was frequently overseas on fund-raising missions; and even when he was in Bogota, his centre for the publication of ecclesiastical data was of little interest to Camilo. Nonetheless, on just this one occasion Camilo did accept Gustavo’s request and, in collaboration with a social in¬ vestigator, wrote up a brief evaluation of the Radio Schools of Sutatenza. The Radio Schools had begun to flourish in Camilo’s seminary days and their efficient director, Monsignor Jose Joaquin Salcedo, had become a veritable tycoon at the head of a powerful propaganda machine. Through his radio programs Salcedo exerted an enormous influence on the Colombian masses, and his aim was similar to that of Communal Action: to inculcate the need for hygiene, better fertilizers, good manners, anything in fact which served to divert popular resent¬ ment away from the true causes of the people’s sufferings. Radio Sutatenza fed the public a substantial diet of religion—obedience, sub¬ mission and brotherly love—while enkindling in the listeners an in¬ tense hatred of Communists. Camilo’s evaluation of Sutatenza, drawn up in 1960, was largely descriptive. Only in his conclusions was there a hint of his new think¬ ing on the subject of basic education and mass movements. He noted the growing disproportion between the admirable technical and cul¬ tural goals held up to the Colombians and the grim reality of the country’s stagnating and unchanged social patterns. “The radio

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schools’ achievement has been predominantly educationalist,” he wrote, “but has not included enough material on the complete reform of society’s structures.” Camilo’s criticism was mild, as yet, and tenta¬ tive. He showed signs of increasing radicalism on a trip to Caracas in April of 1961. The trip began tamely enough. He and Orlando Fals had both been invited to read papers at the Sixth Latin American Sociology Congress. They decided to travel together, and when they got out to the airport to take their plane for Venezuela they found a few familiar faces on the same flight. Gustavo Perez Was there with his smart executive brief case, and a cluster of bishops was going aboard on their way to Rome. Everyone greeted everyone else most politely, but the cordial smiles were deceptive. The bishops looked askance at the two modern clerics engaged in secular activities, es¬ pecially at Camilo gadding about with that well-known Protestant university man. (Fals had been the butt of many attacks from the clergy for professing to be an elder of the Presbyterian Church; they felt that he might at least have had the decency to hush it up.) Gustavo and Camilo both regarded the bishops much as children look at jelly fish—with a curiosity and amusement tempered by the sobering thought that, if poked, they might sting. Orlando viewed the bishops with frank hostility. And to complete the circle of sidelong glances, Gustavo felt that both Camilo and Orlando were chuckling up their sleeves at him. He had become a sort of entrepreneur and international public relations man, while his friend Camilo was a much-soughtafter luminary amongst avant-garde intellectuals. Whether Camilo was chuckling or not, Gustavo was aware that his image was wrong. This varied company journeyed together as far as Caracas, where Camilo and Orlando said good-bye to the others and joined their sociology congress. The congress itself was uneventful. It was stacked with North American experts and old-guard Latin American professors reading long rigmaroles. Camilo had recourse to a chapter of his memoire, as there was no time to write something fresh, but he was by no means the only participant to serve up the rehash of an old study. In any case Camilo’s report on Bogota’s low standard of living was new to most of those present and was well received. His introductory re-

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marks, written for the occasion, gave a slightly different slant to his original thesis. He referred to the “proletarization” of Colombian workers and the “disguised unemployment” of many city dwellers, terms which he had not used in the memoire he wrote for Monsieur Urbain. However, the congress was not much more than a pretext for visiting Venezuela, where Camilo was anxious to make new contacts. The caraquenos exuded tropical warmth and hospitality and it did not take Camilo long to get his finger on the Venezuelan pulse. One of his Venezuelan colleagues, Jose Agustin Silva, whisked him away from the boring congress to an informal student debate at the Central University. The subject was revolution. When Silva appeared with his cura friend there was an awkward moment for everyone until Camilo put them at their ease by joining quite naturally in the con¬ versation. The youthful speakers were discussing another, very different con¬ gress which had taken place in Venezuela a month earlier: that of the Venezuelan Communist Party at which the comrades had voted, for the first time, in favour of guerrilla warfare. The students noticed from the way he talked that Camilo was not shocked at the thought of guerrilla fighting. He was just keen to learn. They explained to him that the student movement in Venezuela had entered a new phase. The Cuban line of armed insurgence had been unanimously accepted by the revolutionary youth and the Central University of Caracas was converted into a kind of general headquarters, recruiting station and arsenal for the armed forces of the Communist Party. Jose Silva told Camilo that ten out of the twelve male graduates from his sociology class had left to join the guerrillas. The Venezuelan stu¬ dents were taking Che Guevara’s thesis to heart: they would create revolutionary conditions through a “focus of insurgents.” In fact they would create several focuses. It sounded extraordinary. Camilo wondered if it would work. The students carried off their unusual cura to somebody’s flat and whole nights were spent in lengthy discussions interspersed with song and dance. Camilo surprised the caraquenos by his virtuosity on the bongo drums. Revolution and rum were mixed in plentiful doses while the Venezuelans underlined for Camilo a few important facts about their country.

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Venezuela had one of the richest oil deposits in the world, they reminded him, and for over thirty years her ruling classes had been prostituting it in exchange for refrigerators and radios, nylon shirts and tinned ham. “We produce almost nothing of our own,” they said. “We depend completely on the United States.” They showed him that this was the root cause of all the misery he could see, and Camilo could see easily enough the wooden hovels piled in their thou¬ sands one upon another up the steep hills of Caracas. Not all the flashy apartment buildings could block them out of sight. The caraquenos mostly lived in makeshift huts perched above freeways. “There you see what the gringos have done for us,” his friends remarked ironi¬ cally, pointing out the contrast. They recounted for him the history of the rise and fall of their military dictator, Perez Jimenez, an episode so similar to that of Gen¬ eral Rojas that Camilo could hardly believe it was a coincidence. It was no coincidence, they assured him; it had happened everywhere in South America. The fifties had been the decade of the generals; a rash of epaulettes had broken out all over the continent. Then, towards the end of the fifties, the generals fell like ninepins and were re¬ placed in each country by almost identical pseudo-democracies whose leaders mouthed the same phrases, ran up the same debts and sank their people into the same ever-deepening misery. “We have our Romulo Betancourt,” they said, “and you have your Alberto Lleras— two of a kind. And both began their careers as Communists!” But the problem was not Lleras or Betancourt. “The tin-pot presidents and dictators are only puppets. The bosses are the gringos, they are the real enemy. And they won’t let us go without a fight, you’ll see.” The caraquenos quoted from the greatest caraqueno of all, the Libertador Simon Bolivar, who had prophesied more than a century earlier that “the United States seemed destined by Providence to in¬ flict a plague of misery on America in the name of freedom.” His prophetic words did not appear in the official history books. They cut too close to the bone. Camilo went back to Bogota in mid-April. The day after his return home, news broke that United States mercenaries had invaded Cuba. Latin Americans waited dumbfounded for further reports. Erroneous United Press dispatches told of Castro’s ignominious fall. Then, after

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three days, the astounding truth came through: the expeditionary force was on its way to Havana all right—in prison trucks! For the first time in the long history of aggression a United States Army force had been defeated in Latin America. Revolutionary spirits ran high. And Camilo began to understand better why his Venezuelan friends were following the Cuban path. f

Even had Camilo been close to revolutionary movements in his own country—which he was not—he would have found little to compare with the Venezuelan’s ardour for guerrilla combat. True, Antonio Larrotta had founded his Seventh of January Move¬ ment (the MOEC) in 1959 and urged his followers to take up arms. But at the end Larrotta went into battle alone. He came back from a trip to Cuba in 1961 convinced of Che Guevara’s “focus” theory, but giving it an original Colombian twist. The revolutionary war in Co¬ lombia, as Larrotta saw it, should take advantage of a very singular local phenomenon: the bands of armed peasants who had been roam¬ ing the provinces since the days when the Violence was at its height. Larrotta intrepidly joined such a band with the intention of converting it to the cause of the revolution. But he overlooked the fact that his rustic companions already owed allegiance to unscrupulous gang leaders who, in turn, obeyed orders from political party bosses. The leader of Larrotta’s band, a man known as “Little Eagle,” was at¬ tracted by the price the police had put on Larrotta’s head. Before long Little Eagle rode into town for the reward, carrying the student leader’s body in an old sack. Students in Bogota were horrified at this news and for a long time to come would evoke the memory and heroic example of Antonio Larrotta. But this did not mean that they subscribed to his ideas on revolutionary war. For them the process of change was longer and slower, and their various conflicting theories created a wide gamut of Organizations, from wishy-washy reformist movements to extreme radical sects. Camilo’s opinion of the different tendencies was as vague as his knowledge of them was scant. He had viewed them all from afar. Now he began to draw nearer, to listen, and to weigh up the various opinions. His visit to Venezuela and the Cubans’ victory were a turn-

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ing point for him. Hitherto he had not been accustomed to focus things from a political viewpoint. He had tended to identify politics with string-pulling, and abhorred the Colombian clergy’s habit of med¬ dling in public affairs everywhere from the village pump to the presi¬ dential palace. As a reaction he had been inclined to exclude any kind of political activity as contrary to his ideal of the priesthood. He had a purer, a more spiritual concept of the priest’s mission. The priest should by no means disregard political realities, but he should re¬ main over and above particular party options. His role was that of prophet, the denouncer of injustices wherever they might be found, in one camp or in another. But now Camilo began to have second thoughts and realized the decisive importance of political factors. He examined the forces of opposition which had sprung up to coun¬ teract the two-party system devised by Alberto Lleras and saw that, numerically at least, the strongest opposition to the National Front Government was that led by Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, son of the Liberal caudillo of the thirties. By 1961, Lopez’s rabble-rousing and his mass movement were providing a much needed safety valve for popular unrest. For the Colombian people were still hungry and, under Lleras, getting hungrier. All the demagogic claptrap about freedom and the overthrow of the tyrant had begun to pall. The people cared little whether the government chose to call itself a democracy or a dictator¬ ship. What they did care about was the fact that ordinary foodstuffs were often too dear for them to buy, that their children had no schools, that when they fell ill medicines were too costly for them to afford and, in the country, the landlords still hunted them off their lands. The people of Tunjuelito, for example, did not need to be experts in high finance in order to see how bad things were getting. In the newspapers and on the radio they heard Presidente Lleras bragging of the great improvements he had wrought in the national economy. He declared that he had greatly reduced the immense debt left by Rojas, but he reduced it by borrowing even more heavily than Rojas had done from United States banks and agencies, and when the time for repayment came, the official economists published newspaper articles regretting “a certain imbalance in the terms of exchange.” Not

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all their readers were deceived by this euphemism; what the econo¬ mists had meant was that the Americans were buying Colombian coffee cheaper and selling machinery dearer, as well as charging in¬ creasing interest on outstanding debts. The country was near to bankruptcy. Yet Lleras always came up with a solution, the same solution: he asked for more loans. This management of the country in the sole interests of big ex¬ porters and importers and foreign firms inevitably engendered bitter resentment, and past history had shown that the angry masses were dangerous if their protests were not given an outlet and a vehicle of expression. Thus Alfonso Lopez, Jr., in his father’s best tradition, lent the oligarchy a helping hand and, like his father, did so in the name of revolution. He launched the Revolutionary Liberal Move¬ ment (the MRL). Camilo could not help thinking that history was repeating itself; politicians were blathering just what their predecessors with identical names had been blathering when he was a boy. The new Alfonso Lopez was cut out for the role of an intellectual rather than for that of political agitator, but this only made him more useful. The Liberal businessmen who financed his MRL watched ap¬ provingly as it attracted some of the best talents of the intelligentsia. The movement caught on amongst student leaders as well and soon catered for them with a section called MRL Youth, into which streamed a motley crowd of opportunists, idealists and genuine revolu¬ tionaries. Only time would separate the sheep from the goats. The political secretary of MRL Youth was Camilo’s old friend Luis Villar, back from Berlin and hailed by the Left as its most brilliant writer and energetic spokesman. Luis was teaching law at a semiprivate university which had become a hot-bed of rebellion, the socalled Free University (Universidad Libre). The Libre was a much more concentrated centre of radical student activity than the National University. While Camilo’s pupils at the National still confined them¬ selves to internal student debates, Luis Villar’s Liberal Youth were marching in their red berets and calling down curses on the oligarchy. So were the MOEC firebrands. But the people who made the most noise,

Camilo

thought,

were not necessarily the most revolu¬

tionary. It cost nothing, for example, to praise the valiant Cubans;

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everyone did so, from the most barefaced opportunists to the most generous idealists, from Alfonso Lopez to the late Antonio Larrotta. In 1960, when Luis Villar went off to Cuba at the head of the Colombian delegation to the First Congress of Latin American Youth in Havana, Camilo stayed behind to keep up the work at Tunjuelito with his band of dedicated followers. “Be careful of Camilo,” Luis warned them half-jokingly. “He might do you some harm with that toxic Christianity of his.” Camilo, on his side, smiled to see what an odd assortment of students Luis was taking to Havana. There were delegates from the most diverse groups imaginable, frbm unheard-of little clubs like the Progressive Conservatives no less than from the mass youth organization of the Communist Party. This vaguely radical conglomeration of students came back from Havana with only a vaguely radical statement: they condemned im¬ perialism, foreign intervention and so forth in a very general way. Concrete plans for insurgence were also being made both in Havana and in Colombia, but that sort of thing was done discreetly backstage. The ones who were laying the foundations of a clandestine army and preparing for future battles of longer duration were young men who did not figure prominently at all, and it was with them that Camilo was destined to throw in his lot. But as yet he did not know them. And observing the Havana Congress from the outside, he saw it as a heterogeneous melting pot of student protesters. Even as such the congress served its purpose. It helped fix the attention of Latin American students on the Cuban people’s effort to redistribute land and vary and increase their productivity. The stu¬ dents became more and more sympathetic towards the island revolu¬ tion and came to look upon Cuba’s struggle as their own. All the more fierce therefore were their feelings of indignation as first the Eisen¬ hower and then the Kennedy administration did everything possible to cripple the Cuban economy and bring the Castro regime down. This growing hostility towards the United States turned to utter contempt in April 1961 with the Bay of Pigs invasion, and then to astonishment and elation as the Cuban people closed ranks behind Fidel and fought tooth and nail until they had captured the invaders or driven them into the sea. Latin America stood by amazed, watching David slay Goliath. The imperialist giant was not invincible after all.

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The invasion of Cuba, despite its failure, was a warning to any other U.S. colony which might entertain thoughts of secession. It forced Camilo to take a harder look at his country’s underdevelopment and made him more convinced than ever that all the American talk about “developing countries” was a lot of euphemistic twaddle. If anything was developing in Colombia, it was her own underdevelop¬ ment—in leaps and bounds. The majority of Colombians lived and worked like slaves in order that the Americans could live like princes and the Colombian upper classes like kings. The kings had surrounded themselves over the years with an ever-widening circle of courtiers —what President Kennedy hopefully called “the new Latin American middle

class”:

executives,

technicians,

bureaucrats,

white-collar

workers in general. Camilo himself was one of their number, and tomorrow his pupils would join the throng. They gave Colombia a superficial air of prosperity, which deceived the cursory glancer; the cities'had grown, and visiting tourists or businessmen could drive from the international airports to their Hilton hotels on double-lane highways. But a closer scrutiny revealed that things had not improved since the Roaring Twenties and the days of the Dancing Millions. If anything, they had got worse. Camilo and his friends began to analyze all this with a more critical eye. Looking back over recent events, they remembered how Antonio Larrotta had taken the students into the streets and, once there, dis¬ covered that bus-fare increases were not the mere caprice of suchand-such a president; they had to do with gasoline prices which, in turn, were contingent upon the exploiting of oil deposits. From be¬ neath the particular economic dispute one could always unearth a hidden chain of dependence linking Colombia to American monop¬ olies. If Antonio Larrotta’s one-man stand had been ill advised, the Venezuelan students’ plan for guerrilla warfare sounded more con¬ vincing. In Colombia discussions began in earnest about the precise role of the students in the anti-imperialist war. Some were for joining the peasants and organizing a people’s army. At the opposite pole were those who sought after .seats in Parliament in order, they said, to change the system slowly from within. Every possible shade of revolu¬ tionary theory blossomed between these two extremes and, over the

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early years of the sixties, the students were locked in interminable quarrels. Carnilo listened to those quarrels, still very much from the wings. The complex array of student organizations, each one of a different hue-the MOEC, the UNEC, the CEUC, the JMRL and the JUCO —with their multiplicity of initials and slogans all ran together for him into a confused blur. Only in mid-1961 did they begin to fall into place and he could distinguish somewhat between one faction and another. He was still trying to fit together the pieces of this jigsaw puzzle when one of his pupils, a girl militant of the Communist Youth organi¬ zation, accosted him with the proposition that he attend some party congress in Moscow. Carnilo had little taste for political manoeuvres and even less for the opportunism of the Communist Party. “No thanks.” He laughed, “The day I decide to get mixed up in politics, I’ll hang up my cassock and grab a gun!” He said it as a joke. From the very beginning of his busy days at the university, Carnilo escaped whenever he could into the silence of the countryside, to some monastery in the hills or somebody’s cabin, to meditate and pray. He hated to miss a retreat and at the end of their first year together in the chaplaincy he grabbed hold of Enrique Acosta. “Come on, Enrique,” he said, “the annual retreat for the clergy is on this week.” “But who’ll keep shop here?” Enrique objected. “They can get along without us,” Carnilo replied. “If we don’t make our retreat now with the others there won’t be another chance this year.” Enrique was still reluctant. “Those priests who give the talks are an awful bore,” he said, pouting. “Well, if we don’t like the talks we can take it in turns to preach to one another. But let’s go anyway.” And Carnilo dragged off his unwilling confrere. This hankering after peaceful cloisters was a characteristic of Carnilo unsuspected even by many of his close friends. Just occasion¬ ally the Tunjuelito gang noticed it. Most of his co-workers in the faculty and men he met every day on committees would hardly have

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believed it. His fellow-priests took it for granted that he practised the customs peculiar to their state of life, but few of them saw Camilo nowadays as he was caught up in a world very different from theirs. The only ones who observed Camilo at close quarters in the cele¬ bration of the Mass, for example, were the Catholic students who gathered round him for counsel and spiritual guidance, and they knew that their chaplain was a contemplative person. All his gaiety and activism did not disguise that fact from this inner circle. He formed them into a group called “the Community” which met each week to read gospel passages together and make a kind of communal examina¬ tion of conscience called “the review of life.” They also studied seriously and prepared papers both on theological and social problems and were incorporated into the work at Tunjuelito and new projects which Camilo opened up in other poor areas of Bogota. But the specifically different thing about the Community was its Christian motivation. “As far as the socio-economic structures of the country are concerned,” its members stated in their constitution, “our duty is to prepare ourselves to give them the change they need with an eye to bringing men to God—at a later stage.” If Camilo and his little band of disciples seemed to postpone for a future date their strictly religious task of bringing men to God, they did so out of respect for a world hostile to their Christian beliefs. It was nonsense to talk to others of love for the Church when most of their friends had no other notion of the Church than what they saw every day in the newspapers—photographs of the papal nuncio at cocktail parties or of bishops blessing public works and army tanks. The members of the Community kept quiet and fostered their love for a church of the catacombs, a hidden unobtrusive powerhouse. They felt as if they possessed some secret code which bound them together and made their meetings unforgettable. Their weekly Eucharist—they no longer used the word Mass—was the most memorable meeting of all. Camilo had brought back from France a new concept of what this ritual should be. The priest no longer bent over the altar, his back to the people, muttering mys¬ terious Latin words. He faced the congregation across a table—the altar was greatly simplified now—and they prayed together in Spanish. These were the beginnings of the liturgical renewal and were exciting

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and revolutionary, especially as Camilo was the first to introduce them into Colombia. By means of the reformed liturgy and the creation of study circles, Camilo put new life into the chaplaincy and on the whole Enrique Acosta was pleased with his assistant, even though Camilo had rather turned things upside down. For example the debates between Marxists and Christians, which Enrique had sponsored for the pur¬ pose of defending the faith and refuting false doctrine, did not last long under Camilo’s direction. The new chaplain was not intransigent enough with his adversaries; he let them gain a poiift or two; and Enrique Acosta tended to consider a drawn match against the Com¬ munists as tantamount to a defeat for the Church. Enrique intended to make the Church’s presence felt amongst the intellectuals whether they liked it or not. To that end he invoked a statute law obliging the university’s governing body “to establish in all the faculties, by agreement between the chaplaincy and the deans, professorships

which

directly or

indirectly would

teach

Christian culture.” It was his intention to enforce that law, but with Camilo’s arrival he found himself revising the idea. Camilo showed him that, instead of trying to impose religion on all and sundry, it made more sense to cultivate small groups, elites as he called them, while attending to the general student body in other ways. Enrique agreed, and the chaplains began drumming up support for students in need of financial help and organized residences for country boys and girls. Also under Camilo’s influence they gave the new French look to their public liturgies—feast-day Masses, funerals and weddings. The chapel was artistically decorated with not too many statues and flowers. Choir singing improved as the familiar ditties about “gentle Jesus meek and mild” were replaced by the psalms of David. Holy scripture was read clearly and in Spanish. And everything went so smoothly, especially when it was Camilo’s turn to officiate, that people wondered how they had put up with the old way for so many years. The chapel was never overcrowded, but the congregations did grow perceptibly, in part at least because they liked to see Camilo celebrate. He was serious and concentrated and gave the ceremony something extra which they found hard to put their finger on. When

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he said Mass, he seemed to be looking inwards on some hidden mystery. Yet he was quite natural, and struck a happy mean between the over-hieratical and the plain pedestrian. At the altar he used his strong, tapering hands in the studied and disciplined movements of ritual. But when the moment came for the sermon he gestured hardly at all and spoke in a very unaffected way. This simple fact had a stunning effect on his hearers. Priests never got up to preach without adopting a special pulpit tone and a language of mystical cliches. There was something incongruous about hearing themes like Christian love spoken of in church in a weekday voice, and that very incon¬ gruity made people listen. Camilo mixed the sublime not with the ridiculous but with the com¬ monplace. He was humourous at times, but without trying to be funny, as happened, for example, the day a man asked to receive Com¬ munion before Mass. Camilo gladly complied with his request, but as he came down the altar steps to the kneeling man, he saw quite a crowd surging forward towards him, all with the intention of com¬ municating. Camilo paused, looked down quickly at the ciborium— the golden vessel he held in his hands containing the consecrated wafers—and addressed the people. “Dear brothers in Christ,” he began apologetically. “I think it would be advisable if those who are not in a special hurry would wait to receive Communion at the appropriate time in the Mass. In the first place,” he continued, beginning a short liturgical instruction, “in the first place because now that we understand better the structure of the Mass we see that the offering of our gift is what naturally comes first. This is followed by the consecration of that gift when it becomes the Body of Christ. And only then is it returned to us as the Bread of Life in the moment of Communion. That is the main reason why we should wait to communicate at the end of Mass. And in the second place,” he glanced down at the ciborium again and back at the people, “in the second place,” he repeated, “we’re right out of Hosts!” A titter of laughter ran through the chapel. It did not seriously shat¬ ter the sacred moment but did allow the frustrated communicants to return good-humouredly to their pews. These Masses appealed to a much wider public than the catacomb Eucharists of the Community. Even some of Camilo’s half-baked

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atheists would straggle into the chapel for a look and often stayed behind afterwards to talk things over. Amongst those who appeared unexpectedly one day was an art student from Popayan. The “mitred town” of Popayan, as Colombians called it, was a slice of old Spain, all cluttered up with convents and bell towers and hooded monks. It was the headquarters of Colombia’s inquisition and its sons turned out either devout Catholics or obdurate renegades. Alvaro, the art student, was still undecided on which of the two he would be. Camilo had often found him with his nose buried in the Bible or some book of magic and myths, but he had never come near the chapel, and Camilo was surprised when he suddenly turned up saying that he wanted to receive Communion. “Why do you want to do that?” Camilo asked. “I don’t know,” said Alvaro, “I think I want to make an act of faith in your faith—or something like that. It will be my first Com¬ munion, you know.” Camilo was hesitant, and Alvaro insisted that it was all right as he had been baptized and everything. “We’re all very Catholic really,” he assured Camilo. “It’s just that none of us went back to church after what they did to our aunt.” Camilo was intrigued. “What ever did they do to your aunt?” “They excommunicated her. It was for breaking some Church law which forbade lay women to enter episcopal chambers. Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. As my aunt told them, there were extenuating cir¬ cumstances. After all, the bishop was her brother. Besides that, he was dead. She had gone in to lay out the body, you see. But she was not let off. They showed her the pertinent canon in black and white and she was excommunicated. She made a joke of it and had cards printed commemorating her ‘First Ex-Communion.’ But after what had happened we all developed a kind of allergy against the Church.” Alvaro was certainly the most comic of all Camilo’s scruffy and unlikely flock. He was a sort of stray sheep who had come back to the fold for a nibble of old pastures before straying away again. The pastor Camilo kept the gate permanently on its hinge so that sheep like Alvaro could stray in and stray out at will. He was amused and a little touched to see the art student kneeling like a lamb before the

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altar during Mass next day, and Camilo, without any comment, placed the white Host reverently on his tongue. You know,” Alvaro remarked to his friends later on, “Camilo never even asked me afterwards what I had felt or anything. He just gave me Communion, with no strings attached!” Camilo dispensed spiritual gifts with a free hand and never asked anyone to render an account. He had reduced Christianity to its essentials. After bearing for so long the scars of seminary training— the fear of dissipation, the morbid longing for slights and rebuffs, the unnatural sublimation of sexual appetites—he had sloughed them off and let all his Restrepo realism and spontaneity come to the surface. Even his overlay of Christianity gave him greater freedom, not less. It obliged him only to love. But not in a sloppy, sentimental way. Christianity meant just one thing, Camilo said, to “love efficaciously.” Glad of this new freedom, he felt sorry for those who were still being ground through the religious mill, and once when he found a troubled seminarian fretting about distractions in prayer, Camilo ad¬ vised the young man to think less about himself. “The problem is not to pray more,” he said, “it is to love people more. Over this last year I’ve done less praying—I’ve loved the Boss less if you like—but I’ve loved more, and anything that’s love is good.” The seminarian was puzzled. This did not sound at all like the Camilo he had known a few years before. When he confessed to Camilo his temptations against purity and spoke of his efforts to combat them by reciting rosaries to the Virgin Mary, his unbelieving ears heard Camilo telling him that what he needed to help him over his scruples was one of those blondes they get out in the Esquire magazines. The poor lad was aghast. This was decidedly not the Camilo he had known. Soon stories reached him that Camilo had approved of kissing and girl friends for priests and seminarians, and his worst suspicions were confirmed. Once these alarming stories and garbled versions of Camilo’s new theology began doing the rounds of parish rectories, it was only a matter of time before he would be obliged to leave the chaplaincy at the National. The same tongues that had wagged incessantly about his mother began to wag about him. He was seen in parked cars late at night, they said, and not unaccompanied either. Who knows what

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he was up to? He goes around the university with girls in slacks! And that Communist girl who won the beauty contest at the National is a very close friend of his—you know, the one who wheedled her way into a job as the bishop’s secretary only to steal confidential papers. One important cleric quite exploded. “The majority of the people who surround Your Reverence,” he told Camilo, “are enemies of the clergy and of the Church’s works. And your commentaries, your criticisms, your whole way of acting affords them a golden opportu¬ nity to further their evil desires! ” The more benign, if less original, of his critics reminded their listeners that it was not the poor boy’s fault; there was insanity—not to mention other things!—in the family; and to make matters worse, he was living with his mother, which was scarcely a healthy influence on him. People, apparently friendly people, invited him home for a drink, and bragged to their neighbours next day that he was “at our place until all hours last night, full of whisky!” This gossip battered on the eardrums of the old archbishop until he grew tired of hearing the name Camilo Torres. It was no longer Crisanto Luque who sat in the archbishop’s palace. Luque was dead, and Monsignor Luis Concha had succeeded at last to the primacy of the Church in Colombia. Cardinal Concha, a froglike little man al¬ ready in the autumn of his life, viewed Camilo, as he viewed most people, with a cold eye. He did not like what they told him about the young priest, but the evidence was still too flimsy for him to act upon it. He would wait and see. At the end of 1961, Camilo invited the cardinal to preside at the first student graduation at the new sociology school and bless the faculty buildings. The old man accepted and sat up on a dais between the rector and the Minister of Education while Camilo and other speakers praised the harmonious relations existing between people of diverse ideologies within the school, from the pupils themselves up to their distinguished dean, Orlando Fals Borda. “That Protestant!” thought the cardinal at the mention of the dean’s name, but he made a supreme effort and puffed out his face in an appropriate smile. Frankly he would have preferred not to be rubbing shoulders with so many leftish intellectuals and heretics and free-thinkers, and seeing Camilo so obviously at home amongst them only increased his doubts

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about the young priest. However, he still hesitated to take measures for fear that the Church might lose one of its precarious footholds in this noticeably non-Catholic atmosphere. So the cardinal left things as they were for the moment and was still ruminating on the problem when a storm broke over Camilo’s head in the first months of 1962. During a casual meeting with Monsignor Jose Joaquin Salcedo of the Sutatenza Radio Schools, Camilo had made a few honest remarks about the possible harm some of the radio programs and related publications might be causing. He meant to be friendly and helpful, but the priest-tycoon took umbrage. Salcedo had come up the hard way. From assistant priest in the one-horse country town of Suta¬ tenza he had risen to the top of the radio world in Latin America. He had put Sutatenza and himself on the map, and he would brook no criticism from this Bogota brat with his fancy surnames and overseas education. First he detailed his secretary to deal with the matter. There fol¬ lowed a courteous exchange of letters in which Camilo outlined some of his criticisms to the secretary and awaited further developments. Maybe it was Camilo’s quiet self-assuredness that most riled the mag¬ nate monsignor, for he suddenly did an about-face and forbade his underling to have further correspondence with Father Torres. He would handle the affair himself. He then sent Camilo a scorching letter demanding exact and detailed proof of all accusations and refusing to furnish back numbers of Sutatenza’s publications or to allow his secretary to visit Camilo’s office. He could not have been more of¬ fensive. Camilo had not expected this and wisely let a few weeks go by be¬ fore replying so as not to allow any “emotional overtones,” as he said, to creep in and cloud the issue. A sound intuition told him that calm self-possession was his strongest weapon, even stronger perhaps than the justice of his case. When he did finally send off his answer to the infuriated mon¬ signor, Camilo put his case clearly and with irrefutable logic, citing from Salcedo’s publication El Campesino (The Countryman) unmis¬ takable examples of defamations, calumnies and lies. One of Sal¬ cedo’s victims was Camilo’s pupil Maria Arango, who had been

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elected girl of the year at the National University, more on her merits as a student leader than on any claim to glamour. Maria’s fame as a militant of the Communist Party had been enough for Salcedo to publish the story about her having stolen official papers from a bishop’s secretariat for some vague, sinister purpose. Camilo demon¬ strated that the secretariat in question had denied any loss of docu¬ ments. He also drew attention to the fact that Salcedo’s blind anti¬ communism had led him to take all reformist movements, even the mildest governmental ones, for the most hair-raising subversive plots. “This makes the position of El Campesino seem rather ridiculous,” Camilo observed. But his gravest accusation was that El Campesino's anti-communist propaganda incited people to hatred and “occasioned if not caused” continued pockets of violence around the country. He mentioned certain villages which illustrated his point. To conclude, he reminded Salcedo that this antagonistic method of conducting the whole debate was not at all to his liking and had been forced upon him by the monsignor himself. What he had hoped for was “a Christian and fraternal dialogue between two priests.” Salcedo brought the unpleasant correspondence to a close on May 4 with a brief and menacing note. “At the opportune moment, and when the personnel of this institution has finished putting together the relevant documentation, this office will present formal charges against Your Reverence to the competent ecclesiastical authorities.” This was pure bluff, as Camilo had not left him a leg to stand on. But Salcedo was a very powerful man, and Camilo knew that no one who crossed swords with him got off lightly. He also guessed, cor¬ rectly, that everyone in the diocesan chancery was talking about that young pup Torres daring to pit himself against such a respectable churchman as Monsignor Salcedo. Echoes of this reached the cardinal, but as it was not a matter directly connected with the university, he once again delayed his decision. Exactly a month later, on an evening in June, other echoes, much more strident ones, disturbed the quiet of the cardinal’s study. The little old man got up from his desk, nervously adjusting his scarlet sash. He went over to the window and looked down upon the Plaza

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Bolivar, where a crowd of student demonstrators were waving placards and shouting. His Eminence’s bifocals did not permit him to make out the legends the students had hastily scrawled, nor was his hearing acute enough to catch the exact phrases they were shouting. But he quickly got the gist of their message when he saw several youths let fly a few hefty stones which clunked against the palace walls and hammered on the door. The cardinal’s glazy eye took in the scene with manifest displeasure, and he shuddered as he heard a crack of splintered glass down below. He pulled the curtain across and with¬ drew, muttering some inaudible words which did not sound like a prayer. He would find out who was behind this violent display against the Church. He suspected the nest of Communists in the sociology faculty. Sure enough, his informants next morning confirmed his suspi¬ cions. One of the ring-leaders, they told him, was that Communist beauty queen, Maria Arango, the one who got around in blue jeans and had stolen the bishop’s secret documents. She was a pupil and close friend of Father Torres, who had actually defended her in his polemics with Monsignor Salcedo. With this information fresh in his mind, the cardinal scowled as he went down to inspect his fagade. Fortunately the damage done to the palace was slight. The students were apparently running out of stones by the time they got up to the Plaza Bolivar, having spent their best ammunition on the offices of the daily paper El Tiempo. “Well thank God for that anyway,” said the cardinal as he puffed back up the stairs. President Lleras sent his Minister of Government around to offer him official condolences for the outrage perpetrated against the palace, and His Eminence thanked him politely though the minister could see that the smashed window pane still rankled. In the events of the previous evening there had been much more than met the eye—the cardinal’s eye, at any rate. The student demon¬ stration, held as a protest against the Army’s occupation of two provincial universities the week before, had been carried through without incident, and only after its dispersal did a few unidentified anarchists begin to make trouble. The student organizers, well aware that stone-throwing did not favour their cause, had done their best

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to prevent any unpleasantness and made a few guesses at who might have provoked the skirmishes. Stray hoodlums and looters along Seventh Avenue were always apt to take advantage of a crowd, and one could not discount either the odd student carried away by the heat of the moment. But the violent outburst bore all the hallmarks of a job done by agents provocateurs planted amongst the students. Certainly the authorities made great capital of it. The rector of the National immediately published the names of ten students whom he dubbed ring-leaders of the rioting and summarily expeljed them from the university. The popular Maria Arango figured on the list, not be¬ cause the rector had any evidence of her conduct on the evening of the happenings, but because she was “known to all the world,” he said, “as one of the regular student agitators and strike organizers.” Camilo liked Maria and admired her courage. He did not agree with all her political tenets—she was the girl who had invited him to Moscow—but that was beside the point. She and nine others were being treated with complete disregard for justice. There had been no investigation and no trial—just an arbitrary dismissal. Camilo was brooding on this when he walked into the chaplaincy the next day and Enrique Acosta could see that his young assistant was not his usual bright self. They talked the matter over and Enrique tried to persuade him that all was well. “Those students they’ve expelled,” he pointed out, “have had it coming to them for a long time. They’ve been the cause of all the trouble here, and now that they’re gone the rest of the students can get on with their studies in peace. Good riddance is what I say.” Enrique made Camilo boil inside, but he kept his patience. It was all too true that once the leaders were dismissed the great student masses would be led like sheep and give themselves over wholly to their chief aim in life, the obtaining of a diploma. There would be no questioning of anything any more, which was precisely what people like Enrique and the rector wanted. Camilo did not feel like discuss¬ ing it. He just warned Enrique that he was not going to let matters rest. “What are you planning to do?” Enrique asked.

“I’ll get our faculty to make an appeal,” Camilo replied. Enrique was startled at this news. “But that will look bad,” he said.

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“It will make you appear to be undermining the rector’s authority.” “Look, Enrique,” said Camilo firmly, “tomorrow we might be the ones to be victimized because our ideology is not acceptable to the authorities, and if we don’t act now, we will have no right to com¬ plain then.” He headed for the door. “Why not ask the cardinal for his opinion?” Enrique called after him. Camilo made no comment. He just turned and looked quizzically at his dumpy friend before going out. He made for the faculty room where Orlando Fals and others were huddled together lamenting the turn events had taken. Camilo con¬ vinced them that if the great majority of deans and professors were lying low and accepting the rector’s decision, this did not justify the shrugging of shoulders. He drafted a blunt statement of protest which he and his fellow-members of the faculty’s Administrative Council signed and sent off at once to the university’s governing body. Thus the directors of the sociology school, being practically the only ones to contest the rector’s edict, found themselves overnight at the centre of a national debate. In the midst of the subsequent furore Camilo unwittingly put the seal on his own fate by a routine sermon he preached. The following Saturday was the anniversary of the student massacres of June 1954, and Camilo, following the annual custom, celebrated a memorial Mass for the fallen in the university chapel. In his homily he paid tribute to the student victims of the military dictatorship, and said something to the effect that even though they might not all have been of the Catholic faith, so long as they had lived and died in accordance with their convictions they had surely won eternal salvation. It was a trite enough remark and would normally not have kept the congregation from drowsing. But on this particular morning, only four days after the cardinal’s broken window, the slightest praise for stu¬ dents coming from Camilo was dynamite. The young churchgoers streamed out of the chapel cheering Camilo for his hard-hitting ad¬ dress. What had he said? people asked. He said that even the Com¬ munists will go to heaven as long as they fight for the cause, the students answered. Or something like that. No one seemed to know

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exactly what he had said, not even Camilo himself, but as things turned out he was sorry it had not been something stronger. For the fat was well and truly in the fire. This being so, Camilo threw himself into the fray and backed the students to the hilt. The appeal from the sociology school had given the protesters fresh impetus and under the pressure of growing op¬ position the rector declared the university closed until the end of August. This was a routine ploy designed to break up the student movement by sending everyone home for a while; however, the Stu¬ dent Council voted against the closure and canvassed for professors willing to continue their classes against the rector’s ruling. Camilo was one of the few prepared to risk it. At this point the students convoked a special assembly and, sometime after midnight, amidst raucous applause, declared Camilo rector of the National University. The cardinal’s anger had been mounting as each new report came in, and upon receiving this latest item, he called for his secretary and dictated a snappy letter. The next morning Camilo opened his mail to learn that he had been relieved of his chaplaincy as well as of all teaching posts and administrative functions which he had fulfilled up to that time in any capacity whatsoever within the National University. He would report for duty at the Vera Cruz, an inner-city parish.

Chapter 7

PICKING SIDES

This dismissal was a bit more than Camilo had bargained for. He had expected to be reprimanded. He supposed he would be fired from the chaplaincy. But what surprised him, at first sight, was that the cardinal should want him out of the university altogether. How¬ ever His Eminence had left no room for doubt. His letter was like the old ECISE plans, all-embracing. Camilo picked it up and read it through again, from the “esteemed Father” down to the Luis Concha traced as if on parchment with a quill. Even when read slowly it took only a moment. The cardinal had the gift of brevity. Camilo’s eye rested on the coat-of-arms at the top of the page. He might have enjoyed the intricate pattern of cords and tassels branching out from under the little flying saucer of a hat if his mind had not been on other things. He was interpreting the let¬ ter’s contents. Some would have found little to interpret in such a straightforward communique; but Camilo knew that the machinations which had pro¬ duced it were complicated and sinuous, like the cords and tassels. They originated, no doubt, between the archiepiscopal palace on the plaza and the presidential one just around the corner. For Cardinal Concha was on the very best of terms with the govern¬ ment. His life-long abstention from the political arena, as he liked to imagine it—in other words, his refusal to kowtow to Gomez and the

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Conservatives—had resulted in his very real support for the Liberals. For a bishop in Colombia, whether he realized it or not, genuine neutrality was quite out of the question. Cardinal Luque’s death coin¬ cided with the Liberals return to power in the person of Alberto Lleras, and Concha’s self-styled neutrality was rewarded, albeit rather late in his life, by his being brought from the obscurity of his pro¬ vincial diocese to occupy the primate’s throne in Bogota. The cordial church-state relationship seemed to the cardinal an ideal set-up, and he always lent an attentive ear to tjie government officials who plied between the two palaces. In their recent conversa¬ tions, Camilo reflected, his name must certainly have cropped up. For he had begun to make a nuisance of himself. At the beginning of that same year (1962) he was named to a special Technical Com¬ mittee on agrarian reform whose first mission was the investigation of a dispute between big landlords and subsistence farmers on the Atlantic coast. Camilo took a plane, flew up to the coast and spent a week poking about on the spot, wielding a machete with the farm labourers in the fields and drinking white rum with them late into the warm summer nights. Once it was plain that Camilo was not just one more official technician sent up from Bogota, the Negro cane-cutters and rice-growers took him into their confidence, and Camilo leaned in attentively as they sat around relating their long story of serfdom. For forty years the wealthy local landlord, a senator of the republic, had broken fences and sent his grazing cattle to push the farm-hands down to the edges of the Sinu River. As the Sinu receded the peasants had dug the mud up from the river bed, planting rice and packing up land to build new fields. Time and time again the senator ordered the mayor to send in troops, and over the decades—in 1922, in 1934, in 1947—the farmers were whipped, fired upon, beaten back to the river banks and their humble dwellings burned to the ground. Still the struggle went on. Just the year before, 1961, the mayor had rounded them up behind barbed wire until they had promised to relinquish their “invaded land.” Camilo returned to Bogota with his report. There had been inva¬ sions all right, he said. But the invader was the landlord, not the peasants. He was not back in the capital before the senator of the Sinu Valley had lodged his complaint: the priest was inciting the peas-

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ants to revolt. Camilo was taking his job far too seriously for the Ministry of Agriculture’s liking; and the minister had easy access to the cardinal. What had got the old man’s hackles up, Camilo thought, was not just a string of rumours about his girl friends at the National or the quantity of whisky he was said to consume. There were more serious, more political motives behind his banishment from the university campus. For example, when he was appointed to the board of direc¬ tors of the new Institute for Land Reform (the XNCORA) with the cardinal’s approval at the end of 1961, no one had expected him to start calling into question some of the policies of the Minister of Agriculture. But he had done so. The harmony between church and state was fine. The only fly in the ointment was the obstreperous young Father Torres. Then, to crown everything, he had run foul of the Ministry of Education by siding with a bunch of subversive students against the university’s rector. Mulling it over now with the letter fresh in his hand, Camilo surmised that this last episode must surely have set the cardinal’s telephone ringing. As if it were not bad enough that he should spring to the defence of Maria Arango, one of the other stu¬ dents he had protected was the editor of the medical school’s review Bisturi (The Scalpel) which had published a special—and especially belligerent—issue on the student protest march. While it lamented the rifling of shop windows that had taken place after the march, Bisturi had no tears to shed for the stray stones that had been aimed at the offices of El Tiempo. The editor of Bisturi was an energetic medical student, Julio Cortes, who had risen to the presidency of the Student Council and was in the front line of a national movement for university reform. His passing reference to the attack on El Tiempo as an “inoffensive, if primitive expression of popular feeling” was seized upon as a pre¬ text for curtailing his student leadership. And just as the education authorities were about to remove him, in rushed Camilo once again to spoil their plans. All things considered, the cardinal’s decision to pull him out of the National was nothing to be wondered at. Camilo thought about his next move. He still had plenty of strings to his bow. For the past six months he had been dean of the Social

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Administration Institute in the government school for training public servants, and that new task occupied more and more of his time and his interest. It gave him several advantages over the sociology faculty. As dean he was free to make his own plans; his pupils were related to community development more immediately than university stu¬ dents were, as many of them would be future employees of the land reform institute. Also the school gave him ample scope to travel around the country and conduct courses himself for country people; and, as an added attraction, he had the best secretary iq the world, the Corsican Guitemie, his old friend from Algerian days in Paris, who had come out to Colombia a couple of years before. He had arranged a job for her in the business of one of his wealthy friends where she began to unionize the factory workers and was promptly fired, at which precise moment Camilo needed a secretary at the Public Ad¬ ministration School—the ESAP, as it was called. Guitemie had lost none of her old efficiency and, from the day she moved in, there was never an unanswered letter floating about Camilo’s office. Best of all, she was lively company, and around her and Camilo a very chummy and effective little team of workers went into action on the eleventh floor of the ESAP. This office had become more his headquarters than either the chaplaincy or the faculty, and Camilo put his mind to plotting how not to lose it. For the cardinal had definitely been roused. Intent on getting Camilo settled in a parish, he would certainly want to uproot him from the ESAP. Camilo was not normally given to scheming, but he could do so if the circumstances warranted it. Whenever members of the family caught him at it, they would tease him, saying that his Boyaca side was showing—for the Torres and Umanas from Boyaca were noto¬ riously laconic people whose left hands never knew what was going on in their right. On this occasion Camilo called upon those inbred Boyaca instincts and, with an additional dose of Corsican astuteness supplied by his secretary, decided to beat the cardinal at his own game. He would bring a little more political pressure to bear on the old man, but this time in his own favour. The director of the ESAP, Dr. Guillermo Nannetti, was well im¬ pressed with Camilo and liked the way his work was shaping. When Camilo told him of the threat from the cardinal, Nannetti went around

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at once to speak to His Eminence. Camilo could not suppress a smile. For Nannetti was the brother-in-law of the new President, recently elected as successor to Alberto Lleras. His lucky star and his Boyaca cunning kept Camilo his job at the ESAP. He shortly paid a visit to Cardinal Concha himself and the inter¬ view went off without a hitch. Camilo had made up his mind before¬ hand not to argue wifh His Eminence. The people who expected Camilo to get up on his high horse and resign from his priestly office only showed how little they understood him. He had no desire to quarrel with the Church. He still loved the Church. Not Concha’s Church, with its palace intrigues, but the Church of the French priestworkers, of the pilgrims at Chartres, of the simple faithful at Tunjuelito and elsewhere who looked to him as God’s minister and hoped that he would bring them a message of salvation. The Church had been his life too long now for him to relinquish it petulantly the first time his superior rapped him over the knuckles. With his friends of the Community he had often meditated on True and False Reform in the Church, the title of a book by the French Dominican Yves Congar, and Camilo had come to distinguish, as Congar did, between the sins of the Church and those of her mem¬ bers. Thus his attitude to the cardinal when he went in was one of such fraternal forgiveness that for a moment the old man had the odd sensation that it was he who was being received by Camilo, and not the other way round. Camilo seemed to understand his position perfectly. They touched on the university problem, and the cardinal said that, as he was re¬ sponsible for the public image of the Church, he did not think she should take sides in the dispute, as Camilo had already done; it led only to misunderstandings. Camilo accepted this. The cardinal too, he realized, had to act according to his conscience. They were both remarkably deferential toward one another. The cardinal was solicitous, he said, for Camilo’s spiritual well¬ being and wanted him to move into the Vera Cruz parish, where he would be accompanied by Father Arturo Franco, a priest distinguished for his solid piety. Once again Camilo agreed without demur. The Vera Cruz was centrally located on Seventh Avenue, and poor Father Franco was harmless enough, although it was slightly galling to be

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sent like a naughty boy to a new nanny. However, Camilo swallowed his pride. As long as he had not to give up his post at the ESAP, he had no complaint. And the ESAP business was not even men¬ tioned. Only on the day he obediently took his bags around to the Vera Cruz did it occur to Camilo just how unfamiliar he was with the ways of a parish rectory. Father Franco was waiting for him with folded hands and a carefully rehearsed speech about how they were to live as two brothers, and that if Camilo should displease him in any way, he would not hesitate to bring it up so that the two brothers could iron it out together. . . . The speech went on for a considerable while in that tone. Camilo noticed that Franco always addressed him as “Camilfn,” which was equivalent to calling him “my dear little Camilo.” Yet he was Camilo’s senior by no more than five years. He was taking the role of nanny very literally. Camilo had not been in the parish long before he was summoned to Franco’s study and submitted to another, even longer speech. “My dear Camilm, I’m worried about you. You’re getting in very late at night ... I know that you give yourself to those who need you. But when do you study? When do you have time for prayer?” Father Franco’s chubby hands rested on the desk, his fingers clasped together, his head on one side, like a little novice mistress giving spiritual direction to one of her charges. His voice droned on. Camilo did his best not to lose the thread, although Father Franco was right—it had been a late session the night before. He caught some well-worn phrases like “drinking a lot lately” and “women’s company” and “the great love which unites us in Jesus Christ.” And when the discourse ground to a halt, he replied as politely as he could that he was grateful for this brotherly advice. He escaped at last to his room, and fell to thinking that while he loved the Church, she had certain areas where he felt a total stranger. So many things about the Vera Cruz were strange to him. He was unused, for example, to being cooped up in a stuffy confessional box while devout ladies and small children whispered their peccadillos at him through a square latticed window across which a faded purple cloth had been drawn to shut out the light and sound, so that the voices trembled in the dark and the little sins sounded more hushed

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and secretive, and as the hours dragged on, it was hard to keep awake. Then, at Father Franco’s suggestion, he would take his turn in the parish office, attending to the intermittent trickle of people who came in looking for their marriage lines or baptismal certificates. They came in dribs and drabs, and sometimes, after a long pause, just as he was about to put up the shutters and call it a day, in would rush a breathless girl dragging her little sister around to be examined by Father for her First Communion. Camilo, having conducted the exam patiently and packed off the two sisters, would hardly be closing the door when it would slowly be pushed open again by an old lady grop¬ ing her way in with a medal to be blessed. These inglorious chores made up the common lot of almost all the men who had been Camilo’s companions in the carefree days at the seminary. He had grown away from them, however, and this taste of their daily routine did not tempt him to go back. He was glad to help out in their parishes by saying one of the Sunday morning Masses. He also liked to meet some of those old friends for lunch once in a while. But his interests were altogether different from theirs now, and he honestly found it hard to get excited about the alterations to a church porch or the promotion of some clerical acquaintance to an upper-class deanery. Some of those fellow-priests felt badly about the widening gap be¬ tween their world and Camilo’s, and made an effort to reduce it. When they learned that he had been condemned to do a stretch with Arturo Franco, their best sentiments of loyalty were aroused, and they threw a party in Camilo’s honour. It was during that affable old-boys reunion that Camilo announced his decision to join the Dominican Order. This came as something of a bombshell to his friends in the diocesan clergy. They knew that Camilo had entertained thoughts of being a Dominican years before, but imagined that he had shelved the idea for good. “No,” Camilo told them, “I’ve always wanted to be a Dominican but couldn’t because of my mother. Now that I’m obliged to live in the Vera Cruz, Isabel will have to get on without me anyway.” He was free at last, he informed them, to fulfill his life-long ambition. At this news his priest pals ragged him mercilessly. “If you go off to the Dominicans now,” they chimed, “everyone will say that it’s

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because of sour grapes, that you are just trying to get out of old Concha’s clutches. As well as that,” they pointed out, “you’ll be jump¬ ing from the frying pan into the fire. The Dominican superiors will have you more hamstrung than you are under Concha.” They urged Camilo to let it ride for a while. So Camilo let it ride. He forestalled the enticements of the Dominicans, who were eager to get him. Then, within a few weeks he saw the university stalemate resolved when a parliamentary com¬ mission declared the rector’s action illegal. The expelled students were reinstated, the rector forced to retire, and the sociology dean, Orlando Fals, even persuaded the cardinal to let Camilo complete his course of lectures, at least until the close of the present term. The last cloud lifted in August, when he found Father Franco hav¬ ing himself fitted for a new cassock to wear at the first session of the Vatican Council. He would be off to Rome at the end of September, he told Camilo, as some of the bishops had invited him to join their retinue. Life, thought Camilo, would soon be sweeter at the Vera Cruz. He put aside his yearnings for the ordered cloisters of the Dominicans, and gave himself over wholeheartedly to the parish, the ESAP, the Community, the INCORA, the sociology classes and the dozens of other duties which seemed to pile up infinitely around him. From a minor he was becoming a major celebrity. El Tiempo, Bogota’s biggest daily, published a cartoon of him riding at full speed out through the door of the Vera Cruz on his motorcycle, with a telephone in one hand, a typewriter in the other and a quantity of books and papers stuffed under each arm. At a party one night the Muniprockers summed him up in a jingle: The Vera Cruz parish possesses [they sang] a very unusual priest, whose habit of sleeping in buses does not worry him in the least. If he makes you a date for the morning, don’t think it amiss if, at last, he appears on the following dawning— the hour will have just slipped him past!

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The pious parochial ladies protest at the young cleric’s whims for fear of going to Hades unabsolved from their venial sins. For the reverend under discussion no sooner has finished his Mass, than out of the Church he goes rushin’ to bring revolutions to pass. His quixotic but never choleric special plea for the rebel stu-dents brought the cardinal down on our cleric and Orlando up to his defence. To punish the priest, or elate him, or label him just what he ain’t, did old Concha excommuni-cate him, while the Doms declared him a saint! Camilo enjoyed this. He was happier to find himself the object of caricatures and doggerel verse than a subject for pompous leading articles. Almost without noticing it, certainly without planning it, a dreadful fate had befallen him: he had become fashionable. There was no way of avoiding it, of course. His manly air, his connections, his academic prestige and now, on top of that, his much-discussed brush with the grumpy old cardinal, all conspired to convince Bogota clubmen that the young cura Torres was a priest you could talk to, while their wives worked hard at the task of turning Camilo into the darling of the northern suburbs. No one felt properly married, nor their babies decently baptized, unless Father Camilo had performed the ceremony. The Vera Cruz parish, with its white Spanish-colonial church on Seventh Avenue, originally intended by the cardinal as Camilo’s place of exile, became instead the compulsory setting for a stylish wedding. Camilo had still not learnt to say no to anybody, and consequently was besieged by every frustrated society dame in town. Each one arrived to keep her first appointment suitably attired in a dark skirt and demure mantilla, but, having dumped her marital problem in the young priest’s lap and received a sympathetic hearing, she would be

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back to seek his advice a second and a third time, dressed less se¬ verely now and unwilling to admit, even to herself, that her inten¬ tions were not exclusively spiritual. His telephone rang hot, and they pursued him relentlessly into the late hours of the night. Not even the vigilant Isabel was able to fend them off altogether. Thus Camilo, somewhat against his own better judgement, con¬ ducted a sort of special ministry as private chaplain to Bogota’s high society. This made him the envy of not a few social climbers in the clergy’s ranks, and at the same time estranged him frqm the ordinary parish priests bound down to the ungrateful daily grind of sick calls and catechism classes. In every sense Camilo was on the Church’s outer fringe. Odd man out though he certainly was at home, Camilo was more at ease amongst churchmen working for renewal on the wider stage of Latin America. To such men the moment seemed a hopeful one. Pius XII’s long reign was over, and as old Pope John beamed across the Catholic world, an optimistic group of priests and bishops in South America set themselves the task of giving the Latin Church a muchneeded face-lift. Their leading spokesman, Bishop Manuel Larrain of Chile, organized a closed meeting of hand-picked church reformers for August of 1962 and asked Camilo to attend. He readily accepted, and felt at home amongst old friends, for the dozen participants whom Bishop Larrain had brought together in the Argentine were either men Camilo had studied with in Europe or had met at international uni¬ versity congresses over the past two or three years. They were theologians and lay Christians politically active in their respective countries—Uruguay, Chile and Peru—and each one of them was con¬ sidered a top-flight expert in his field. No introductions were necessary, then, and in the quiet of a country retreat house outside of Buenos Aires they got down to sharing thoughts on their common concern: how to make the Church’s mes¬ sage meaningful to Latin Americans at this particular historic mo¬ ment. Once again—this time in a more subtle way—Camilo proved to be the noncomformist. As long as the participants talked in general terms there was no

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fundamental difference in their point of view; all were agreed that the Church had to become involved in social change. Divergences of opinion arose, however, over the type of government which was de¬ sirable in each country. The Chileans were sticklers for the Christian Democrat solution. In fact they had high hopes of getting their Catholic candidate into power at the next election. But Camilo’s ideas on social change had widened over the three years since he had left the musty lecture halls of the Catholic University of Louvain. Since then he had moved in the predominantly secular atmosphere of student groups at the National, where he had developed, almost automatically, a critical attitude to¬ wards anything which savoured of an “integrist” Catholic mentality. Unfortunately, he had no way of replacing the mere tabulation of facts, which was the system he had learnt in Louvain, with a genuinely scientific method of analysis. On Colombian problems there was scarcely any analytic material available and, in any case, Camilo found little time for reading in depth. Nevertheless, he had accustomed him¬ self to hold up abstract notions on democracy, for example, to the cold fight of economic facts. He no longer took age-old rights and privileges as undisputed dogmas. He re-examined them. While the Christian Democrats accepted, and even defended, private property and class distinctions as normal characteristics of any state, Camilo had come to see them as ills created over the course of history by the capitalist society. For him they were the product of a class system which had no justification in true Christianity. He disagreed, there¬ fore, with the idea of a Christian party, and objected to “the posing of the political problem in religious terms.” Thus when Bishop Larrain spoke of the Christians “capturing the revolution” before the Marxists got ofi with it, he could not have been further from Camilo’s way of seeing things. It seemed to Camilo that the Chileans were beset by the fixation of preserving formal democracy at all costs.

This explained their obsessive fear of

Marxists. Camilo, on the other hand, had scant respect for democratic forms; Colombian history had shown him how they were used to favour a wealthy minority. He was slightly surprised to find himself taking a stand against such eminent churchmen. If the Argentine meeting had been held several

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months earlier, he might not have been so belligerent. But only two months before, in June, he had stood with the students against the system, and this first open political action had left him much more radical. He was less conciliatory, and was taking sides. When he spoke disparagingly of democratic institutions, not even that gentle, almost sleepy voice of his could cushion the impact his words made on the Christian Democrat enthusiasts who were pres¬ ent. However, at least one man at the table supported him. The noted Peruvian theologian Father Gustavo Gutierrez shared ^Camilo’s dis¬ trust of things like parliamentary procedure. Gutierrez had just arrived from Lima, where only a few weeks be¬ fore the Peruvian oligarchs had brought in the troops to depose a democratically elected government which did not suit them. Right now, Gutierrez explained to the others, a new electoral farce was be¬ ing prepared in Peru to ensure that this time the oligarch’s candidate was not beaten. Camilo’s friendship with Gustavo Gutierrez went back to their student years at Louvain, and the two men had a lot in common. They knew that the oligarchy called the tune in Peru just as in Colombia, and they were both keenly conscious of the need for revolutionary change and the danger of being left flat-footed on the sidewalk of history. “We must act,” Camilo urged, “even at the risk of being absorbed.” Gutierrez did not like the idea of being absorbed. Very much more the intellectual than Camilo, he was concerned to discover “a specifi¬ cally Christian form of radicalism which did not simply follow the Marxist current.” To Camilo this sounded an abstraction. What he saw was the tangible thing: the Marxists are the ones who are in there fighting for the new society, and we Christians ought to be in there with them. He was thinking of people like Maria Arango and Julio Cortes. “The revolutionaries are so few,” he said, “and we progressive Catholics are also very few.” Historically there was only one mistake the Christian could make: to refuse to act. Ideological disquisitions seemed to Camilo redundant at a moment when the freedom of mil¬ lions was at stake. Guti6rrez made distinctions between the role of the priest and

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that of the layman. Camilo replied that in a critical moment a priest should jump into the breach and take on a secular role. He was more concerned with the action itself than with the theory behind it. That recurring intuition of his told him that someone would surely come along afterwards to theorize on the actors and the part each one had played. All twelve men left the' Argentine meeting with feelings of disap¬ pointment. Rather than a real exchange of ideas, their conversations had degenerated into a series of monologues, each speaker engrossed in the state of affairs of his own country. Camilo felt especially alone. Not just because he was the sole delegate from Colombia, but for other reasons too. He realized that his country sulfered, as none of the others did, from the crushing weight of Church authority. In Colombia the whole inquisitorial edifice was calculated to break any group of radical laymen who might try to take initiatives without some bishop’s seal of approval. That was why no movements of energetic lay Christians had emerged in Colombia as they had done elsewhere. Where the laity had failed, Camilo felt, a clergyman should not hesitate to act. If he were a Chilean priest, or a Peruvian, he might be more addicted to theologi¬ cal discussions; but he felt impelled to action, and would be slow to accept any more invitations to this kind of high-level conference. The men who had sat with him at those round-table talks in the Argentine also came away needled and dissatisfied. Unlike Camilo, however, they would be returning to repeated sessions of a like na¬ ture over the years to come. Their host, Bishop Larrain, was the founder and president of the Latin American Bishops Council (CELAM), which was in the proc¬ ess of creating an unwieldy network of secretariats for the moderniz¬ ing of Church structures. All over the continent an incredible clerical bureaucracy was being erected. In every capital city offices were set up to deal with questions of reformed liturgy, new catechisms, Chris¬ tian education, social communications, ecumenism, seminaries and missions, and they multiplied at an ever-quickening rate under Park¬ inson’s inexorable law. Bureaucrats begot bureaucrats. National episcopal secretariats became a must. Sleek priest-technocrats sped from one lecture hall to another, and flew officiously around South

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America. The Vatican Council, just getting under way, created em¬ ployment for a further army of secretaries, pressmen, theological ad¬ visers or just plain travel agents, drawn from amongst the pick of young priests. Some of the most promising elements of the clergy were sucked into this machine, above all in Colombia, where the CELAM had set up its headquarters. Camilo steered very clear of that ecclesiastical monster. The Chilean Christian Democrats held out attractive offers to him. In Santiago the hard-headed Roger Vekemans, a Belgian Jesuit who was channelling millions of German marks into the Christian Democrat campaign, was keen to get the modern young Colombian priest on his staff. He proposed Camilo for head of a new institute to study the demographic explosion at a continental level. The salary was juicy, and the prospects good. But Camilo laughed, and went right home. Colombia had taken hold of him and he would not be lured away to sit behind an executive desk. At most he would agree to a few months back at Louvain to put his doctoral thesis together and take his degree. That was something he had been toying with ever since he had finished his licentiate. It would be handy, he thought, to have that certificate to flash at appropriate moments. More than once he had written off to his old master, Monsieur Urbain, asking him to direct the thesis, but he had trouble lighting on a topic acceptable to the board of Louvain’s political science school. Without much premeditation he had proposed a highly provocative theme—“Catholicism, Communism and Freedom in an Underde¬ veloped Country”—but the school’s director took fright and rejected it as being “too live an issue.” Later, in more sober vein, Camilo had settled for something on rural migration to the cities, which was per¬ fectly suitable to the Louvain people. The only problem was that he never found time to get away. His itinerant lecture team at the ESAP kept him on the move from town to town all over Colombia. Through his work with the land re¬ form institute, too, he was in daily contact with the backbone of the country’s labour force, from the teeming thousands in the Cauca Valley cane fields and refineries to the most remote and isolated farm-

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ers lost in the folds of almost inaccessible hills. Camilo got to know them all. It was the land reform institute’s first year of operations, and the Ministry for Agriculture sent its technicians out to study rural prob¬ lems. Camilo missed very few of those reconnaissance expeditions, and got in amongst the country people in a way no one else even at¬ tempted. The new minister, who fancied himself as something of a left-winger, smirked at the young priest’s enthusiasm. “The revolution will not be brought about by curas,” he remarked to a friend. “Not even Lenin in person would make a revolutionary wearing that black skirt.” Unmindful of such nonsense, Camilo went right ahead penetrating deeper into the countryside and into the character of the Colombian people, enjoying the company of simple folk and listening for hours on end to their stories. They told him of times when the Violence was rife, a bare ten years before. Their tales took on sudden drama when a man pulled up his shirt to display the ugly gash a soldier’s bayonet had left across his stomach, or when a wrinkled woman described her husband’s execution, her children’s murders and the burning of her house. Camilo’s journeys led him into that part of the country where the Violence had left its most lasting imprint, for it was the institute’s policy to begin land reform by patching up problems precisely in those areas. Amongst the country people of the Tolima province, for ex¬ ample, the glowing coals of hate were still alive, and the government was anxious to stamp them out. Camilo saw that they would not be stamped out by the insipid measures the institute was taking. The wary and long-suffering peas¬ ants were not people to be fobbed off with the paving of a road or the construction of a canal or the official title deeds to half an acre of land. The roads and canals, they knew very well, were built for the big landowners, and the workers did not need a scrap of paper to tell them that a pocket-handkerchief plot was theirs after they had fought for it and tilled its thin eroding soil. What they wanted was real land, not bits and pieces of rocky hillside but the wide-open fields lying fallow in the plains where the bosses occasionally grazed their fat cattle. Camilo moved away from the towns and pushed out into the

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scrubland where tight-lipped peons and subsistence farmers worked hard and spoke to no strangers. With time they grew less wary of Camilo, so much so that one man even let him into a well-kept secret. He beckoned Camilo into his hut and carefully lifted back the floor¬ boards to reveal his most prized possession. Reaching down, he gingerly lifted out a gleaming, well-oiled rifle. He fondled it, and placed it in Camilo’s hands. Nothing else the farmer owned was worth half the value of that gun. He cared for it, and kept it clean and well stored away with its box of cartridges for some future date. Camilo had nothing to say. He knew that the Independent Re¬ publics still existed in the hills, although the official reports always described them as bands of outlaws and ruthless killers. Certainly the Violence had spawned a specie of bandit given to robbery and murder, often in the pay of some highly respected politician. Young Antonio Larrotta had fallen in with such a man, and it had cost him his life. But the Independent Republics were a very different thing. When the newspapers depicted as common thugs those honest farm¬ ers who defended themselves against violence and oppression, they were deliberately distorting the truth. What Camilo began to see at firsthand in Tolima was not banditry; his fellow-countrymen were simply arming themselves for war. Camilo’s personal observations were further confirmed by an im¬ mense amount of material on armed peasant movements which the sociology faculty had amassed over the past two years. With funds from the Peace Foundation donated by Camilo’s wealthy friends, the faculty had engaged the services of a rural clergyman, Father German Guzman, whose pastoral ministry in a Tolima parish had brought him into close touch with guerrilla groups. Guzman had ac¬ cumulated a considerable archive on the rebel bands in his parish, and then, as a member of a government commission charged with the task of pacifying insurrection, he had added to his documentation. The sociology dean, Orlando Fals, had been quick to procure Guzman’s unusually rich sources and, with the help of a justly re¬ nowned lawyer, Eduardo Umana (Camilo’s cousin), they marshalled their findings into the first serious study of the Violence ever to be published. The first volume was on sale in the bookshops in Septem¬ ber of that year, 1962, and caused a sensation. For the second time in

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a matter of months, the professors of the sociology school were in the national limelight. The Violence was the sort of subject that political scientists at Louvain, for example, would have considered too hot to handle. At the book’s appearance, Conservative politicians immediately got up in arms, and, in the Senate, Alvaro Gomez, son of the chief per¬ petrator of the Violence, old Laureano Gomez, railed against this “snide version of the facts, contrived with the help of secret docu¬ ments.” That was the best the Gomez family could manage, as the facts themselves were undeniable. Conservative editors and Jesuit scholars vied with one another in finding fitting epithets for the authors. The Jesuits branded Guzman “a renegade priest”; the Conservatives called Umana “an incom¬ petent and extremist free-thinker”; while both, punning weakly on Orlando Fals’s name, agreed that he was “not only a Protestant, but false.” Camilo did not come under fire, for although he had worked on the study with Guzman, his name did not figure as co-author. The incident blew itself out in a few weeks, after wild debates in the House. Ex-President Mariano Ospina, as guilty as Gomez and, like him, converted now into a snowy-haired elder statesman, was asked for a pronouncement. He came out tut-tutting over the affair and saying that “this was not the moment to enter into an analysis of the Violence and its origins, nor to talk of who was responsible for it.” Under his breath Ospina might well have muttered that, as far as he was concerned, the time for such an analysis would never be ripe. So the government clamped down on the press, and drew a veil over the discussion. It flared up again only in October when a secret report on the book leaked out of the Ministry of War. The report had been written by an army officer. Colonel Alvaro Valencia Tovar. This was not Valencia Tovar’s debut on the national scene. His fame had been gradually growing. In 1951, when Colombia, alone of all countries in South America, sent troops into the Korean War, the colonel was amongst those to sail across the Pacific at the head of his country’s Lilliputian Army. Then, more recently, the press had carried stories of Valencia Tovar’s brilliant military strategy against a renewed upsurge of violence in Los Llanos. The “Pacifier of the

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Plains” was the title the papers had given him, and the colonel was hailed as a sort of genius in anti-guerrilla warfare. Such hyperboles were hardly justified. In reality all he could claim to have done was to have rounded up a few youthful enthusiasts who had tried to ignite a revolution in the plains under the leadership of a man called Tulio Bayer, whom the colonel accurately described as “an eccentric doctor.” The whole guerrilla adventure had followed close on the murder of Antonio Larrotta in 1961 and the failure of his revolutionary plans. Several of Larrotta’s exasperated followers, in¬ cluding his two brothers, joined up with a fistful of plainsmen and the madcap Dr. Bayer, establishing their headquarters in a tiny forgotten village hundreds of miles across the plains on the Venezuelan border. Their operations had not even had time to commence before Colonel Valencia Tovar sent in a complete battalion to capture them. It was a modest enough triumph for the army officer. Yet the form¬ ers of public opinion had built up the colonel’s image beyond all rea¬ sonable proportions, so that he was already known as a kind of national hero when his report on the Violence leaked out of some secret files and onto the front pages. It got two-inch headlines, which was more than it merited, for it contained no spicy revelations. It simply recommended army per¬ sonnel to study the sociology school’s findings and look for antidotes to the violence which was continuing in rural areas. That these candid remarks from the colonel should cause such consternation only showed what a sore point he had touched. The Violence was not a relic of the past, a subject fit for dispassionate historians. On the con¬ trary, the Colombian countryside was as explosive as a box of dynamite, as Camilo had realized ever since the day he bent over that well-polished rifle tucked under the floorboards of a shanty in Tolima. Everyone had a remedy to suggest for combatting the violence, but the colonel thought that his was the shrewdest. His idea was to in¬ struct the troops in the art of winning over the disaffected peasants. To put this into effect, he knew, one would have to civilize the soldiers, and, convinced that he had hit on just the man to educate his rough and ready sergeants, Colonel Valencia Tovar made his way to the Public Administration School and was ushered into Camilo’s office.

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The two men were already acquainted. In the old days, the colonel recalled over an initial cup of coffee, when he was in charge of a mili¬ tary academy not far from the seminary, Camilo used to be sent around each week to give religious instruction to his trainees. They had a hearty laugh at the recollection of Camilo as a very raw semi¬ narian trying to knock some Christian doctrine into the heads of hardboiled recruits under the command of Captain Valencia, as he was then. Presently the colonel put down his coffee cup carefully on Camilo’s desk and, leaning forward, came to the point of his visit. He observed that the novice teacher of those days was now an eminent pedagogue and might consider including some army officers in his courses at the ESAP. The colonel elaborated. In his new capacity as chief of the Army’s Department Three, he said, he was in charge of educational program¬ ing for the officers, a duty which he deemed of the utmost impor¬ tance. Now his recent success in quelling the incipient rebellion in Los Llanos had convinced him of the need to establish good relations between the inhabitants of a disturbed zone and the troops sent in to restore order. However, the behaviour of his men did not always help. Many of those under his command were veterans who had been hard¬ ened by the experience of the Violence and treated the peasants like common criminals. There were even officers, the colonel admitted, who took illicit advantage of their authority. Indeed one of the points in that report of his which had caused considerable uproar was his suggestion that violence in the countryside sometimes began with brutalities and abuses committed by army men. Notwithstanding a certain resentment amongst some of his fellowofficers, and scepticism on the part of others, Valencia Tovar insisted that “humanitarian action” and what he called “psychological war” were weapons much more effective than rifles in the anti-guerrilla campaigns. His victory in Los Llanos had proved it; and the authori¬ ties had acknowledged his worth by promoting him to his present im¬ portant mission in Department Three. From this post he planned to create a new generation of officers imbued with the Civic Action mentality. Camilo had read most of this in the newspapers, but he listened

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politely as the dapper little officer discoursed on his Civic Action pro¬ grams. His men were distributing powdered milk and free medicines to destitute peasants, and even building schoolhouses in some of the more troubled areas. As the colonel described it, Civic Action was working wonders. The Army had invented all kinds of subtle techniques, he explained, for breaking down hostility towards the uniform. For example, the indians were given free rides on army trucks. The only obstacle, he repeated, was a certain lack of sensibility on the part of uncouth sergeants and lieutenants, and hq wondered if the Public Administration School might not conduct courses in psychological methods for handling this sort of problem. As a matter of fact the ESAP did have courses designed for just that purpose, and Camilo was painfully aware that the school’s official aims were not very different from those of the Civic Action pro¬ grams. It could hardly have been otherwise. After all, the ESAP was the government’s central agency for the training of public servants. It turned out clerks for ministries and institutes, pen-pushers and minor executives for every level of the gigantic official bureaucracy. Camilo and his team did their best to awaken a critical spirit in their pupils (according to Camilo’s old principle of “infiltration in government organizations”) but the official policy kept him fairly shackled. Only his courses for the future employees of the land reform institute gave him slightly wider scope, and he managed to implant nonconformist notions during his lecture tours to provincial towns where it was easier to escape control. Right now the school was forming a new itinerant team under the auspices of UNICEF, and intended to train social workers in techniques for Planned Recreation. Camilo explained this program to the colonel, and then left his visitor for a few minutes in the hands of the dynamic Ruth Argandona, a stocky Bolivian educa¬ tionalist who had recently joined his team at the ESAP. While Ruth filled the colonel’s ear and his portfolio with data on the Philosophy of Recreation, Techniques for Recreation, Recrea¬ tion and Community Development, Recreation and Socio-Economic Structures and so on without respite, Camilo mused over the novel prospect of giving classes to military men. Maybe—he grinned to him¬ self—he would infiltrate the Army. It was agreed that officers would attend Planned Recreation

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seminars, and Camilo exchanged a surreptitious wink with Ruth as they showed Colonel Valencia Tovar to the door. The colonel went off quite happy. Camilo’s affable manner and his ready acceptance of the scheme had left him no reason to suspect that the young priest’s views on social change were essentially different from his. Camilo had deliberately kept his views to himself, as he could see nothing to be gained in trying to proselytize a senior officer of the Army. But in fact his ideas and the colonel’s were diametrically opposed. Camilo understood (and put in writing about that time) that “the function of the military institutions” was “the maintaining of the es¬ tablished order of things.” The Army, he considered, was “the instru¬ ment of the dominating groups.” Far from sharing the colonel’s view, all his sympathies lay with the surviving guerrilla bands. Even further; what Colonel Valencia Tovar referred to as “disturbed zones” and “trouble spots” were recognized by Camilo as hopeful little pockets of nonconformity. In them a genuine class conscious¬ ness was taking shape and a liberation war was being organized. Not that Camilo had become an undiscerning subscriber to any armed revolt which sprang up. He had serious reservations, for ex¬ ample, about the flighty Dr. Bayer whom Valencia Tovar had brought to heel in Los Llanos. Tulio Bayer’s assault on a far-off border town, which had so quickly come to nothing, left Camilo and most of his friends unmoved. At best the episode seemed like just plain anarchy; at worst, opportunism. In reality, it was a mixture of both. Amongst Tulio Bayer’s rank and file there had been honest ideal¬ ists like the Larrotta brothers. But shuttling back and forth between Bogota and the Venezuelan frontier were a number of political agitators of doubtful allegiance who handled the financial side of the venture. Funds for the revolution flowed in generously from Cuba, but the Cubans were unable to keep a tight check on how the money was spent. Since the heroic Antonio Larrotta’s MOEC was receiving it, the Cubans presumed it was in good hands. Reports on guerrilla activity in Los Llanos reached Havana, and all seemed well. How¬ ever, what with the expenses entailed in supporting the MOEC’s urban organizers, their travels and a series of miscellaneous items never really accounted for, only a smattering of the original budget

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ever reached the front line. Meanwhile, the doctor was taken prisoner by Valencia Tovar, then set free and, after an entertaining press con¬ ference, went off to live in Paris. This was not the type of guerrilla exploit which appealed to Camilo. What he admired was the unpublicized struggle of country people in the Independent Republics of Tolima and surrounding provinces. For years those stubborn peasants had warded off fierce military attacks; and more recently had resisted the temptations of the Rehabilitation project which the Lleras administration sponsored in an effort to dis¬ arm and dislodge them. Now came Civic Action, the latest attempt to lull the peasants into inactivity. Of course Camilo knew that this plan was not Colonel Valencia Tovar’s brainchild. It was common knowledge that Civic Action had been devised by the U. S. Army as the new regulation technique for fighting insurgents in Latin America, and was inculcated into Valencia Tovar and hundreds of his fellow-officers during train¬ ing courses at the Fort Gulick army base in the Panama Canal Zone, or at Fort Gordon in Georgia or Fort Bragg in North Carolina. When the colonel solemnly disclosed his plans for Civic Action, he was sim¬ ply reciting a lesson he had learned from his gringo masters. The little ginger-headed colonel, in his role as caretaker of United States interests, naturally became the butt of political satire. When Tulio Bayer, in his celebrated press interview, was asked to com¬ ment on Valencia Tovar, the lanky doctor described him unkindly as “a sort of gringo in a state of underdevelopment.” That remark, although by far the best-aimed shot in Tulio Bayer’s brief career, did less than justice to the colonel. True, there was noth¬ ing original about Valencia Tovar. His Civic Action idea was clearly an imitation of the gringo model. But the gringos had found no officer, maybe, in all of Latin America more accomplished than he in adapting their propaganda techniques to local conditions. Under his command, the soldiers ingratiated themselves with the peasants and thus cut supply lines to freedom fighters in the hills. To further weaken the guerrilla’s strength, the colonel found subtle ways of fanning flames of discord amongst guerrilla leaders themselves. He may not have been as brilliant a strategist as he gave himself credit for; but he was a crafty soldier. At the same time, he was so prim and old-fashioned

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that it was hard to imagine him as the man who could damage a whole guerrilla movement. Valencia Tovar was a dangerous enemy. Camilo was inclined to underestimate the danger. He was con¬ vinced that sooner or later a complete upheaval was inevitable, and when that day came no amount of Civic Action or Rehabilitation (or wishy-washy land reform either, or Communal Action) would be able to contain the peasant risings. The long succession of slaughter which the ruling classes inflicted on the country people had, in Camilo’s opinion, unleashed a social process which the ruling classes them¬ selves had not envisaged and were powerless to control. Basing his views on personal experience in the countryside, supplemented with a study of the sociology school’s documentation, he had come to appreciate the positive effects produced by the Violence, and made this the theme of an extensive essay he wrote early in 1963 entitled “The Violence and Socio-cultural Changes in Colombian Rural Areas.” That essay was the synthesis of several years’ work, and the last detailed sociological study Camilo would ever write. He got it ready to present at the National Sociology Congress which he and Orlando Fals and other colleagues had scheduled for March. This was to be the first such event on a national scale, and the sociologists had elected Camilo to preside and read the principal paper. Working against the clock in every odd spare moment at the ESAP, hurriedly dictating paragraphs to one of his secretaries, fishing out references from amongst old lecture notes, he managed to put it all together in time. When it was finished, Camilo found that he had written a very forceful document. The facts he had assembled, and his whole line of argument, had led him to an inescapable conclusion: namely, that no genuine change in Colombia was likely to take place without recourse to violent means. Before reading it in public, he decided to discuss the paper with Gustavo Perez and other priest friends. They suggested he take the sting out of it by inserting a preface to underline the fact that it was a purely scientific analysis and that he was speaking not as a priest but as a sociologist. So Camilo wrote a short “introduction for the pro¬ fane,” in which he warned his listeners not to be surprised that he

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should describe the Violence as “an important factor in social change.” He pointed out that he was not making any judgement about the morality of violence. “Morally speaking,” he wrote, “violence cannot be justified in general terms.” That qualifying phrase, “in general terms,” packed a nuance that was quite lost on the profane. And on his fellow-professors too, as it turned out. For Camilo’s thesis, when launched at the sociology con¬ gress, produced only a standard little round of applause. Its impact was muffled by the ponderous atmosphere of an academic conven¬ tion. After Orlando Fals’s standard opening address, and a similar one by the Minister of Education, the congress set its general tone with a series of dry monographs. An American sociologist delivered, in poor Spanish, a paper on the difficulty of getting ignorant Colombians to accept modern technical innovations. Boiled right down, the American professor’s problem was how to sell United States machinery to an underdeveloped country. This was followed by even more arid papers: a statistical rundown on a typical urban zone, more statistics on farming methods in Santander province, still more on the social background of Bogota’s business executives. All statistics. Not a shred of analysis. The sociologists clapped approvingly at the end of each session. They were on familiar ground. Fals read a paper on Latin American trends in rural sociology, cit¬ ing dozens of authors and schools. He had obviously travelled and read a great deal. They clapped again. By the time Camilo got up on the second day to read his paper, the three or four rows of academics who sat looking at him were quite numb and impervious. Camilo leisurely filled his pipe and be¬ gan. His theme was dynamite, and if he had read it with verve, he might have got his audience sitting on the edge of their chairs. But his voice was monotonous; his language was the traditional jargon of the sociologists and his style was long-winded and roundabout and repeti¬ tious. There was no relation at all between the almost anaesthetic ef¬ fect he seemed to produce and the incredible things he was saying. For he showed how the Violence had destroyed not only thousands of human lives, but also a whole chain of social structures which, until then, had remained unchanged for centuries. With the formation of

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armed peasant bands, he stated, a totally new hierarchy had grown up and was challenging the traditional power elites. In the guerrilla camps, ordinary peasant folk freely elected their chiefs. Unlettered men, on their personal merits, quickly rose to become generals. They and their companions drew up new codes of civil law and put them into effect. Inert and individualistic farmers were galvanized into ac¬ tion and set up communes to support the popular armed forces. The hitherto downtrodden peasants attacked entire brigades of well-armed regular soldiers, and beat them. All this had happened, Camilo re¬ peated, and continued to happen. He described this not in so many words but rather in too many words, taking the edge off it with technical terms. Once in a while he broke into simpler language, but his audience seemed beyond recall. They were not even jolted by the concluding phrases of his first sec¬ tion. “As far as waging war is concerned,” he summed up, “the peas¬ ants’ inferiority feelings have been replaced by a sense of superiority. In guerrilla warfare they are aware of having been victorious over the Army, of having thoroughly routed the urban-type institution which is the main defence of our cities.” At this point he paused, but the assembled sociologists neither protested nor cheered. They shuffled in their seats, and one or two stole a glance at their watches. Camilo poked some more tobacco into his pipe, dragged on it and puffed a bit of smoke about, before proceeding. Next he enunciated deliberately the heading of his second chapter: “The absence ... of vertical. . . ascendent. . . mobility.” His audience coughed and wriggled and scraped their chairs on the floor before settling down again. They then assumed the air of share¬ holders listening to a chairman’s annual report, and Camilo read quietly on. In the long section that followed, he developed his favourite theme. He demonstrated that, in Colombian society, only the sons of the wealthy and their servile followers had access to the channels of per¬ sonal advancement. He analyzed those channels, one by one. He imagined an anonymous citizen trying to better his position economi¬ cally or in the educational sphere, or through political scheming, or by getting a job in the bureaucracy, or by joining the Army, or the Church. In each case, he observed, the vast majority of Colombians

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were doomed to be drop-outs. Success could be achieved only by a few, and then at the cost of subservience to the minority which held economic power. All ladders to the top were closed to those who had neither money nor influence. Anyone who had known Camilo a long time would have recog¬ nized, in this presentation, a more elaborate and much more logical version of his old “vicious circle” speech. He examined each one of the circles, and brought forth evidence to show that the guerrilla groups were beginning to break them. He contrasted a,guerrilla army with the regular armed forces. The latter, he said, served only to “maintain internal order which, politically speaking, means to main¬ tain the present structures. Whereas the guerrilla army’s objective is precisely the opposite: to transform those structures.” Even that audience, whose sensibilities had been dulled by years of sterile graphs and diagrams and computations, did not remain al¬ together immune to what was taking place. Camilo laid into the Army and the Church, the bureaucrats and the politicians, with such a will that the scientific tags ceased to blunt his meaning. People shifted uneasily and rustled papers. He began to draw to a close. “In view of the above analysis,” he read, “we can say that the Violence has signified for Colombia the most important socio-cultural change in peasant society since the Spanish conquest.” Eyes opened wide at this. Camilo was getting carried away. Maybe they could dismiss the whole affair as an ex¬ aggeration. “If Communal Action,” Camilo went on, “and land reform and other popular movements sponsored by the government ... do not succeed in unblocking the normal channels of advancement for peasant leaders, then violence will remain the only practical channel open to the nonconformist Colombian peasantry.” “That was better, Camilo,” they thought. “At least you put an if in it.” He got them anxious again by suggesting that “it is most un¬ likely that the present ruling class would effect genuine structural changes,” but he quickly restored the balance with some remarks about hopeful signs in recent governments. His final sentence was padded with hypothetical and qualifying clauses which completely allayed their momentary qualms.

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“If pressure be exerted with sufficient skill and energy,” he con¬ cluded, “the structure of our ruling class could still be changed, on condition that the ruling classes themselves awaken, before it is too late, to the danger of a transformation which may completely destroy them for not having adapted themselves to a social change which is inevitable.” It was over, and people got up and stretched their legs and praised the paper, faintly, as they made their way out into the lobby in search of refreshment. They briefly discussed the consequences of Camilo’s thesis. But once someone put a cup of coffee in their hands, all thoughts on the Violence were swept aside by the more immediate problem of locating the sugar. There were still several papers to be sat through before the con¬ gress closed on the following day, with the usual congratulatory speeches, and everyone went back to their routine occupations: Camiio to the ESAP, the American sociologists to Wisconsin and most of the Colombian ones to chasing after employment with ad¬ vertising agents or fertilizer manufacturers or whatever was being offered. Some even got university posts. The congress papers were published a few months later in a hand¬ some volume and each participant, on receiving it, flipped nostalgi¬ cally through its pages and stacked it away on his bookshelf. A copy was filed in the faculty archives as well. And in the normal course of events, probably no one would ever have opened it again. Guitemie came into Camilo’s office one day about that time and told him that there was a man outside who wanted to speak to him. She had no idea who the fellow was, but there was something mysterious about him. “He insists on speaking to you alone,” she said. Camiio asked what he was like. “Well, he’s a man in his early forties. He’s short and stout, and has a red face.” Camiio said to show him in, and Guitemie told Camiio to be careful. His caller was Eduardo Franco, the man who joined the Liberal Party guerrillas back in the forties and had commanded his own rebel army in Yopal. Camiio had difficulty in reconciling the rotund figure

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which bustled into his office with his image of the legendary guerrilla chief. Franco gave him a brisk handshake, took a seat and immediately got down to business. Would Camilo consider educational work amongst the men of Los Llanos? If so, Franco had a proposition to make: while the ESAP provided the courses, he would provide the contacts. Camilo rather liked the way Franco took over, and tried to imagine him sitting up on a big horse giving orders to his men. , Franco kept talking. He said that he was informed of the orienta¬ tion Camilo gave his courses, and heartily approved. He felt the same way about things himself. He only hoped that Camilo had found peo¬ ple capable of responding to his message. He straddled his chair and pulled it up closer. Camilo half-expected him to dig spurs into it. He just wanted to let Camilo know that if he was looking for re¬ sponsive pupils, Eduardo Franco was the man to find them. He had lowered his voice to a raspy whisper. The pupils he had in mind for Camilo, he said, were his one-time guerrilla fighters from around the Yopal area. They were great potential; the finest revolutionary ma¬ terial in the country. They only needed someone to show them the way. This sounded good to Camilo, and he urged Franco to tell him more. Franco took the cue, and touched on the role he would play. He would be glad to serve as contact man. His cowboys were slow to trust a stranger, he explained, especially a government official. It would be much easier for Camilo to get accepted if he went in with someone who knew the ropes. Now he himself knew the plains like the palm of his hand. . . . For all his straight talk, Camilo thought, Franco had a knack of in¬ sinuating mystery. Well, whatever game he was playing, he had come at the right time. He might prove useful to Camilo in getting a per¬ manent ESAP course established in some place where it could pro¬ duce worthwhile results. The brief three-week stands in country towns had only a superficial effect, and Camilo wanted to experiment with something of longer duration. It had occurred to him that the law¬ less men of the plains might be receptive to his ideas, but he needed

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someone on the inside to prepare the way. Eduardo Franco could be his passport into Los Llanos. So it was that a bus which clattered into the dusty town of Yopal a few weeks later brought Eduardo Franco back to Los Llanos for the first time since his escape across the Venezuelan border in 1952. For eleven years he had dreamed of making a comeback. He knew that many of his old comrades-in-arms distrusted him. Some said that he had deserted. Others, that he had turned informer. They even hinted that he may have been responsible for the death of Guadalupe Salcedo, the most popular of all guerrilla chiefs around those parts. After the amnesty of General Rojas, when they all handed in their guns, Guadalupe was led into a trap in Bogota and murdered by the police. Yet nothing had happened to Franco. Of course Franco’s father was a big land-owner, while Guadalupe was a peasant’s son, and that made a lot of difference. Their suspicions had kept Eduardo away, but he never lost hope of returning to the land where, in his youth, he had ridden at the head of a revolution. In those days, while big dumb cow-hands went out and got themselves shot, Eduardo had been the brains behind the war, the political thinker, the man to work a deal with the Liberal Party chiefs. He had failed, of course, but he needed only a second chance. No longer a Liberal sympathizer, he was aligned now with the MOEC revolutionaries, and had assured them that he would resurrect the old guerrilla movement that was latent in Los Llanos. As he stepped off the bus, he put his hand into his breast pocket to make sure he had not mislaid the credentials he carried from the dean of the Public Administration School. Camilo was his passport back into Los Llanos. He presented a letter to the local civil administrator, another to the colonel of the cavalry regiment and a third to the chief of the security police. In each one Camilo kindly asked the respective au¬ thority to afford the bearer every possible help in his mission of or¬ ganizing a course on co-operatives which the school planned to conduct for farmers in the Yopal area. The documents produced re¬ sults. Within a fortnight, government planes had flown in peasants from remote villages. They were billeted in the cavalry regiment’s

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quarters, and Camilo and his ESAP team arrived for the inaugura¬ tion. The course began on a summer’s night in the municipal hall. Fifty-five hard-bitten farmers, brought in from the far-flung comers of the eastern plains, sat on wooden benches with their squinty eyes fixed on Camilo when he stood up to speak. He thanked all those who had generously assisted the co-ordinator, Senor Franco, in making the course possible. There was stoney silence from the benches. He went on to stress the importance of co-operativism, and said some¬ thing about the future of Los Llanos being in the farmers’ own hands. They continued to look at him in silence. He had borrowed a couple of films on co-ops from the Canadian Embassy, so these were shown next and seemed to make a better impression. The projector broke down only twice. With that the course was declared officially open. During the two weeks that it lasted, Camilo set to work changing the atmosphere. Between classes he sat in the shade of a mango tree with the farmers and listened to them spin long yams about the days of “the revolution,” the name they always gave to the Violence in Los Llanos. He saddled a horse and rode out with them across the flat scrubby fields, with a wide-brimmed hat to keep off the sun. They told him of their grievances against the big ranch owners, and he ate in their primitive houses and played with their naked children and saw for himself the poverty in which they lived. In the canteen at night he put away as much aguardiente as any of them, and they taught him to sing their ballads and jingles. On the last evening the whole town seemed to be packed into the hall for the closing session of the co-op course, and the farmers called on one of their local orators to make a speech of thanks. The man got to his feet, carefully unfolding a sheet of paper on which he had written the fanciest rhetoric of his career. “Distinguished professors,” he read, addressing himself to Camilo and his colleagues. “Think not that your time here hath been wasted. Your message will fructify in us like the pastures of the immense plains when the rainy season begins, at which time the dry strawcoloured grass is changed to the green of hope—a figure of speech, gentlemen, by which I mean to compare us with the pastures and you, sirs, with the rain.”

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This was very well received by the crowd. The speaker went on to assure his teachers that their inspiring thoughts would “fly like flame-coloured herons to the farthest confines of the plains.” Once again the farmers showed noisy approval. At each new metaphor, more fantastic than the last, thunderous applause broke out in the hall, until it rose in an almost unbearable crescendo. Then outside there was roast meat for everyone, and plenty of beer, and late into the night, under a clear sky, verse after verse of popular songs were sung to the galloping beat of harps and guitars. This was how the men of the plains made fiesta. Camilo and his friends were allowed to return to Bogota only after giving their solemn promise that they would soon be coming back to stay. Camilo felt sure they would be back before long. He had practically chosen a site for a permanent training centre, and had sounded out a few possible co-workers who seemed enthusiastic about the idea. As for the local dignitaries, they had made a great fuss over him. An agricultural school in the district would bring them enormous prestige. He congratulated Eduardo Franco on the work he had done as co-ordinator, and Franco, who had been tipped off in the meantime that it would be better for his health if he disappeared from the scene, took the opportunity to insinuate that, for political reasons, it might be wiser in the future if he collaborated with Camilo from a distance. He explained that he was well known in the area as a former revolution¬ ary, and maybe his presence in Yopal would give the project too much of a left-wing colouring from the start and spoil Camilo’s chances of support from the authorities. In Bogota, at the end of March 1963, Camilo set wheels in motion to get official approval and funds for the Yopal project. His first step was to put the proposal down in black and white as a memorandum for the land reform institute, and submit it to the board of directors. In his memorandum Camilo described the project in detail. He put particular emphasis on a clause in the land reform legislation which ordained the creation of “rural action units” for the implementing of co-operatives, credit schemes and community organization at a re¬ gional level, and he showed how exactly an agricultural school in

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Yopal would fulfill the requirements of that hitherto neglected clause. Aided by his associates in the ESAP, Camilo worked on the docu¬ ment with all possible guile. To get it passed by the board of directors would be a delicate business, as he well knew, for he was a member of the board himself. Almost every week for the past twelve months he had assisted re¬ ligiously (and more or less punctually) at the board’s meetings. At first he had done so with enthusiasm, for he honestly believed that the reform might yet give the peasants back their land and ^tave off the terrible holocaust which was coming. He even wrote essays to show that the land reform institute was unique in Colombian history in that it gave ordinary citizens access to “vertical ascendent mobility.” But a year of meetings had quite changed his opinion. From the inside he came to see the institute in its true colours. The land reform bill had been drafted, in the first place, in obedience to a command from Washington. In 1961 the Kennedy administration ordered all the Latin American colonies to revamp their land laws as a prerequisite for receiving Alliance for Progress investments, and Colombia had quickly fallen into line. The Lleras government had promulgated a law cleverly phrased to avert the struggle for land which had been given new impetus by the example of Cuba’s genuine reforms. On first hearing, the law had quite a radical ring. To a hand¬ ful of inveterate feudal landlords it seemed to presage a reign of ter¬ ror such as only Stalin had hitherto conceived, and they trembled to think what might follow now that property rights were no longer sacrosanct. In practise, however, the law was simply an attempt to smooth things over by selling barren patches of land as small holdings to peasants, especially in the trouble spots and disturbed areas. The oligarchs had no need to worry, for the law had been designed by their own faithful servants. And it was the oligarchy’s men, of course, not the peasants, who sat on the board and spent a couple of hours each week dividing up the land. The Minister for Agriculture presided at those meetings, and a delegate from the Graziers’ Federation was there, amongst others, and one from the National Agricultural Society, as well as a general from the armed forces and an elderly monsignor who repre¬ sented the Church. Camilo had been named as second fiddle to the

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monsignor, but his voice did not carry much weight. When a motion of any consequence was under discussion, he looked around des¬ perately for support from the trade unions’ delegate or the spokes¬ man for farmers’ co-operatives. These two men sometimes cast their vote with Camilo out of a sense of decency; after all, they were the only ones present who were supposed to represent the point of view of the working classes. But both of them, from humble beginnings, had risen to the dizzying heights of white-collar bureaucracy, and were delighted to be let rub shoulders with the makers of destiny every Monday afternoon. Camilo found them reluctant to champion his causes. So he had persevered alone. Week after week he had taken his place at the conference table, dozing through long debates over fine points of procedure, but with an ear cocked when anything important came up, and all ready to pounce. If a large country property were being voted exempt from the reform, Camilo would be the one to challenge the decision. When the sugar millionaires requested a sus¬ pension of the institute’s activities in the Cauca Valley, Camilo was the only one to seriously oppose them. He suggested replacing their capitalist sugar refineries with co-operative production and workers’ ownership. Some were vexed at Camilo’s quixotic sallies and what they con¬ sidered his hare-brain schemes. But most of his colleagues simply smiled at his naivete, which was infinitely more annoying. “You get your stuff out of books,” grinned the pompous president of the Graziers’ Federation. “Which is fine in theory. But I happen to be a farmer, and I know what I’m talking about.” There was no reply to that kind of argument, but Camilo could not help thinking of the con¬ ceited man’s ten-thousand-acre farm and of the poorly paid men and women who milked his cows to keep him living richly in the capital. On those rare occasions when some fellow-member’s view hap¬ pened to coincide with his own, Camilo could be sure that it was for a completely different reason. Maybe the man was just trying to score a point off the institute’s manager, or angling for the manager’s job. In certain circumstances a progressive Camilo-type attitude to land prob¬ lems improved one’s chance of promotion. But more often than not, Camilo’s transient ally was simply grind-

172

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ing some political axe. For the board of directors, like all official bodies under the Lleras two-party system, was composed of Conservatives and Liberals in equal numbers, and almost every proposal for land reform was converted into a tussle for political advantage. Camilo’s Yopal project met the same fate. When he presented it in April, the Liberal members of the board gave it a good reception, and the Conservatives immediately found fault with it. Their chief objection was that the project came from the ESAP, whose director, Nannetti, although brother-in-law of the new Conservative president, was an influential Liberal politician in his own right. The Conserva¬ tive members of the board refused to budge, even after Nannetti himself made a special appearance at a board meeting in May to rec¬ ommend the project. Camilo began to lose heart. At the first meeting in June his project was tossed about once again, the Liberals grabbing at it and the Con¬ servatives rudely snatching it away. Someone vaguely maintained that it was a good scheme, but not suitable for Los Llanos. Someone else agreed that the idea was sound, but pointed out that it did not fall within the jurisdiction of the ESAP. After the board had squabbled over it for half an hour, old Monsignor Agustin Gutierrez lifted his head hazily from out of a sheaf of papers and suggested that they postpone the matter for a later date. As luck would have it, in the month of June the Conservative poli¬ tician Alvaro Gomez was sworn in as principal representative of the Senate on the institute’s board of directors. Son of the ruthless old ex-dictator, Gomez, Jr., was no less trenchant an adversary than his father. He was a declared enemy of agrarian reform, even in the mild Colombian version, and was determined to wreak vengeance on the Liberals who had overthrown Laureano ten years before. If the Gomez clan was no longer in power, the people most responsible were the Liberal Party guerrilla fighters of Los Llanos. Alvaro Gomez’s elec¬ tion to the board just at that moment did not augur well for Camilo’s project. At the second meeting in June, Gomez cunningly unmasked the ESAP’s intentions in Yopal and swayed the vote so conclusively that it was clear the project would never be brought up for discussion again. Camilo came out of the meeting both crestfallen and furious. He

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took his leave and hurried away, while Senator Gomez lingered in the corridor gloating over the victory with some of his party hacks. Un¬ restrained by board-room decorum, Gomez now gave free rein to his feelings on the matter. “Those bastards in Los Llanos will get nothing out of us,” he said. “Not even our shit!”

Chapter 8

DECLARING WAR

The young economist who managed the land reform insti¬ tute was, of all the government’s acolytes, one of the most devout. Penalosa was his name. After the decisive meeting in which Senator Gomez dealt a death blow to the Yopal project, Penalosa made it his business to have a word with Camilo. He said he was awfully sorry. Being a Liberal himself he was natu¬ rally in favour of the program. He reached up and put a patronizing hand on Camilo’s shoulder. “But you know how it is,” he said. “Alvaro Gomez is a very influential man, and the President is a Conservative and very easy to influence. If we are not careful, we will all lose our jobs.” As he spoke, the panicky little manager made several unnecessary adjustments to his tie and tweaked his thin pencil-line moustache. His eyes darted about unhappily. He was obviously ill at ease. Camilo smiled a bit sadly at poor Peiialosa’s discomfort. He knew what the man was thinking: that any boat-rocking in the institute right now might very well unseat him. Many a Liberal appointee like him had been ousted by the present Conservative administration, and only Penalosa’s exquisite tact had kept him in his coveted managerial chair. He was successfully navigating one of the channels of ascent. Camilo set his mind at rest. He had no intention, he said, of at-

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tempting to convert Alvaro Gomez. He might just as well try to make a guerrilla fighter of Cardinal Concha. There was no point that he could see in broaching the subject at any further board meeting. He left Penalosa relieved, and took his project elsewhere. He took it to the Minister for Agriculture, who was also a Liberal, and who told him not to worry, that his ministry would underwrite it. Which was fine, in principle, but the contract drawn up between his ministry and the ESAP had to be rubber-stamped in the Ministry of Finance, which was a stronghold of the Conservatives. Most of the Conservatives opposed automatically anything with a Liberal tinge; blind loyalty to their party bosses was what kept them on the pay-roll. But officials higher up in the Ministry of Finance had stronger reasons for rejecting the ESAP’s proposal: the cura Torres had been heard referring to his project for Yopal as “an instrument of revolution.” Well if that was so, they had their own special way of thwarting it. Every time Camilo rang to ask them how the contract was coming along, he was told that it had still to be endorsed or authenticated or ratified or validated, approved, authorized or reaccredited, in some department which, as it happened, was completely outside the juris¬ diction of the official to whom he put the question. The competent official never seemed to be available at the moment Camilo made an enquiry about the contract. He sent Guitemie over to the ministry to look for it. Miraculously she disinterred it from under a mound of almost identical papers. Its folder, she noticed, had begun to swell with appendages, and as it grew in bulk, its movements became slower and more cumbersome, and it meandered from office to office at a snail’s pace. For six months the persistent Guitemie kept hot on its track, digging it out of pigeon holes, thrusting it under official noses, demanding attention, creating unpleasantness, winning enemies, but all the time moving it steadily along. During the slow uncertain months of waiting, Camilo was not idle. He kept his promise to the farmers and went back down to Los Llanos as often as he could. Friendships grew stronger with time, and the people of Yopal helped him scout around and prepare the way for the future training centre.

176

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No one, however, was as attentive as Roman, the chief of the secu¬ rity police. He took Camilo under his wing at once, and threw his doors open to the young priest. His wife, who adored Camilo, flew with her private pilot all over the eastern plains as far as Venezuela, announcing the forthcoming agricultural courses and lining up students from amongst the unschooled boys of the outback. She got the country fairly humming with expectancy for hundreds of miles around. Camilo was glad of the assistance, but the farmers warned him to be wary of Roman. His interest, they said, was more than friendly; it was professional. “Take a drink with him if you like,” they told Camilo, “and ride in his airplane. But when you want to talk to people, get out into the country on your own.” During one of his excursions around Yopal, Camilo met a man called Antonio Perafan, who had come to Los Llanos two years before to start an experimental farm. Perafan was a rebel and an idealist. He sounded off in no uncertain terms against the oligarchy, and said he had no time for pseudo-revolutionaries either, and back-sliders and big-mouths who sat in cafes in Bogota and talked and talked and did nothing. Camilo took a liking to Perafan, and almost immediately offered him the number one post in the new project. The fact that the man’s farm had practically fallen down around his ears, leaving him with nothing but a few moulting chickens and the lamentations of his wife, did not deter Camilo. Perafan, he thought, only needed another chance. Once he had appointed Perafan director, Camilo began naming agronomists from the city and taking on caretakers and roustabouts from amongst the local men. He soon had a whole staff ready to set the new school rolling. But still the funds did not come through. Towards the end of 1963, at a moment when, despite Guitemie’s best endeavours, the contract seemed to have got bogged down ir¬ revocably in a ministerial office, Camilo sent Eduardo Franco off to Europe to look for financial help. By this time he had fathomed the mystery of Mr. Franco. In Los Llanos a stigma still clung to Franco’s name, and the cowboys had threatened to shoot him the next time he showed his nose around Yopal. It was as simple as that. The cowboys’ ultimatum made sense to Camilo; but so did Eduardo’s desire to put life back into the one-

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time fighting men of Los Llanos. Camilo never closed the door on anyone. And as Franco was an enthusiast, and understood Camilo’s plans, he would be as good an ambassador as the project was likely to find. Franco, delighted, and armed once again with letters of introduc¬ tion, arrived in Belgium and solicited finance, in Camilo’s name, from the International Christian Trade Union people at Louvain. He did not get a very warm reception. Five years ago Camilo’s friends at Louvain had predicted a brilliant career for the young Colombian priest. But each new fragmentary report on his activities had filled them with alarm. His conflict with the cardinal was under¬ standable enough, but not his outright defence of Marxist revolution¬ aries, nor his break with the Christian Democrats in the Argentine, nor his open criticism of Christian Democracy in more than one of his writings. “Camilo seems to have lost his balance,” said Vanistandael, the Christian Union’s secretary. Rumour had it in Louvain that Camilo was no longer completely reliable, that something had hap¬ pened to him, that he had changed. When Eduardo Franco approached them, therefore, with Camilo’s request, though they did not refuse point-blank, they hemmed and hawed a good deal, and vaguely promised a reply in due course. Franco did not leave Louvain at once. He took himself off to the Amities Belge-Colombiennes with another of Camilo’s letters. The Amities was a society which received donations from Belgian in¬ dustrialists and invested them mainly in scholarships for Colombian students. The organization was dominated by Camilo’s erstwhile land¬ lady, Madame Morren, a militantly Catholic dame with a horror of Communists and a keen nose for sniffing them out. Her initial mis¬ givings about Camilo had flourished in his absence, and at the mo¬ ment of Franco’s visit, his stocks with her were particularly low. For Camilo had been filling the university, and her student resi¬ dence, with Colombian Marxists. She had insisted that the Amities’ scholarships be allotted to Catholic students, at which Camilo, who handled the scholarships from the Colombian end, had written to one of his young friends that it was “a damn shame to have to choose stu¬ dents who are mediocre just because of religious reasons imposed by Madame Morren.” Madame heard of this, as she heard of most things, and did not take it kindly. She received Franco with cold courtesy,

178

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but would not be putting good Belgian money into any of Camilo’s doubtful schemes. While Camilo was awaiting the results of Franco’s mission, with his hopes anything but high, Guitemie was nudging the contract through the final stages of its long journey until, at the beginning of 1964, the last signature was on it and the last stamp stamped. In the ESAP they held it aloft, jubilantly, like a trophy. Money would be com¬ ing in! Money for Yopal! Without delay they rented a farm-house and begat} classes, and bought a fair-sized property outside the town and began to build. Up went a class-room in white cement, and a red-brick cook-house where they installed the stove and the electric plant. Palm leaves were thatched over a wooden rotunda and screens put in to make an airy canteen. Hen-houses were constructed, and pig-stys, and Camilo went out with a gang of men to hammer in fencing posts. They planted a grove of orange trees too, and rows of creeping tomatoes, and dug canals in from the river to water them. Out of a dusty wilderness the little school took shape. They called it the Rural Action Unit of Yopal (the UARY), and one of the men nailed a wooden shield over the class-room door, fastened an ox’s skull to it and printed U A R Y in red letters across the wide bony head. He said it gave the place a nice fancy look. Dr. Nannetti came down from the school for the opening on March 1, with several high government officials. They made a brief inspection tour of the new constructions, commented favourably and assembled in the shade of a bamboo clump outside the kitchen for the inaugural address. Camilo, in his white cassock, said a few words and read a prayer and sprinkled holy water over everything. There were more speeches, and little glasses of bitter champagne were passed around, and a tray of biscuits. Then Dr. Nannetti and the other VIP’s went back to their desks in Bogota, and Camilo stayed behind with his friends to celebrate, more fittingly, the birth of his infant UARY after its long and hazardous gestation. The UARY promised Camilo a chance for grass-roots educational work, not in short spurts, as previously, but over an indefinite period of time. Moreover, Yopal was a long way from Bogota, where the

1. The Liberal Party comes to power, 1930. President Olaya Herrera (with raised hat) and future President Alfonso Lopez (third from left).

3. Bogota, April 9, 1948: “savage hordes in the streets.”

4. Seventh Avenue, after the “Bogotazo.” 5. Guerrilleros of Los Llanos, at the time of the Violence.

6. President Mariano Ospina Perez: “elegant and urbane.” 7. The dictator, Laureano Gomez: “an image graven on the people’s imagination.”

8. Archbishop Crisanto Luque and General Rojas: “easy for the cardinal to manage.”

9. His Eminence, Cardinal Luis Concha: “something from a Hollywood costume movie.”

10. Cardinal Concha and President Alberto Lleras: “the cordial churchstate relationship.”

11. Colonel Alvaro Valencia Tovar: “a dangerous enemy.”

12. The Torres family in the early thirties: Gerda and Edgar Westendorp, Dr. Calixto Torres Umana, Isabel Restrepo de Torres, Fernando and (bottom right) Camilo.

14. The seminarian: “along holier paths.”

15. In Louvain, with Isabel: “sharing his life ‘minute by minute.’ ”

16. “Out through the door of the Vera Cruz.”

17. The priest-dean at the ESAP.

18. The university chaplain.

19. Arrival from Lima, July 3, 1965: “shoulder-high across the airport lounge.”

22. Isabel: “almost seventy and dressed in elegant black.”

23. In the guerrilla army: the Bogota evening papers, January 7, 1966. 24. With Fabio Vasquez (left) and Victor Medina (center).

25. Camilo’s body: “with arms outspread and a bearded face lolling on one side.”

26. “A full-page photo of his corpse . . . the only picture released.”

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defenders of the status quo implacably dogged his heels. “The ruling classes,” he wrote to a friend, “seem to be getting set for a McCarthytype repression. However, we keep working with the common people who are, in my opinion, the only hope for change.” He was steadily undermining the bottom of the social pyramid, without yet losing his seat at the top. He was sitting, of course, on a live volcano, waiting for it to ejupt. It gave a warning rumble at a land reform meeting in February, when he joined battle for a second time with the vitriolic Senator Gomez. Over the Yopal issue the year before, Camilo had been able to avoid a head-on collision with Gomez and the Conservatives. But not this time—for the present dispute was not over a question of tactics but of principle. It began the day Gomez attacked a proposal to expropriate certain large tracts of uncultivated land. In the legal jargon of the reform such proposals were known as “resolutions of extinction of dominion,” and in the course of a board meeting, whenever Camilo heard that term, if he had been lolling, he came back to life. For expropriation (the so-called extinction of dominion) touched the very kernel of the land problem. Under the Colombian legislation, it was a very whittled-down sort of expropriation. The owners were handsomely indemnified for the loss of their land, and the peasants, to buy it, incurred impossible debts before the state. However, it was the reform’s nearest approach to the substance of the agrarian question. Most of the board’s time was spent on incidental matters. The manager, Penalosa, would announce glad tidings of a loan from the World Bank or the AID or the Rockefeller or Ford foundations, and new office buildings would be planned, and study tours suggested and travel expenses augmented for officials and technicians. Then some member would reopen a standing debate over the respective functions of the institute and the Agrarian Credit Bank. This might lead to talk of further credit schemes for the established farmers—never for the peons and day-labourers. After that, if the armed forces’ man ex¬ pressed concern over a problem of “public order,” in other words the invasion of land by exasperated peasants, the board would make plans to deal with the matter, either by the renewed subdivision of already

180

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subdivided plots, or by transporting the troublemakers to some un¬ explored corner of the country where they would be put to hack down the inhospitable jungle. That kind of enforced mass migration was euphemistically referred to as “colonization” and was the board s favourite gambit. Only when all else failed did the institute declare land expropriated. On February 10 a clear-cut case came before the board. After due examination, immense portions of a hacienda in the northern coastal zone were shown to be totally overgrown and neglected, while the neighbouring peasants were dying of hunger for want of land on which to raise their crops. The board, Camilo presumed, was about to vote expropriation when Alvaro Gomez suddenly raised objections. He alleged that the technical report submitted to the board was not altogether conclusive, a claim which seemed to Camilo so hollow that he did not expect to hear it supported. To his surprise and indignation, the board members, one after another, began lining up behind Gomez. They repeated his argument like parrots. “I do not find it reasonable,” said the president of the Graziers’ Federation, “to give my affirmative vote while doubts about the issue remain unresolved. I will act only with adequate information, as I am guided at all times,” he added smugly, “by the deepest regard for honesty and uprightness.” At this, the board’s legal adviser spoke up. He cited chapter and verse of the law to show that any doubts about the land’s present state should be resolved not by the board but by the landlord; the onus of proof was on him. “In this case,” he concluded in an imper¬ sonal tone, “the correct procedure for those who are in doubt is to vote for the expropriation.” The legal man was wasting his breath, as the board members had obviously agreed amongst themselves to defend the property owner at all costs. Expropriation was put to the vote, and roundly de¬ feated. The only ones to vote in its favour were Camilo and the two reluctant representatives of the working class. There the matter might have rested if Camilo had not been deter¬ mined to have his say. “The board’s decision,” he protested, “creates an extremely dangerous precedent. In the first place, it allows the application of a legal disposition to be contingent upon such a sub¬ jective factor as personal advantage. When the application of a law

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depends on the discretion of those whose duty it is to execute it, the governing body becomes quite arbitrary. Thus is sown the seed of a totalitarian state.” This infuriated Gomez.

After he had based years

of anti-

Communist propaganda on his professed abhorrence of the totalitar¬ ian state, here was Camilo indicting him as its advocate. This taste of his own medicine was more than the man could swallow, and he quite lost his customary aplomb. His eyes popped in their sockets and he struggled for words, but before he could find them, Camilo had ad¬ duced another cogent argument. “In a country like Colombia,” he went on, “where we ought to foment the maximum use of resources, it is anti-social to exploit only state reserves while allowing people to retain, as their private property, soil which they wantonly leave uncultivated. To do so is to turn back the clock on several decades of agrarian legislation.” Gomez was flabbergasted. Camilo’s vigorous denunciation had re¬ vealed what the Conservative senator’s glib tongue had successfully hidden for years: namely, that his treatment of the agrarian prob¬ lem was even more antiquated than the pseudo-reforms of the Liberals which dated from the thirties. Worse still, Camilo had implicitly de¬ nounced his hypocrisy and veiled economic interests. He arose and addressed himself, irately, to the chair. “I shall demonstrate to you, sir,” he said, “that Father Torres, al¬ though acting in accordance with the letter of the law, is betraying his own conscience and flouting the Natural Law.” His thesis, so boldly enunciated, proved difficult to sustain, and, after foundering badly for several minutes, he made a lame promise that he would put it in writing to be included in the minutes of the following meeting and sat down. Nobody in the room knew quite where to look, and the meeting dissolved a few minutes later under the pressure of twenty men’s embarrassment. People paired off muttering half-hearted “see-youtomorrow’s,” and awkwardly went their ways. The incident gave rise to a couple of sequels. Very early the next morning Alvaro Gomez was awakened by the putter of a motor-cycle in the drive, and when he came down to

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breakfast he found that the maid had left an envelope beside his plate. It contained the following letter: My esteemed Alvaro: Before saying Mass this morning, I recalled the Gospel saying: if any one of your brothers has anything against you, go first and be reconciled with him, and then present your offering before the altar. After I had put my case at the board meeting yesterday, I was really confounded when you took it as an attack on you personally. I have always believed that one can strongly criticize people’s ideas, while still holding those same people in esteem and respect. In the present case, I want you to know that, although I disagree with very many of your ideas, the more I know you the more I appreciate you, both as a person and as a politician. For that reason I am prepared to make amends either publicly or privately, if in fact I have offended you personally. As for the ideas that I expressed yesterday, I am also prepared to retract if I am shown to be in error. I once told you that we Christians should always be ready to learn—and I was not trying to be sar¬ castic! You may make whatever use you wish of this letter, either public or private. Fraternally, Camilo

The second sequel, which followed a few weeks later, had less of a biblical flavour. The auxiliary bishop of Bogota called Camilo to the chancery and warned him to go quietly at the institute’s meetings be¬ cause those bishops best known for their Conservative Party leanings had written to the cardinal petitioning his removal from the board. Cardinal Concha was not an easy man to push around. He accepted suggestions from cabinet ministers, of course, and even occasionally from bishops, despite their inferior rank, but never from members of the Gomez faction. He still smarted at the thought of the thirty years’ ostracism to which they had subjected him. Since the government had lodged no official complaint, therefore, he left Camilo in his wobbly seat on the board of directors. But Camilo’s influence, never very great, was reduced to nought.

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For whenever there was any ticklish business on the board’s agenda, Senator Gomez and his friends made sure that the Church was repre¬ sented, not by Camilo but by old Monsignor Gutierrez. If the mon¬ signor were present, Camilo, as his deputy, had no right to vote; and although the monsignor was not a very regular attender, he had a knack of appearing in time for just those meetings at which the Conservatives had some.deal to put across. This cavalier treatment of Camilo was nothing new. Back in August of the previous year, when the rejection of his Yopal project was still a fresh wound, the board members had rubbed salt into it by approving, without the slightest hesitation, an identical proposal brought forward by someone else. As a little pot-bellied politician tabled his almost indistinguishable motion in favour of rural action units, Camilo contemplated his domed pate and his horn-rimmed glasses and knew the man’s project, though essentially the same as his own, was bound to be accepted. He knew it even before his fellowmembers had begun reverently to nod their heads. They all knew it; and the bowing of their heads was a mere ritualistic formality. For the bespectacled billiard-ball figure who had taken the floor was Carlos Lleras, the chief architect of the whole land reform farce, and the man already designated by a certain group within the oligarchy as the country’s next President. They had been grooming Carlos Lleras for the presidency for more than twenty years. Although small and unprepossessing, he contained all the essential ingredients. Like his cousin, Alberto Lleras, he had begun his career as a radical student in the twenties and, also like Alberto, had undergone a total conversion to the ideology of the bourgeoisie. The oligarchs had no doubt that little Lleras’ heart was in the right place; he had given them ample proof. As head of the Liberal Party a decade before, he had urged on the guerrilla fighters in Los Llanos, only to turn them over, remorselessly at the end, to the big landowners. Furthermore, he had placed his uncommon flair for econom¬ ics unconditionally at the service of the bourgeoisie; he helped frame laws and plan ever subtler frauds. His masterpiece was the land re¬ form bill, into which he had written that clause on rural action units with a view to converting it, at the appropriate moment, into one of

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the most fair-sounding gimmicks in his presidential campaign. When Camilo advanced the Yopal project, he had done so quite innocently; he had no idea that he was yanking at a plank in Lleras’ electoral plat¬ form. Not even Lleras’ acquiescent colleagues, now dutifully mutter¬ ing their approval, could have known that. All they knew was that it would be folly to oppose Carlos Lleras, the oligarchy’s favourite. He was more than president in pectore; he was already virtually sitting in the palace. They treated him with respect. Camilo was annoyed at this, but not surprised. Thkse goings-on were regular fare at the institute. In fact the board meetings had af¬ forded him a ring-side seat every Monday afternoon at the sordid spectacle of power-grabbing. He had seen the senators callously carving out their niches and carving up the land. He had watched the little Penalosas pathetically taking orders and receiving humiliating pats on the back and invitations to the Jockey Club. He knew that the Penalosas knew that the land reform was a giant swindle, but they tried to justify it, to make the best of it, to convince themselves that the real problem lay in the backwardness of the people, the laziness of the peasants, and that in an underdeveloped country like Colombia, the process of change was naturally slow. They repeated these phrases over and over again in an effort to persuade themselves that all was, more or less, well. At cocktail parties they drank not only officialdom’s whisky, they drank in officialdom’s cant. And the board-room jungle grew up around them, and hemmed them in, and ensnared them in its tendrils and quicksands and promises of facile promo¬ tion, and dragged them unremittingly down. Camilo did not go under. In part his natural honesty saved him. But not that alone; for other naturally honest men had surrendered under pressure. The system was no respecter of good intentions. The demands of a man’s environment, Camilo knew, are what ultimately condition his way of thinking. “We must realize,” he told students in an energetic address in 1963, “that our attitude towards things is al¬ ways the product of pressures, in other words of social phenomena.” In the long run what saved Camilo was the daily pressure exerted on him by ordinary workingmen and -women. At times he was in peril, for he came under very different pressures.

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He would get caught up in a round of committee meetings and con¬ ventions, or let the importunate matrons of El Chico consume his days and nights with their woeful tales of domestic tragedy. The more they took him away from the workers, the more muddled did his revolu¬ tionary thinking become. His discourse to the students, for example -the one in which he affirmed that our attitudes are the result of pres¬ sures—was itself a classic illustration of that truism. For in it he tried to envisage a dream world sorhewhere between the capitalist and socialist states. “Without socializing the means of production,” he said, “the majority could bring about a society in which all the in¬ vestments and all the gains be allocated to the common good.” Such an unreal, such an unimaginable society could have occurred only to someone who was attempting, albeit unconsciously, to avoid the unavoidable alternative to capitalism. It revealed a distrust of socialism which was based partly on Camilo’s criticism of the Soviet model, but which had deep roots in the education his social class had given him. However, his bourgeois prejudices, of which his aversion for socialism was one, had a sole and certain remedy: permanent con¬ tact with the people of the working classes. By 1964 he was taking that remedy in large doses. He spent more time than ever in the company of factory-hands in Bogota and farming men in the country. The ESAP gave courses in the coastal town of Lorica, where he had once defended the rice-growers of the Sinu Val¬ ley, and although Camilo’s efforts on that occasion had done little to alleviate their sufferings, the poor Negro workers welcomed him back into their paddy-fields and knew that he was their friend. Later he took his mobile team of educators to Santander Province, and sowed seeds of rebellion amongst mule-drivers and onion-pullers and daylabourers and subsistence farmers in the cold mountains of Pamplona. In Bogota his MUNIPROC had survived. Student brigades still went out to the dwellers on the city’s muddy fringe, and when some of the youngsters drifted away, a new batch of recruits would be found. And Camilo’s enthusiasm continued unabated. Theorizing on revolutionary change was never Camilo’s forte. He had skimmed through a few Marxist authors and had a hazy idea of the October revolution and its aftermath. But that was all. However,

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his faith in the common people grew so strong that he bounced un¬ hesitatingly into an attack on Lenin’s contribution to revolutionary theory, namely (Camilo’s words)

“the revolution by the elite.”

“Lenin maintained,” so Camilo said, “that the revolution could not be brought about by the masses, but rather by a group of people who had understood the meaning of history.” To this false concept, in Camilo’s opinion, was due nothing less than the eventual betrayal of the Russian Revolution. At this, his Marxist intellectual friends threw up their hands. There seemed to be no way of engaging this cura in serious debate. But they had to admit that he was a devil for work. If only their cadres, they thought, could achieve that easy access to the masses which Camilo had. What distinguished Camilo from those around him was his zeal for drawing closer to the workers, not his intellectual talents. He was neither erudite nor deeply analytical. His articles and public state¬ ments were mostly awkward; in detail, sometimes inexact. But they were hard, nonetheless, and challenging. So his hearers defended them¬ selves as best they could. Marxist pundits poked friendly gibes at him, and government technocrats smiled indulgently, and Catholic prelates clicked their tongues, and bad-tempered politicians snorted and all of them, one by one, began to close their doors on him. As they did so, other doors opened, doors improvised out of card¬ board tacked on a frame, or packing-case panels or sheets of rusty corrugated iron. They were pushed back for Camilo, and he was wel¬ come to bend down and come inside the shanty. And if there was no door, the burlap hanging over the entrance was lifted up to let him pass through. In Los Llanos the people lived in dwellings with only one wall, and he could walk right in out of the sun from any one of the other three sides, take off his hat and sit on an upturned box and light his pipe while the coffee was heating over the fire. Los Llanos was where he most liked to be, and as his new baby, the UARY, got under way he often went down to the plains to keep an eye on it. Throughout the year 1964, at the Monday afternoon board meetings, if he was fidgety in his seat and restive and uncom¬ fortable, it was not solely due to feelings of disgust. In part it was be¬ cause he had spent the weekend riding his horse around Yopal.

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Camilo’s horse was a lively chestnut to whom he gave the name Benbella. And he sometimes rode Dorian, a big black Arabian stallion. One day Dorian, crossing a stream, halted without warning and lay down for a bath. As the big stallion rolled over and splashed about kicking his hooves in the air, Camilo emerged drenched to the skin and laughing until his ribs hurt, more from the laugh than from the fall. The cowboys laughed too. But they respected him for his readiness to ride with them, and as long as he climbed back into the saddle, they said, he would make a good horseman. And Camilo always climbed back. In the month of May, from away over the plains, thousands of head of cattle were brought into Yopal. This was the time for the fattening and the branding; and the time for rodeos. Camilo clambered down off the corral and took his turn at riding the young bulls, and was bucked and tossed into the dust and rolled over amidst fresh roars of laughter. He lived over again the scenes of his boyhood, and sometimes alone, swinging in his hammock, recalled the weeks he once spent wandering over those plains in search of life’s “total answer,” and making up his mind to be a priest. Those had been romantic days. He remembered the night he sat on a fence making his momentous decision to enter the seminary. The very stars had seemed to swirl. How unglamorous, by comparison, were the decisions which faced him now: where to find money to meet the UARY’s growing bills, how to keep peace between conflicting members of the staff and how, above all, to hold off Roman, the security man, while the UARY teachers fed revolutionary notions to the farm boys. Roman was the most feared man in the plains. He ranged over hundreds of square miles, flying, riding, driving his jeep, friend and protector of the big ranch-owners, persecutor of the squatters, in¬ fallible detector of the rebellious and guardian of the law. His gun defended the handful of families whose ancestors, more than a cen¬ tury before, had invaded the plains, murdered the indians and taken the land. It defended them from the cowhands and small farmers who were sure of only a few weeks’ salary each year in the round-up sea¬ sons of September or May, and who, for the rest, sowed cassava and

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banana plants on their little conucos down by the streams, and ran two or three skinny milkers, maybe, on a tiny patch of grass. They had their wives to keep, and their swarm of hungry kids, and when they looked across the cattle-rancher’s fence at the luxuriant pastures on the other side, they sometimes felt temptations impossible to resist. Occasionally at night, part of a fence got pulled down, and in the morning a few unidentified mangey cows were grazing along¬ side the owner’s prize heifers. Roman would soon be on the spot with his troopers, and shots were often fired, and if the farmer was carried out alive, his wife knew that she would be digging the land alone for many months to come and sending the children into town once in a while with a pot of soup for their dad in the county jail. At the outset Camilo tried to humour Roman. He often went over to the man’s ranch for a drink, and was warm and friendly whenever he appeared at the UARY. But not all of Camilo’s helpers gave the security man such a sunny smile. Many of them hated the sight of his tough leathery face and the sound of his humourless laugh—“a jackal’s laugh,” as Camilo called it. When Roman drove up and stepped out of his jeep, the local men stopped their talk and just stood quiet, taking in the revolver at his hip and the metallic contraption he wore where his right arm had been shot off (who knew when?) with its gruesome hook for a hand. They didn’t like to see Camilo being so nice to the bastard; but they guessed it was the only way to treat him, unless you were looking for trouble. The UARY gave Camilo enough trouble as it was. For a start the cost of it went soaring way over the budget. He had hoped it would be largely self-supporting, but its fruit trees and vegetable plots pro¬ duced next to nothing, and great quantities of food had to be brought down from Bogota each week by truck. The little school just limped along, while those who should have been managing it indulged in con¬ stant bickering amongst themselves. The director, Perafan, was forever at loggerheads with his secondin-charge; and both of them had bad relations with fellow-workers and with men of the Yopal district. Perafan and the accountant and the agronomist and the co-op expert had all been reared in other parts of the country, and the plainsmen considered them outsiders. They had a lot to learn about Los Llanos—about the weather and the crops

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and the soil—yet they were on salaries five or six times as big as the wages paid to a local worker hired as overseer or odd-job man. Camilo tried to smooth things over, but he was not always present at the school, and even when he was, he could not totally cleanse its original sin. The UARY was, after all, the child of the ESAP; it had been begotten in bureaucracy. The Yopal project encountered another problem. It turned out that the men of the plains were not nearly as ripe for revolution as Camilo, fired by Franco’s propaganda, had first imagined. He soon found that the old-time guerrillas who had fought for the Liberal Party—and had been betrayed—recoiled instinctively at the mention of further wars. They had gone back into their shells, and each one fended for himself, alone, against the sun and the rain and his fellowman. To these sceptics there was no sense in talking of revolution. Their sons, Camilo thought, would make likelier material, but they would have to be handled with kid gloves. For two reasons: from the cradle their elders had warned them against city-slickers plugging revolution, and the merest rumour of subversion would reach Roman’s farmhouse quicker than a bushfire. Camilo, then, when he came down to give the boys a class in rural sociology, took them along gently. He gave them his channel-of-ascent theory, and let them draw their own conclusions. But not so Perafan; and not so the young agronomist. These two men were fiery exponents of revolution, and had none of Camilo’s patience or tact. Before long everyone in Yopal had heard of Perafan’s recipe for social change: the firing squad for the oligarchs, and for Cardinal Concha, a slow hanging by the genitals. This brought Roman and his men down on the UARY like a pack of bloodhounds; while in Bogota, Dr. Nannetti was informed, and knitted his brow and made arrangements to keep a tighter check on his young priest-dean. One summer evening at the UARY, as Camilo walked across to the kitchen door, he happened to look down and saw the bodies of life¬ less birds scattered all over the yard. They were arendajos, little black and yellow birds which nested in the bamboo trees. Flying home in the evening, blinded by the setting sun, they had not made out the

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white-cement wall of the school-room and, one after another, smashed into it and fallen down, broken and dead. Camilo called for the caretaker and asked him to paint the some darker colour. It was bad enough that the UARY should him so many headaches. But it was a crime that its walls should and kill the innocent arendajos.

had wall give trap

That year the government decreed the bombing of Marquetalia, one of the Independent Republics in Tolima. Various governments had wrestled with the problem'of the peas¬ antry in arms. Rojas had bombed them, but had not been able to bomb them out. Alberto Lleras had tried, in vain, the persuasive tactics of “rehabilitation.” Finally his successor, desperate now, de¬ cided to bring out all his guns and wipe the Independent Republics off the map. The reigning President’s name was Valencia, and his desperation was not hard to understand. For the Lleras administration had be¬ queathed him a sorry inheritance: a bankrupt economy, a pile of debts, a devalued peso and, consequently, an angry populace. In 1958, Alberto Lleras had initiated the National Front, the rotating regime of Liberals and Conservatives, in an atmosphere of optimism and good will, but when he handed the reins of government to Valencia in 1962, his popularity was at a very low ebb. In an effort to boost the National Front’s morale, John F. and Jacqueline Ken¬ nedy came to Bogota and paid glowing tribute to Lleras. Then the bourgeoisie named Lleras for the Nobel Peace Prize, and put a fortune into a tickertape parade in his honour. Banners were carried down Seventh Avenue featuring the legend gracias, alberto lleras! But the common people, victims of mounting loans from the United States, sarcastically painted counter banners in English: THANK YOU, MR. LLERAS!

After that, between 1962 and 1964, the nation’s debt had increased, and with it, the poverty of the masses. Valencia, a blustering Presi¬ dent, seemed to have lost control. To begin with, he knew nothing about economic affairs. To be perfectly honest, even his closest friends admitted that he knew nothing about anything at all. Except, perhaps, duck-shooting. He was a reasonably good marksman, and

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spent the weekends in hunting parties on his family’s estate at Popayan. In his country seat he was respected as the son of a cele¬ brated, if out-moded, poet, and was known not as plain Mr. Valencia but as the Count of the House of Valencia. His forebears had been relics of a Spanish nobility reduced in circumstances but inflated with memories of past grandeur. While he and his friends stalked ducks in the morning and got tipsy in their dilapidated manor houses at night, the hungry people began to join forces against the ruling few. In March of 1964, the election for parliamentary seats showed a dramatic fall in votes for all parties and candidates. The working masses had ceased to put their faith in the pseudo-democracy of the bourgeois state. They organized, instead, a nation-wide agitation. Strikes exploded in every city, and bombs exploded in government buildings. Above all, the peasant movements gathered strength, and in the province of Santander, a small but solid liberation army was being formed. Valencia, when he got wind of all this and felt the throne shaking under him, gave hasty orders to his army generals. As a first safety measure, they would exterminate the armed enclave of Marquetalia. Marquetalia had long been a thorn in the government’s side. When other peasant strongholds weakened under attack or blockade, and starvation forced the men and women out from the hills, pitifully wav¬ ing the white handkerchief of surrender, the people of Marquetalia stood firm. They dominated a high plateau in the central mountain range, farmed it in a commune, conducted their own government and maintained a standing army. They posted sentries at every moun¬ tain pass, and any official troops who tried to enter Marquetalia met a barrage of machine-gun fire. All attempts to liquidate them having failed, the President and his generals and their American military advisers opted for all-out concentrated bombing. Without further ado, they informed the public of their plan. The operation would represent, according to official press reports, the government’s “transcendental commitment to liberate the Independ¬ ent Republics.” It would cost some $30 million and involve sixteen thousand troops. Helicopters would fly the men in at tree-top level, and the latest American anti-guerrilla techniques would be employed

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—napalm and germ warfare. Foreign war correspondents were invited to come along and see just how effective those modem weapons were. Operation Marquetalia was scheduled to begin on May 1. These matter-of-fact announcements left the Colombian people stunned for a moment and speechless. Then came the protests. Every humanitarian club or association united its voice to that of the MRL (the Revolutionary Liberal Movement) and the Communist Party to condemn this monstrous fratricide, and, as a result, army generals and government ministers gave interviews in which they modified their earlier bald statements and said that the bombs would be used only as a last resort, and only against those who were “unwilling to submit to Colombian laws and the Colombian constitution and au¬ thorities.” Meanwhile, the great working masses held their breaths in horror, and the families of Marquetalia frantically dug trenches and caves and hideouts in the sides of the hills, and braced themselves for the worst. As the fateful month of May drew nearer, one of the few people who was not content with verbal protests, but sought a way to avert the catastrophe, was Camilo. He spoke of his anxiety with Gustavo Perez and his colleague Orlando Fals, and with his cousin Umana and the priest Guzman, who had worked on the study of the Violence. Was there nothing they could do? They were joined by a demagogic left-wing politician, a man called Garavito. Among them, they de¬ cided to make an appeal to the Minister of War. They would seek per¬ mission to enter the zone of operations as an independent peace mission before any military action was undertaken. On a given morning, therefore, they assembled in the office of the minister, General Rebeiz, but had hardly uttered their first words when the general, who had been glancing from one to the other, came to Garavito, glared, turned puce and leapt to his feet with a howl, ordering the man out of his sight. Apparently Garavito’s well-known demagogy rendered him persona non grata with Rebeiz. The general swung around to the others. “If you don’t get rid of this man,” he roared, “we may as well call the whole thing off!” Garavito took the hint and retired; but it was not easy for Camilo

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and the others to make real headway after such a false start, and with Rebeiz so visibly piqued. The general was obviously not over-sympathetic to their proposal in the first place, as he considered it an intrusion into his domain. However, as long as they were prepared to go ahead at their own risk, he would place no obstacles in their path. There was just one thing he wanted them to be perfectly clear about: there would soon be no corner of the country left in wfeiich the national flag could not be hoisted, whether the people of Marquetalia liked it or not. “You might just tell them that,” he suggested to the members of the peace mis¬ sion as he wished them good luck and bade them good-day. Before leaving, someone wondered if the Army might not lend them a helicopter, at which Rebeiz laughed mirthlessly and said he thought the idea preposterous, and once again bade them good-day. With or without a helicopter, Camilo and his friends were ready to leave for the mountains as soon as the word was given. But there was still one formality to be attended to: the cardinal had to reply to the minister’s petition that he allow priests to take part in the peace mis¬ sion. They waited impatiently. It was well into April, and still no word from the cardinal. Camilo tried to get in to see him, but His Eminence was unavailable. On April 24, General Rebeiz made a statement to the press on the proposed mission, pointing out that it had “absolutely no official char¬ acter” and that, whatever its outcome, the government would con¬ tinue “unyielding in its determination to place in safe custody those bandits who have their centre of operations in Marquetalia.” He also mentioned that he had sent a second note to Cardinal Concha re¬ questing hierarchical authorization for Fathers Torres, Perez and Guzman. At last, on D-day, May 1, Camilo and Gustavo and Guzman learned of the cardinal’s decision from the headlines of El Tiempo: “Priests Denied Permission to Go to Marquetalia. Sources close to the archbishop’s palace disclosed last night. . .” Linotypists had hardly set the words in a column for the early edi¬ tion before soldiers in a dozen barracks were being roused and given a final briefing, and by mid-morning all participating regiments were

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moving south to the operation’s general headquarters in the town of Neiva. From there they would close in on Marquetalia. From their shelters amongst the dense mountain foliage, the peas¬ ant families heard the first helicopters humming overhead. Suddenly a shrill voice filled the air, drowning out the noise of the motors. “This is a last call to the civilian population,” the voice croaked. “Come out and give yourselves up. If not, you will be destroyed along with the armed bandits. This is your last chance!” Someone peered up through the undergrowth to see where the voice was coming from. He saw a huge megaphone' hanging down under the aircraft’s belly, like the sex of a mule. It continued to blare out its call to the “civilian population.” They looked at one another, half-amused, despite the danger circling so close over their heads. Which of us is a civilian? They were all civilians. But the head of every family was armed, and the toughest guerrilla fighter was indistinguishable from the man next to him. In his straw hat, his white shirt and pants, his tennis shoes or sandals, he looked no different from anyone else. Well it was now time to act different, their leader told them. He gave orders. “Women and children and nonfighting men will be evacuated into the jungle, where it will be hard for the enemy to spot them. We others will break up into small mobile guerrilla groups and harass the enemy as soon as he sets foot on the ground. If those bas¬ tards up there want war, then we’ll give them war!” After buzzing around the area for an hour, the helicopter swooped away over the trees and was lost to sight. In the distance the people could hear the megaphone braying out its message to other invisible civilians. They hurriedly wrapped up a few belongings and began to move cautiously out of their hiding places. Not all of them got back under cover in time. In the days that fol¬ lowed a woman was mown down by machine-gun fire as she scurried across the open fields. A jet fighter, strafing the jungle, blew up a human warren where fifteen terrified children had snuggled together. Black measles crept over the flesh of adults and children alike, for the planes sprayed behind them a terrible trail of germs. Within a few weeks, however, the women and children had reached comparative safety, and the men had worked out new forms of com-

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bat. The enemy planes tried hopelessly to locate them from the air. Platoons of foot-soldiers hobbled back to camp dragging their dead and wounded; snipers had taken them by surprise. Guerrilla warfare had begun in earnest. In Bogota the newspapers were full of denials that military inva¬ sion was taking place in Marquetalia. “Only Civic Action programs are being used,” said the Minister of War. “And we shall respect all ideologies.” The President pinned medals on two policemen who had been the “lucky ones” chosen by fate to eliminate a couple of infamous bandits. “Heroes of the Pacification,” he called them. The implication was that anyone who could bring in the head of a peasant from Marquetalia might become a national hero too. The truth about Marquetalia reached Camilo through friends like Maria Arango who were activists in the Communist Party. Through¬ out the month of June they kept him informed with communiques from the guerrilla front in which he read that whole platoons of soldiers had been ambushed, many of them killed, and quantities of their arms and ammunition, uniforms and equipment confiscated by the peasants. The civilians, he was told, had started to look like regu¬ lar soldiers. They carried GI knapsacks, and aluminium water-flasks were tied to their belts, and their M-l rifles were made in the U.S.A. None of this, of course, appeared in the daily papers. At the end of July, Camilo read the Marquetalia agrarian reform bill, a document promulgated by the guerrillas at a general assembly in the mountains. It was a vague project, based more on a yearning for private ownership of the land than on any concept of socialism. Its chief merit was the fact that the peasants had composed it them¬ selves, in a maqui, while the bombs were dropping around them. Later, Camilo was given statistics on the net result of Operation Marquetalia. For their $30 million, the Colombian Government and its American advisers had got the following: a hundred burned farm¬ houses and a hundred farms; the occupied common lands of Marquetalia; a hundred thousand fowls eaten, and approximately the same number of cattle; two thousand peasants imprisoned, more than two hundred of these murdered, and nobody knew how many tortured for information. The damage caused to the terrain was valued at about

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$2 million. The sum total of Marquetalian people fallen in combat: seventeen—one guerrilla fighter, one woman, and the fifteen children who had taken shelter in the jungle. The operation also produced an effect which neither the army gen¬ erals nor the gringo experts had counted on: the mobile guerrilla units which had sprung up in response to the massive air attacks held a secret meeting with other armed peasant groups in the south of Tolima Province and formed the Southern Guerrilla Bloc. The Colombian revolution had entered a new phase. *

The whole episode had a decisive influence on Camilo; the fight of the men of Marquetalia prompted him into action. He felt grateful after all for the minister’s opposition to the peace mission and the cardinal’s refusal. If he and Gustavo and Fals and the rest had been allowed to go down to parley with the peasants, the Marquetalians might have come to terms with the military men and strangled their own rebel movement. Instead, two opposing armies were now drawn up for battle: the oligarchy’s and Yankee’s army with all its modem equipment on the one side, and on the other, the armed forces of the men of the land, scrappy forces, it was true, and poorly armed, but with hopes of becoming, in time, the mobilized troops of the masses and defenders of the best part of fifteen million Colombians. New guerrilla detachments were springing up, and each one, it seemed to Camilo, was a potential vanguard of a someday peo¬ ple’s army. But someday’s don’t simply happen, he figured. They have to be made to happen. It seemed to him immoral to sit talking of revolution while a handful of headstrong peasants struggled unaided to launch an army. “We progressive intellectuals are very brainy,” he scoffed. “We have a lot of good things to say. We’re popular too, and in a group we are really very nice people. But the reactionaries have only to move a finger, and we’re floored! We can’t go on like this,” he con¬ cluded, “without organization, and without arms at least as powerful as theirs.” The peasants had given the lead in organizing and arming them¬ selves; and the progressive intellectuals could at least help boost the

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peasant movement. However, as soon as he looked for a way to do this, Camilo came to grips with the intransigence of the Communist Party; for the Southern Guerrilla Bloc was manipulated by the party’s chiefs, who were wary of Camilo and loathe to let him onto their preserves. They had reason to fear him, as he was a threat to the total control which the party exercised over the Independent Republics. For years the Central Committee had forbidden local peasant leaders to take any important decision before receiving orders from the party’s policy-makers in Bogota. And they had obeyed. “The party comes first,” they said, reciting their well-memorized creed. Occasionally the Politbureau sent down envoys from the city to take them through the articles of faith and inculcate the fundamental principle of fighting “on all fronts.” With this slogan the comrades justified their cosy well-paid nooks in Parliament, and concluded, by way of corollary, that the peasants must on no account endanger the parliamentary front by causing unnecessary disturbances in the countryside. They should restrict their activities to mere self-defence. For the peasants, self-defence meant suicide. Either they took the initiative of surprise attack, or they left it with the enemy. Thus count¬ less deaths had been caused by the opportunist instructions of the Central Committee. The bombing of Marquetalia, however, turned the tide. With the threat of extinction hanging over them, the peasants had had no time to consult the high priests. Their local leaders gave the orders, saved the people and, almost without knowing it, dis¬ covered the formula for genuine guerrilla warfare. The Communist Party heads accepted the fait accompli and hastened to turn it to their advantage. They sent in organizers to con¬ gratulate the Marquetalians on their victory and succeeded in appeas¬ ing the dissident peasant leaders by promoting them to membership on the Central Committee. The popular guerrilla movement had not yet slipped through the party’s fingers, and if Camilo wanted to get in touch with the peasants, he would have to do so through the correct party channels. He put it to his friend Maria Arango and her husband, Marroquin —Marroco as everyone called him—a likable character who had been at the head of the Communist Party’s youth organization for years.

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But 1964 was a bad year for Marroco. Camilo found him trying to patch up what was left of his organization after the Sino-Soviet split; for the admirers of Mao amongst the Colombian Communist youth, having grown weary of the party line and Moscow’s languid recipe for revolution-peaceful co-existence, disarmament and the “defense of democratic freedoms”—had opened the split right down the local scene by setting up an opposition, Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of Colombia with plans for guerrilla warfare on the Chinese model. Marroco and his co-religionists of the Muscovite persuasion were busy calling the Maoists names like “politically cotkeyed dema¬ gogues” and “childish adventurers” when Camilo walked in announc¬ ing that the armed peasant rising was the key to the whole rev¬ olutionary problem and asking to be taken to talk to the fighting men of Marquetalia. Marroco unscrewed the top of an aguardiente bottle, laughed, poured a glass, scratched his beard, and said, “Look here, Camilo, this is hardly the moment, you know, what with all the strife and so forth. We couldn’t guarantee your safety.” Of course he promised to talk to the party chiefs about it, but he didn’t think they would be keen. In his opinion Camilo was doing a first-rate job as an educator in political awareness and had no need for direct contact with the guerrillas. Maria piped up with: “Remember what happened to our poor Federico,” an unnecessary reminder, as it turned out, for Camilo had not for a moment forgotten Maria’s brother Federico, the big smiling engineer who suddenly one day, just a year before, had felt the fire of revolution in him and gone off to form a rebel army, only to be be¬ trayed by his comrades-in-arms and handed over to the police and stood up against an anonymous adobe wall somewhere and shot— ingloriously, stupidly shot! Camilo threw back his head, threw down the aguardiente and left Maria’s remark hanging without a comment in the middle of Marroqufn’s sitting room. If she thought he was going to repeat a misfired exploit like Federico’s she was very mistaken. He had something else in mind. But the Communist Party people, he saw, were not open to suggestions. The party set great store by legal recognition and elec¬ tion campaigns, and the Marquetalia business, far from being one of

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the Communist Party’s glories, was a downright embarrassment. Camilo let the matter slide while Marroco cheerily filled the glasses again and chattered on about other things. Thus Camilo’s first attempt to break into the political arena had run him up against a brick wall. The time for action had arrived, he was convinced of that, and he was ready to play his part. But where? and how? He could hang up his cassock and grab a gun, so he had once told Maria, but it was not; as simple as that. Not only Antonio Larrotta but Federico Arango as well, and through recent years in rapid succession a host of students, had gone off to the hills and their isolation from the peasant masses had cost them their lives. Camilo admired their bravery and good will, but he was aware that a revolu¬ tion required more than good will. It needed to put down deep roots in the history of a people, and to nourish them in the soil of the peo¬ ple’s struggle; and while he did not deny that the intellectual had a specific role to play in the process of change, he recognized that political analysis, sound though it may be in theory, was only really valid when it had been sifted by the wisdom and experience of the people. In Venezuela, Camilo noticed, his friends had been slow to learn that lesson. Since they began in 1961, their youthful efforts to spark off a revolution had met with repeated set-backs. They blamed the Communist Party leaders who, there too, vacillated between armed insurgence and the scramble for seats in Parliament. But the causes went deeper. Chief among them was the fact that Venezuela had little precedent for armed peasant revolt; the economy was concentrated along the coastal strip in the oil wells and the mines, and the Venezuelan farmers had no tradition comparable with the fight for the land which, in Colombia, was centuries old. Camilo saw that the guerrilla movements in the neighbouring country were trying to har¬ vest where history had not sown. “You people have plenty of leaders,” he once remarked to a Venezuelan friend, “but no troops. In Colombia we have no shortage of troops; what we lack are leaders.” He looked around bleakly to see what had become of yesterday’s student agitators. Luis Villar had gone into Parliament, in an opposi¬ tion seat of course, where he shook a weary debater’s fist at the Na-

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tional Front officials across the benches and took a whisky with them between sessions in the bar. And where were Luis’ erstwhile cohorts of the Revolutionary Liberal Youth? Well, some were sitting along¬ side him in the House, while others had disappeared altogether, mostly into bourgeois private life. Just a few had disappeared into the jungle to organize a guerrilla army, but of these Camilo knew nothing at all. From time to time some university acquaintance would appear in his office with a request to hide a document or find a safe place of lodging for some unidentified friend who needed urgent inedical treat¬ ment or, on one occasion, to transport a rifle to a country town, but the fellows came and went wrapped in such an aura of secrecy as to invite no questions. Camilo simply complied, if he could, and kept quiet. He presumed they were from the MOEC. In the university world Marroqufn’s Communist Youth were hav¬ ing a hard tussle, not only with the adherents to the Chinese line, but also with the noisy students of Santander who had marched some three hundred miles from Bucaramanga to Bogota and brought all the country’s universities to a standstill for three months. Marroco had no objection to the student strike; but he did oppose the plea for guerrilla warfare which was on every strike leader’s lips. To Camilo these catch-cries had the ring of empty menaces such as Luis Villar used to fling in the face of the oligarchy a few years earlier. But Marroco, who had his ear to the ground, knew better. The students from Bucaramanga were not simply spouting hot air; they spoke in the name of a new group of insurgents. From now on, thought Marroco, the Communist Party would have to contend with more than the disaffected Maoists and the anarchist bomb-throwers of the MOEC; a really serious threat to the party’s hegemony over the Left was emerging in the mountains of Santander. For that same year, on a July night in a peasant’s hut on a hillside near San Vicente de Chucurf, a handful of men, hunched around a table drinking coffee, put the final touches to the most ambitious con¬ spiracy in the history of Colombia: the launching of the Army of Na¬ tional Liberation. They looked an unlikely lot. Neither Parmenio, the owner of the house, nor his ragged bunch of neighbours sitting silently on stools with tin mugs in their hands seemed capable of

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bringing down the national government; yet the bright flickering light of an oil lamp picked out a knowing grin on every deep-rutted face. Each man seemed to be saying: just give us time. Their leader, Fabio Vasquez, the sinewy young man with mous¬ tache and an Antioquenian accent who did most of the talking, told them how the campaign would work. He spoke of the success of the Cuban guerrillas in thd Sierra Maestra and described in vivid detail the adventures of the twelve men who survived the landing of the Granma and how, two years later, they came to power in Havana. Cuba was to be their inspiration; but Parmenio and his friends should hold out no false hopes; the battle would be a long one, a much longer one than the Cubans’, and not all of them would see the victory. Only perseverance would ensure it, and faith in their own people. The farm labourers listened to Fabio with respect. For more than a year he had been living with them in their solitary hamlets around San Vicente, hoeing hard each day on the mountainside; and all his talk was of rebellion. He made them feel proud to be men of Santander, sons of Jose Antonio Galan, the first peasant to rebel against the Spanish crown two centuries before. Ever since Galan, he said, Santander was known as the home of fearless warriors. He re¬ minded them of Rafael Rangel, who had ridden into San Vicente and routed Laureano’s troops in 1949, and he rekindled in the older men the will to take up arms. Little by little he unfolded his plan. He and a group of revolution¬ aries had hit upon this zone as the ideal location for a guerrilla army. The town of San Vicente was situated close to Barranca, where Colombia’s principal oil deposits and giant petrol refineries lay along the shores of the Magdalena. The Army of National Liberation would operate right down the Magdalena Valley with a long-term project to control the main lines of transport, both by river and rail, connect¬ ing Bogota with the Atlantic coast. In due course they would be able to paralyze the country’s economy. To every man’s objection Fabio had an answer ready. The dense tropical foliage around the Magdalena, he insisted, was unbeatable guerrilla country. Besides, the inhabitants were mainly subsistence squatters who would favour their cause; few and far between were

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the big land-owners, and the jungle was too treacherous and inhospi¬ table for regular army patrols to effectively penetrate. Fabio’s final and convincing argument was the fact that the Magdalena River Valley had been the chief battle-ground of the labour movement since the days of the banana plantation massacres in 1928. Forty years of fighting for a raise in salaries had been the lot of the unionists in the plantations and refineries. The Communist Party cadres who ran the unions never offered their members a final showdown with the bosses, but the very sense of class struggle which the party had aroused over the years in the proletariat of the Texas Petroleum and United Fruit companies had ripened the workers for revolt. Fabio explained to the farmers that he had no grudge against the Communist Party, nor against the MRL Youth nor the MOEC. On the contrary, many of his comrades had been militants in one or an¬ other or all of these groups, but had outgrown them. The revolution¬ ary movements were divided, and only a concentrated action of a sort that was at one and the same time political and military could save the Colombian revolution from defeat. It was the destiny of the men of San Vicente—and here Fabio stood up—it was their historic destiny and their honour, he declaimed, to form the original platoon of the Jose Antonio Galan Front and, with it, to inaugurate the Army of National Liberation! The next day the guerrilla camp was pitched in the foothills of the Cerro de los Andes and training began in earnest. Fabio had acquired a rifle or two and the peasants pooled whatever arms they had. Their first duty was to keep their weapons clean and polished and near to hand at all times. The rigours of their new army life soon accustomed them to the rest: sentry duty, turns at cooking, the hunting of wild animals, the route marches and exercises for fitness, literacy classes for those who could not read or write and, for everybody, lessons in rudimentary political science. Once they had understood the basic notions of oppression and social change, Fabio sent them out two by two into the surrounding shanties to make disciples for the revolution. Sometimes they came back with a new recruit—a sullen willowy boy of thirteen, maybe, or a tanned and gnarled peasant of undetermined age who had left his

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house and land and wife and family to join the ranks of the liberation army. From an original seventeen the Galan Front began gradually to grow. Meanwhile, in Barranca and in the nearby provincial capital, Bucaramanga, and in Bogota, a team of urban revolutionaries was already in action. Their main task was to make contact with worth¬ while elements abandoning the Communist Youth or the MRL or the MOEC and draft them into the services of the liberation army, the ELN. The ELN’s most active propagandists were the strikers who had led the march from Bucaramanga and were causing such deep antagonisms amongst the followers of Marroqmn. Special squads of underground workers were detailed to handle the supply of funds and firearms and medicines, and some of these were amongst Camilo’s mysterious callers at the ESAP. One of them was Fabio’s brother, Manuel, a young law student who, with Villar, had edited the MRL Youth’s weekly paper. Camilo knew that he was Manuel Vasquez, but nothing more. He would have been glad to know much more. For the ELN had not yet made its public appear¬ ance, and until it did so at the beginning of the following year, 1965, the political scene in Colombia was a very dismal one indeed. Alfonso Lopez and his Revolutionary Liberal Movement had long since ceased to squawk against the government; they had become part of the government. Having won seats in the Senate and more in the House of Representatives, they had no further cause for com¬ plaint. As far as the people were concerned the MRL had been just one more delusion, and therefore, in the 1964 congressional elections, despite the cardinal’s exhortation that every citizen go to the polls under pain of serious sin, the percentage of voters dropped to an alltime low. The masses waited for a lead. With presidential elections looming in 1966, two army generals began to whip up popular support in the towns, one of them new to politics, and the other far too old. The first officer’s name was Ruiz Novoa, the Minister of War, gambling his general’s stars on his luck in leading a successful coup against the government of which he himself was a minister. He thought to capitalize on the dilemma facing President Valencia—either the admission of defeat or the iron fist—and promised the people a

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third choice, a kind of benevolent military dictatorship. He stirred up quite a hornet’s nest in Bogota. The other general was Rojas, whom Lleras had dethroned in 1957. Lleras’ National Front had given the people such a raw deal that some almost sighed for a return to the Rojas regime. The old general set up his National Alliance (ANAPO) and began to campaign. Both generals scored a measure of success in the cities, where the cost of living was rising faster than it had for twenty-five years. Urban workers were desperate for a solution. But the country people, past desperation, looked on contemptuously. In the midst of this political void, Camilo felt impelled to act. His first move was to bring together men and women of the most diverse beliefs and endeavour to unite them around a common cause. He excluded no one. Christian Democrats were invited and Communist Party theorists, free-lance intellectuals and uncommitted scientists with vaguely left-wing leanings. Umana, Fals, Guzman, even Luis Villar came along; and Alfonso Lopez, the leader of the MRL, was present at the opening meeting in Camilo’s flat, just in case there was any political kudos to be gained. The indispensable minimum, Camilo believed, was the framing of a program for action, “a concrete program,” he said, “prescinding from all differences of ideology and religion and from all traditional politics.” At which Alfonso Lopez grunted and left. Attendance slackened at the following meetings, but those who did keep their weekly appointment with Camilo—some out of a genuine concern, some out of loyalty to their friend the cura and others drawn by the scent of something cooking and frightened of being left outall agreed to prepare brief essays, one on parliamentary reform, another on economic planning, a third on international relations and so forth, which taken together might form the basis of a political plat¬ form. They promised Camilo to have their studies in by the second week of the coming year, 1965. People told Camilo he was wasting his time. What was he going to do with a new set of studies by the old troupers of the Left? His Marxist friends amongst the students at the National wondered why he did not make a direct approach to the Southern Guerrilla Bloc. Camilo explained that he had made overtures to the Communist Party

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but had got no response. In any case he had little to offer the men-atarms in Marquetalia. Their greatest lack was correct political theory, as was evident from their confused thinking on the agrarian problem, and Camilo knew he was no theorist. In that regard perhaps his pot-pourri of intellectuals would help. If they provided him with a concise analysis of the principal issues, he would ask for nothing more. With their ingredients he hoped to formulate a clear statement of policy on which to build a movement and refute the false prophets of the Left. He spent a few months, therefore, gently nagging at his would-be collaborators and reminding them that time was running out. The year 1964 was coming to an end, and what little was left of it went in a series of preliminary skirmishes. There was a public debate on “pressure groups” in which Camilo, without raising his voice, simply wiped up the floor with a panel of eminent citizens. When these gentlemen bleated sophisms in praise of the status quo, Camilo replied with a few home truths. This produced loud cheering from the back of the hall, which antagonized Camilo’s contenders more than his logic. Two days later, while his adversaries were still licking their wounds, Camilo published, in a daily paper, what was up until now his most devastating attack on “the decadence of the ruling classes.” The antics of President Valencia and his lackeys had proved too much for Camilo’s patience, and he aimed a surprise blast in their direction. “The fatuous fireworks of their tropical eloquence,” he wrote in an uncustomary spate of adjectives, “remind one of the decadent courts of Renaissance Europe, where the ruling few amused themselves with floral games and charades and pantomimes, while the populace sank into misery.” As his victims reeled back, Camilo came at them with sarcasm, another weapon he had never used before. “We don’t ask our politicians to be experts in every field, but we do expect them to seek technical advice, or read a book or, at very least, consult a dictionary.” His article did not stop there. It went on to show that in Colombia two sub-cultures were being bred, side by side, “completely different

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from one another, independent and mutually hostile.’ One of these cultures corresponded to 15 per cent of the population; the other represented the remaining 85 per cent. “Between the two,” he said, “all possible communication is being shut off.” For the first group, Camilo maintained, a word means one thing; for the second, another. Revolution, for example, means “immoral subversion” according to the 15 per cent; for the 85 per cent the same word means “constructive change.” The 15 per cent understand by political party a “democratic organization”; the 85 per cent take the same term to signify a “group of oligarchs.” And so it ^oes on. Pacifi¬ cation, he said, for one group means the “hunting down of delin¬ quents,” and for the other “the massacre of patriotic guerrillas.” The communication crisis had reached such a point, in Camilo’s opinion, that there was nothing more to be said. His concluding phrase struck an ominous note: “Slowly but surely, the popular classes have relinquished their claim to understand words or be understood when they use them. Now they understand only the language of action.” He was called into the chancery again, and again told to go easy. This last article had so brought the cardinal to the boiling point, the auxiliary bishop warned him, that he was likely to let the good bishops have their way and remove Camilo from the land reform board. Camilo regretted this, he said, as it would run counter to the cardinal’s hitherto independent policy, and suggested the decision be left until the time for his trip to Louvain. “Louvain?” asked the bishop, raising an eyebrow; at which Camilo reminded him that he was still hoping to take out that pending doctorate of his. The bishop’s eye¬ brow poised before dropping back into position. “Camilo,” he thought, “is playing for time.” In September he did go back to Louvain, not to write his doctoral thesis, however, but to read a paper at a Pro Nundi Vita International Congress of Catholic churchmen. Even though, as a rule, Catholic world congresses went against the grain, he had accepted the invitation as a chance to put his views to a wider public and see what echoes he might catch in advanced Church circles. Two years had passed since the frustrating round-table sessions in the Argentine and, in the meantime, the Vatican Council had succeeded in shooing a fair number of bats out of the Church’s belfries. Maybe he would get a

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hearing, and even some support. He knew that he was going to need it; for the political action in which he was about to engage-although as yet he did not know exactly what form it would take-was sure to lead him into waters unchartered by the Church in Colombia. If rep¬ utable foreign churchmen backed him, maybe he would not seem so far beyond the pale. His paper, therefore, which Guitemie translated into French for him, developed a long and closely reasoned argument to show that Christian charity, if it were to be efficacious and not merely a ques¬ tion of words, had to concern itself with economic planning, which, in the underdeveloped countries, meant a total change of power structures. “These structures will not change without pressure being exerted by the masses, and that pressure will be violent or nonviolent according to the attitude adopted by the minority governing classes.” He pointed out that, both theoretically and practically, the ones who were in the forefront of the fight to change structures were Marxists, and this brought him to his conclusion: the necessity of collaborating with the Marxists. “There is nothing to be afraid of,” he said, “for in a society which needs structural change, genuine authority is earned by revolutionary commitment, and that commitment, for the Christian, should be a commitment out of charity. The moral authority thus gained will give the Christian the right to demand concessions the day the Marxists come to power.” But not even this slightly opportunist allusion at the end won Camilo much sympathy. His suggestions were considered outlandish and unacceptable to the savants of the Roman Catholic Church. In the course of the congress they had listened approvingly to the big Irish-American bishop from Panama who talked for an hour on the danger of “Marxist infiltration” and how he aimed to combat it by “enlisting lay-helpers from the slightly more educated classes.” They had commiserated with a pompous archbishop from the Punjab lamenting the fact that “in India barely two per cent are within the Church’s fold.” But Camilo’s obvious unconcern about getting people into the fold and his insistence on revolution and the role of the Marxists had struck a jarring note. They froze him out with a polite

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and icy silence. Someone, not so polite, remarked that his French had a most comic South American intonation. Once the congress was over he had no desire to linger in Louvain; his one-time student haunts seemed dull and dreary to him now. Within ten days he was back in Colombia and up to his ears again in a dozen pitched battles in Bogota, the most willing of which were those he waged against the oligarchs’ candidate for the presidency, the Liberal Carlos Lleras. Liberal Party promoters had shamelessly proposed that a tax be levied on all employees of the land reform institute to finance Lleras’ election campaign, while in the ESAP the director, Nannetti, an avid Liberal, circulated a staff list suggesting that each staff member sacrifice 10 per cent of his salary for the party’s candidate. They had only to attach their signatures, so the circular said. It was now Camilo’s turn to come to the boil. He called together the employees under his immediate jurisdiction and instructed them not to sign; then he went in search of Nannetti and confronted him with his mimeographed list. “If this financial contribution were intended for an opposition party,” he fumed, holding the sheet of paper under the director’s nose, “you would be the first to have the contributor penalized. A public servant, you would say, ought to be nonpolitical!” Nannetti had to back down, of course, and so too did the Liberals in the land reform institute after Camilo had openly opposed them at a board meeting. Carlos Lleras and his camp seethed with anger. A little over a month later, in November, Lleras was invited by the rector of the National University to address the student body. Never had a politician been received with such hostility; the students jeered and whistled and threw rotten eggs at his little bald head until at last he was forced to take refuge in the rector’s office in the company of a buxom female Liberal, Esmeralda Arboleda. From behind locked doors the students heard Esmeralda shouting that they would have to drag out Carlos Lleras over her dead body, a prospect which gave them pause, long enough for the palace guard to arrive and rescue the terrified presidential candidate. Camilo came out in the papers next day with a defence of the stu¬ dents. His article was no blind apology for hooliganism. On the con-

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trary, it was a logical analysis of the causes behind the student demonstration, inviting the oligarchy to a serene reflection on the events. “Dr. Carlos Lleras is an intelligent person,” he wrote, “highly educated and, to say the least, civilized. ... We can be sure, too, that the university students don’t enjoy throwing eggs at their fellowmen, nor do they like to, spend their free time facing the fury of the bayonets.” He suggested, then, that the conflict was produced not by a personal whim of the students but by a deep and permanent abyss which separated the masses from the ruling families. The students, by reason of their privileged status within an illiterate society, feel them¬ selves to be the voice of the voiceless masses, and on those occasions when they find themselves face to face with a representative of the oligarchy, conflict is inevitable. The oligarchy’s hens were coming home to roost, he argued, re¬ calling how the students had been led to serve the National Front’s political interests in years gone by. “The students do not understand why they were applauded for throwing stones at Rojas Pinilla and are now censured for throwing eggs at Carlos Lleras. The ruling class does not understand why the students meddle in politics; and the students do not understand why the nonpolitical rector of the university sponsors a political address within the university pre¬ cincts.” The incident highlighted once more the communication gap which existed between the masses and the ruling few. The healing of this open wound, he submitted, was all-important, as the attitude adopted by the oligarchy “will determine whether the forthcoming social con¬ flicts in Colombia end in harmony, or in violence.” With that he had had his say for 1964. It was late November; the students finished their exams and the ESAP closed down for vaca¬ tions. Guitemie went home on a holiday to France, and Camilo took time off. There was a lull before the storm. Fabio Vasquez and his men had not taken time off. After six months of strenuous training the Jose Antonio Galan guerrilla front was now ready to stage its first military action. Someone suggested they strike in Galan country around the town

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of El Socorro. But this would take them to the other side of the Cor¬ dillera de los Cobardes and well away from their base. All the better, it seemed to Fabio, as their operation would thus throw the au¬ thorities off the scent and allow the guerrillas to regroup afterwards around their original campsite. For days Fabio and his general staff, which included a university student, Victor Medina, and several sturdy peasants, pored over a map of the area. One of the members of the general staff was Afanador, an ugly one-eyed wiry man who hailed from Simacota. He leaned over and put his finger on the name of his hbme town and said: “That’s the place you’re looking for.” Simacota was a sleepy hollow some fifteen miles from El Socorro. It had an Agrarian Credit Bank full of cash, which the guerrillas could use, and a pharmacy full of drugs they needed. They could easily overpower the town’s police¬ men, four in all, he said, and add their rifles and revolvers to the guerrilla’s munition stock. There was a further advantage: Afanador would guide the men along a hidden jungle track which led up over the mountain range and down to within a mile of the town. And so it was decided. In mid-December they packed their knap¬ sacks, shouldered their rifles and carbines and shotguns and set out behind “Dead-eye” Afanador in single file up the mountain pass. Twenty-seven men they were now, plus a blond teen-age country girl called Mariela. Each guerrilla wore his red armband with the white initials of the ELN, and felt nervous and brave as he marched towards his first combat. Fabio had given the order: as a tribute to Antonio Larrotta and his revolutionary movement, they would attack Simacota on January 7. For fifteen nights they plodded up over the muddy ridges, wading through streams, stopping dead in their tracks at the distant bark of a dog. By day they took shelter in the scrub, and relaxed. Finally at 4 a.m., on one of the first nights of the new year, they camped beside a friendly peasant’s hut. When dawn broke they could see shining down below them the tin rooftops of Simacota. Tuesday, January 6, was spent in last-minute preparations. After sundown Afanador and another man were sent to reconnoitre. A couple of hours later they were back with their report: all was quiet in the town. These two drew a detailed street map for all the men to

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study, picking out the police station, the credit bank, the brewer’s agency, the drugstore, the telephone exchange and the hotel. Each man repeated his instructions over and over again, and when ham¬ mocks had been hung and silence descended over the camp, instead of sleeping, everyone lay wide-awake going over his part, hour after hour waiting for the first light of day. At eight o’clock in the morning four guerrillas, wearing neither khaki nor ELN armbands, walked into the Simacota police station, drew revolvers and shot the sergeant and two constables dead. They stooped over the fallen men and unstrapped their revolvers, and were looking around for the fourth man when Fabio and the rest burst into the town firing shots into the air. The townsfolk were thunderstruck. “Keep calm!” shouted Fabio. “Don’t run! We’re not going to harm you! We are the Army of National Liberation!” The town’s mayor was having breakfast in the hotel when they ordered him out at pistol point and led him across to the credit bank to find the cashier and open the safe; the wireless operator was putting a frantic call through to the army barracks in El Socorro when they abruptly cut her cables; Senor Villarreal, the only rich merchant in town, was dragged into the street while they ransacked his house; and the mild drugstore attendant, horrified, watched them filling their knapsacks with all kinds of bottles and pills. A group of guerrillas went quickly from door to door handing out leaflets and instructing the people to gather in the plaza. It was not an order, they said, it was an invitation; but the simple dwellers eyed the weapons warily and took it as an order. Within half an hour an uneasy calm had settled over Simacota. Every soul in the town, it seemed, was assembled in silence in the square, and Victor Medina got up to speak. Victor had been well chosen for the task of addressing the people; he was a bom PR man. He explained to the frightened townspeople that they had nothing to fear from the liberation army; quite the con¬ trary, the guerrillas were their guarantee against oppression. They regretted that war forced them to kill policemen, but, in fact, the men in uniform were the defenders of a system which exploited the people. In the people’s war many of her sons would fall, both in the soldiery

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and the police force, until the day all the oppressed masses united against their common enemies, the oligarchy and the imperialists. The student leader’s friendly manner gradually won the people’s confidence and a few spoke up asking him to explain what he meant by “oligarchy” and “imperialists.” Victor, by way of reply, read the manifesto which had been passed around. At the same time the other men mingled with the crowd, exchanging pleasantries with the women and children, lighting a cigarette with the men, breaking down the atmosphere of panic. But panic struck Simacota a second time in the middle'of the morn¬ ing. The people, looking up at Victor, suddenly saw that he had stopped talking and was staring, terrified, out over their heads. “The Army!” he yelled, pulling his gun down off his shoulder. “The Army’s arrived!” Everyone swung around to follow his gaze; on the hillside above the town they saw troops coming along the road from El Socorro. “Cayetano!” screamed Victor, the code word for retreat. “Cayetano!” The guerrillas ran madly for cover down the main street heading for the jungle. The soldiers fired after them; they turned and fired back. Two infantrymen toppled. The soldiers aimed again and brought down one of the fleeing guerrillas. No one stopped to salvage the corpse. Parmenio it was, left lying dead on the cobblestones while his comrades escaped out of the range of flying bullets. The soldiers were too demoralized to give chase. They stayed to pick up their dead. The people stood around talking in hushed voices, scanning the sheet of paper the guerrillas had left in their hands, and the fourth policeman poked his head out from under a bed where he had been cowering for two hours and asked was it safe to get up. In the days that followed, the newspapers were full of Simacota. The twenty-seven men had become two hundred in the press accounts. The girl guerrilla was featured for the female glamour interest. Mariela holds up the police sergeant outside the village church and riddles him with bullets. The whole operation goes like clockwork and the guerrillas retire jubilantly with their booty and several new recruits from amongst the townsmen. They all but sing the internationale.

DECLARING WAR

213

As soon as the headline-writers realized what unwonted publicity they had given the guerrillas, they attempted to mitigate it by calling for all-out repression against this “handful of bandits.” Neverthe¬ less, despite all the contradictions and exaggerations of the press, it was obvious to everyone that a completely new type of guerrilla force had appeared on the Colombian scene. The bourgeoisie turned pale. Wealthy store-keepers and landowners from the El Socorro district moved with their families to live in the city. Left-wingers were elated at the news, and Camilo, who had been anxiously waiting for signs of life from the partisans of revolu¬ tion, did not conceal his delight. When the manifesto was published in the papers he read it over several times. It was not the essay of an armchair intellectual. It was a war cry; and Camilo liked the sound of it. SIMACOTA MANIFESTO The reactionary violence unleashed by a succession of oligarchic governments and continued under the corrupt regime of Valencia, Ruiz Novoa and Lleras, has been a powerful weapon used to squash the revolutionary peasant movement, a powerful weapon of domina¬ tion for the last fifteen years. Education is in the hands of traders who grow rich on the ig¬ norance in which they maintain our people. The soil is tilled by peasants who own nothing and who waste away their strength and their families’ health for the benefit of oli¬ garchs who live like kings in the cities. The workers receive starvation wages and are subjected to the misery and humiliations of big industry, both foreign and national. Democratic young intellectuals and professionals are obliged to place their talents at the service of the dominating class, or perish. Small and medium-sized producers, both in the country and in the city, are ruined by ruthless competition and credit monopoly in the hands of foreign capital and its local flunkies. The riches of the Colombian people are looted by American im¬ perialists. But the people, who have felt the scourge of exploitation, of misery, of reactionary violence, have risen up and are ready to fight. The revolutionary struggle is the only path open to the people in order to overthrow the present regime of violence and deceit.

214

CAMILO TORRES

We form the Army of National Liberation and fight for the free¬ dom of Colombia. The people, whether they be Liberals or Conservatives, will make common cause with us to overthrow the oligarchy of both parties. LONG LIVE THE UNION OF PEASANTS, WORKERS, STU¬ DENTS, PROFESSIONALS AND ALL HONEST MEN WHO WANT TO MAKE OF COLOMBIA A LAND WORTHY OF THE COLOMBIANS! LIBERATION OR DEATH! ARMY OF NATIONAL LIBERATION Jose Antonio Galan Front Carlos Villarreal

Andres Sierra

Camilo scrutinized the two signatures at the foot of the manifesto —the assumed names of Fabio Vasquez and Victor Medina—and wondered who they were. Then he sat down and filled pages of a letter to Guitemie with news of the ELN and the assault on Simacota. “What has been born, it seems to me, is the future liberation of Colombia,” he wrote. “With people like this we could really do some¬ thing.”

Chapter 9

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

In an effort to get in touch with the ELN, Camilo put out a number of feelers. He spoke of Simacota with a dozen different friends amongst the MOEC men and yesterday’s MRL Youth, but though they shared his views, he could detect no special complicity in their reactions. Some of them, however, Manuel Vasquez for one, took note of his enthusiasm and passed the word on to Fabio and his general staff who instructed them to keep a closer eye on Camilo and sound him out further. If he was genuinely interested, he might prove useful. But the priest must be treated with all possible caution. Even though he had collaborated with them on several occasions without so much as asking who they were, nonetheless Fabio was, by instinct, distrust¬ ful. The secret organization was still in its infancy and its survival depended on the observance of rigid safeguards. It would be madness to place any confidence in the cura Torres, who, for all his revolution¬ ary protestations, was still, after all, an upper-class clergyman operat¬ ing as a highly placed government official. A treacherous, or even an indiscreet, word from such a man could lead to the destruction of the whole liberation army. “Find a way of committing him more seriously to our cause,” was the laconic briefing Fabio wrote to the head of the underground in Bogota. For the next few weeks the guerrilla leader scarcely gave Camilo a

216

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second thought, for he and his men were dodging fierce enemy blows. After the Simacota action, the regular Army unleashed a desperate wave of persecution against them. Patrols sent out from the head¬ quarters of the Fifth Brigade in Bucaramanga ranged over the Cerro de los Andes and penetrated into the jungle of San Vicente. They arrested and tortured peasant suspects and managed to wring con¬ fessions from a few of their bewildered and terrified victims. When the ELN felt itself hemmed in on all sides the general staff held a hasty meeting around the camp-fire to plan a new operation which would divert the Army’s attention from the arba and, at the same time, firmly establish the ELN’s prestige on the national scene. That night they dispatched a messenger post-haste to the petrol town of Barranca with instructions for the local ELN underground: to stage, as soon as possible, a decoy attack in the remotest corner of Santander Province. In Barranca there followed another rapid mid¬ night meeting, and a spot was chosen for the operation some two hun¬ dred miles from Simacota at a place called Papayal. Lost, almost, in the hot Magdalena Valley, Papayal was nothing more than a cluster of peasant shanties submerged in a forest of banana and cacao plants, and overgrown by the jungle; but a road leading northwards from Barranca ran close to the village and for that reason a little central police station was maintained there to service the outlying districts. The ELN militants in Barranca savoured the prospect of a stationful of arms and ammunition and sent a man at once to reconnoitre. A few days later five determined guerrilla fighters took the road north and by the end of January were camped outside Papayal. They polished their carbines and rifles and revolvers and made ready for their assault on the unsuspecting policemen. Meanwhile, the country was in the throes of yet another crisis: the government seemed about to crumble under the pressure of public hostility. Coffee prices that year were low on the world market and President Valencia, under orders from the International Monetary Fund, had devalued the peso for a second time and sent the common man’s living costs soaring. Ruiz Novoa, the Minister of War, openly cam¬ paigned against the President, and the President continued to cam-

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

217

paign against the peasants, ordering the minister to raid the remaining Independent Republics. The people’s patience had reached the break¬ ing point, and early in 1965, when the government announced a new set of sales taxes, workingmen mobbed the union offices compelling their bureaucratic representatives, whether they liked it or not, to bring them out on a protest strike. They did not like it a bit, as a matter of fact, for the two chief union federations-one, the UTC, of Jesuit origin, and the other, the CTC, a liberal-style secular institution—were both run by white-collar men hand in glove with the managers. But this time the union bosses were forced, for once, to obey the will of the workers, and ordered a general stoppage as of Monday, January 25. For a week prior to the scheduled strike, all opposition parties and groups looked for a way to make capital of the mass movement, and Camilo, doing his best to unite the forces of the Left, had never been so busy. He helped organize committees of Public Aid to guarantee the strikers’ survival, and dashed from union meetings to party conferences trying to persuade the leaders to shelve petty personal disputes in favour of the people, who were ready to risk everything. However, to his disappointment, no one seemed interested in guiding the workers to a showdown with the regime; on the contrary, the union bosses had flocked to the Ministry of Labour and were coming to terms, behind closed doors, with the representatives of big business. At the eleventh hour, on Saturday night, January 23, they emerged from a long session with the minister and called the strike off. Instead of a belligerent protest, they promised the people a special commis¬ sion: “The government will immediately set up a study commission with equal participation of labour and management, in order to pre¬ sent, within a space of thirty days, a draft of proposed laws designed to help solve the difficult social, economic and fiscal problems which the country faces. . . The outcome of this was predictable enough; after a month of dis¬ cussions the Minister of Finance would announce a new “tribute pie” and change the name of the sales tax to a milder-sounding “tax on secondary consumptions.” Camilo made a comment which summed up the general mood.

218

CAMILO TORRES

“All of us feel deeply disillusioned,” he said. “The people’s move¬ ment has been buried, and worse still, it has been given a pauper’s funeral. As always in Colombia, the solution to the problem is said to be found in the appointment of a high-level commission to study the question and pass the buck and postpone the real solutions—I say postpone them, because the real solutions are already plain for all to see. The very people who had approved the sales tax are now named to the commission to cook up what they call ‘the tribute pie’—a pie for the oligarchy and a tribute for the people. The oligarchs, of course, decide who will provide the ingredients for the pie, l3ut the popular classes know very well who is going to eat it.” Camilo’s was an accurate diagnosis; the oligarchy as usual had manipulated the situation to their advantage. In order to halt the rising fury of the masses they had brought pressure to bear on the arrogant and pouting President Valencia, obliging him to switch overnight from florid epithets against the UTC to prosaic negotiations between his minister and the union bosses. Then, two days after the burial of the strikes, the same powers behind the throne forced General Ruiz Novoa to retire from the Ministry of War and return to civilian life; from a would-be military dictator he became the laughing stock of the officers’ mess. The oligarchy had weathered yet another political storm. In fact, in all its long experience of power, the Colombian oligarchy had known only one peril which it recognized as mortal: the armed insurrection of the peasants. The oligarchs’ most dramatic and repres¬ sive measures had always been employed to crush each peasant up¬ rising; and, in 1965, having left a burnt waste-land in Marquetalia, they turned their heavy guns and poisonous gases on the neighbouring Independent Republic of El Pato. From El Pato a hundred frightened families trekked seventy days towards the safety of the jungle; but of the women, children and aged some ninety-six fell by the wayside and died of hunger during their long, forced march. Even as the oligarchs’ army was engaged in these ruthless killings to the south and striving to hunt out the new rash of guerrillas in San¬ tander, the Army of National Liberation struck suddenly again, on February 5, in Papayal.

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

219

February 5 was a Friday, and in the afternoon two Papayal police¬ men dozed outside the station in the shade of a banana tree. The guerrillas hidden in the bushes took careful aim and picked them off with their first volley of shot. The police inspector’s assistant, who was inside, rushed out to see what was happening; he met a second volley full in the face. From a distance another officer saw the attackers rifling the fallen men and ransacking the station. He ran boldly up the road, shooting, but they fired into him and left him for dead and disappeared into the jungle. The shooting was all over in a matter of minutes, and the villagers came out sniffing gunpowder and fishing about amongst the police¬ men’s carcasses and idly picking up the scattered propaganda leaflets of the ELN. The Papayal action was an unqualified victory for the members of the liberation army. Not only did it furnish them with a dozen firstclass weapons, it also dispersed the enemy’s forces that had been concentrated around San Vicente and gave prompt and solid backing, in the public eye, to the ELN’s earlier spectacular assault on Simacota. Camilo felt more anxious than ever to talk to them. For their part, the ELN militants in Bogota kept him under observa¬ tion and were well impressed with what they observed. The young priest-sociologist at the ESAP had begun to take a stronger political line. In February, for instance, not long after Papayal, he brought out a political platform much more radical than the ELN people had ever expected of him. Tired of waiting for his intellectual friends to provide him with the studies they had promised to have ready a month earlier (and which were never ever to appear), he made up his mind to “start at the other end” and mapped out a sketchy program defining the principal planks which, he believed, any self-respecting left-wing group should include in its political platform. He called it “A Platform for a Movement of Popular Unity.” Guitemie typed it up for him on a Sunday afternoon and he sprang it on his colleagues at an informal political luncheon next day. He did not propose it as a last word; quite the reverse, he saw it simply as a rough draft, a discussion starter, which could be knocked into shape later. It was an effort to provide a minimum state-

220

CAMILO TORRES

ment acceptable to all socialist groups and parties. Evidently not even his bitter experience over the sabotaged strike in January had quite dampened his hope of forging the Left into a strong, harmonious block. But the platform proved not so much a unity banner as a bone of contention. Everyone tussled over it. The Christian Democrats thought it far too extreme, and the Communists wanted it watered down to make an allowance for what they called the “progressive national bourgeoisie,” a potentially radical sector according to the party. In¬ deed, to the Communists, Camilo’s program seemed 'too close to Cuba’s. For the revolutionaries, on the other hand, it was not yet close enough, and the ELN intervened to give the thing a more anti¬ imperialist flavour. They did so discreetly. Camilo still had no idea which of the young men he was talking to were ELN militants, but of all the opinions expressed, theirs were, in fact, the ones which most convinced him, and he began to polish his platform in keeping with their criteria. Where his original platform spoke of the economic interests of the oligarchs, the ELNers had him add “and those of the foreign in¬ vestors with whom they are in league.” Where he had spoken of the country’s socio-economic development, they made him see that the phrase was inadequate and he rounded it out with a reference to “na¬ tional independence.” In general they helped him tighten up the language of the platform and it soon became a crisper document, more precise, and with a much more belligerent ring. “Our final objective,” he wrote, “is the formation of a pluralist political apparatus capable of taking power. During the months of March, April and May 1965, the platform will be distributed and dis¬ cussed by the militants of those movements who are in agreement with it. Then those who support the platform will be brought together under the name of the United Front of Popular Movements to achieve unity in action while respecting the ideology and specific programs of each party and group.” This was his first mention of the United Front. He clearly envisaged it as a grass-roots movement whose basis would be “action com¬ mittees” in each village and town and in the poor quarters of every city. “Delegates will meet in Bogota on July 20 to deliberate on the

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

221

immediate goals of the United Front and to define their position with regard to the forthcoming presidential elections.” Camilo was taking his political stand and, to judge by the terms of the platform, he stood unequivocally with the revolution. The ELN men watched and waited for his next move. He made his move on March 12 at a most unlikely moment. He had been invited to give a lecture in Medellin to the Antioquenian branch of the Conservative Youth—hardly an appropriate occasion, it seemed, to launch the revolutionary United Front. After the lecture, however, the Conservative Youth organized a dinner in his honour to which they invited “all the student groups and unionists of Antioquia.” Now by March, Camilo had begun to emerge as the new idol of the rebellious, so that the widest possible gamut of left-wingers turned up at a downtown restaurant, the Fonda Antioquena, to hear him speak. “Too good a gathering to let go unavailed,” thought Camilo, and he took out his platform and read it. He felt they were going to like it, but he had not reckoned on a standing ovation; they almost rose the Fonda’s roof. He arrived back at his ESAP office in Bogota next day with a sheepish grin on his face and a crumpled bit of paper in his hand, jottings for the speech he had made in Medellin. “The platform caused a sensation,” he told Guitemie, and, with premonitions of a pending scandal, added: “In fact, I think I let off a big fart!” Crude, but true; the explosion shook the ESAP. A Conservative member of the school’s governing body got up angrily at a board meeting that week to recount the Medellin episode and call for the priest’s immediate withdrawal from the staff for his “active participa¬ tion in politics.” Dr. Nannetti, the ESAP’s director, had been half-expecting some¬ thing like this. During the Christmas vacations he had broken into Camilo’s office, forced the locks on his files and confiscated papers. A month later he had interrupted one of Camilo’s courses on Planned Recreation and made him take down the posters which pupils had pinned up on the notice board alluding graphically to the country’s economic crisis and making no bones about who was to blame. Nannetti found the posters “far too political.” From then on he had obliged Camilo to submit in advance a copy of all his lectures.

222

CAMILO TORRES

He was delighted, then, to be able to face his recalcitrant dean with this charge of political activity and remind him of the incident in November when Camilo had accused him of politicking. “It cuts both ways, you see,” said Nannetti, rubbing it in. This time it was Camilo who climbed down. He had to put in a re¬ port on his conduct at Medellin along with a retraction and a kind of good-behaviour guarantee. “I acknowledge,” he wrote with some chagrin, “that the platform, being not only a theoretical document but also a plan of action, is hence a political statement incompatible with the functions of a uni¬ versity professor who is, at the same time, a sort of public official. I therefore consider it my duty to promise to refrain in future from the divulging of programs of political action.” This was a bitter pill for Camilo, but he swallowed it; the time had not yet come to take his leave of the ESAP. While still biding his time he had to swallow another and, for him, much bitterer pill, one administered by the diocesan chancery. Camilo, despite all his secular activities, still considered himself very much a son of the Catholic Church and felt sure that his bishop would always stand by him in moments of adversity. But when he called on the auxiliary bishop late in March to unburden himself about Nannetti and the unpleasantness at the ESAP, his superior showed no sym¬ pathy. He simply conveyed to Camilo the cardinal’s wish that he re¬ sign at once from the Public Administration School and accept a post he had already been offered in the chancery as member of a religioussociology commission. Camilo assured him, as he had assured him a few weeks earlier when the offer was made, that he was giving the matter serious thought and returned to the subject of the growing animosity towards him in the ESAP. He was anxious, he said, to hear the bishop’s personal view of the affair and his opinion of the plat¬ form. “Platform?” said the bishop, shooting up those well-rehearsed eye¬ brows of his and acting dumb. “Platform? What platform?” Camilo was too amazed to answer. Only a few days before some¬ one had shown him a copy of his platform printed in the chancery for perusal by the diocesan censor and other Church authorities. It

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

223

seemed incredible that the bishop, whom he had always thought his friend, should pretend ignorance. He excused himself and hurriedly left the palace, dismayed but less naive. He went home to his flat in a very bad mood and wrote a letter to the cardinal renouncing his priestly office and asking to be “reduced” to the ranks of the laity. “When I chose the clerical state I did so above all in the belief that as a priest I would be better able to serve the Church and the Colombians. Now, after more than ten years of ministry, I realize that in the present historical circumstances ... I could achieve that purpose more efficaciously as a layman.” He dashed off several heated paragraphs and finished “filially,” but hesitated to post the letter. The next day a friend advised him to sleep on it and Camilo, in any case, for the umpteenth time began to have qualms. For months he had felt urged to take this step; the public commitment he was acquiring would never, he knew, be permitted by the Church, so why not make the break? Sooner or later he would have to choose between the priesthood and revolutionary politics. But he preferred to postpone the decision. His attachment to the Church was a sentimental thing ingrained in him since adolescence and en¬ hanced by a thousand happy memories. He should not let it go lightly in a fit of exasperation over the deceitfulness of a bishop. Holy Week was coming up in April; he would take a few days off then to think about it and pray. It was a long while since he had prayed in earnest; the pressure of work had left him little time for those flights into solitude which he had always been fond of. And so it was with a sense of returning to the sources that he made off on Palm Sunday for the quiet of the mountains. There were a couple of books in his brief case, the breviary of psalms plus a recent work by his old favourite, Yves Congar, the French Dominican, and in the pocket of his cassock he felt the bulk of the well-thumbed rice-paper edition of the Jerusalem Bible which he had carried with him for years. He needed nothing more; only the muteness of the hills of Boyaca. On the Sunday evening he reached the town of Paipa and climbed up to a tiny retreat house perched above the waters of Lake Sochacota. It was almost dark. A solitary peasant, crossing his path, gave him the countryman’s simple greeting: “Adios!” “Adios!” he

224

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replied, and the rest was silence. He turned in early that night and arose at dawn on the first day of Holy Week. He recited his Mass by the window overlooking the lake, brilliant now in the morning sun, and strode off after breakfast up the rocky slopes. He wanted to feel himself completely alone in the presence of God. Only twice in his life had he seemed so naked under the searching gaze of his conscience and the loving eye of God. The first was al¬ most twenty years before, at seventeen, as he wandered over the plains haunted by the challenge of the priesthood; and the second was on the eve of his ordination, kneeling in the seminary chapel, when he had taken his life in his hands and offered it to his unseen Lord hidden in the shadows of the tabernacle. His concept of God (“the Boss,” as he always said) was less remote now, but it was no less awe¬ inspiring; and he trembled on the mountainside at the thought of casting off the habit he had worn for so many years and forsaking God’s priestly calling. He opened Congar’s book The Priesthood and the Laity and leafed through its pages for enlightenment. Congar quoted the priestworkers and their desire to “share the destiny of the poor” and, if need be, “to rot with them.” “Extremist formulas,” commented Congar, but Camilo underlined them. “We must take our place with our fellow-men,” he read. “Not just alongside men, not just before men, but really with them.” He paused a long while to let the words sink in. He thought of the hungry mil¬ lions of his fellow-countrymen, of the revolutionaries who risked their lives for them, of the guerrilla fighters; and as he thought, the words meant more to him. “To take our place with our fellow-men.” The problem of his priesthood suddenly seemed less important. In any case the priest’s role was that of prophet, and the prophet Amos, Congar said, had been inclined to think that, in certain circum¬ stances, “the temple worship estranged him from Yahveh instead of bringing him closer.” Camilo asked himself if he were not in the same situation as Amos. He stood at a crossroad. On one side the Church offered him a respectable position; on the other, the masses cried out for a leader. On that side he saw no signs of respectability; he dis¬ cerned, rather, the murky political business of intrigues and name-

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

225

calling. But could the priest be prophet, he wondered, without being soiled in the process? Long days and nights went by in the retreat house above Paipa. Holy Thursday came and Good Friday, and Camilo sang the Gospel of the Passion and preached to the peasant congregation that came in from the fields to hear him. With the performance of the ancient rites he felt an inner peace come over him and he saw things very clearly. As yet he was not being obliged to face outright the question of his priesthood. For the moment he had only to renounce the offer of a post in the chancery. He would take the hurdles one at a time. But from now on he would be quite ready to meet them. “I will be faithful to my own conscience,” he decided, “and therefore I will be faithful to God.” On the last night before going back to Bogota he sat down with great calm and penned a letter to the auxiliary bishop. It contained not a hint of anger. Your Excellency, (this traditional form of address takes nothing from the fraternal spirit I want to convey in this letter written, as it is, to an older brother whom God, in his providence, has placed over me to rep¬ resent him). When Your Excellency suggested that I resign from my present work and assume the duties of social investigator in our archdiocese, I begged you to give me a little time before replying. My reasons were based on considerations of charity vis-a-vis a number of people who depend on my work and whose employment would be threatened if I should retire from my post without giving due notice. I believe that these were valid reasons, and that Your Excellency considered them so. Without diminishing their validity, I have since given much thought to another aspect of the problem, namely the personal re¬ action which your proposal produced in me. I confess I felt a pro¬ found repugnance at the thought of working within the clerical structures of our Church. I have taken advantage of my spiritual retreat in order to examine this attitude more deeply, for such a reaction in a priest seems, if not ridiculous, at least improper. For more than ten years my work as a priest, though always sub¬ ject to the authority of my bishop, has been carried out rather on

CAMILO TORRES

the fringe of the clerical structure. Such a situation may have brought its problems as far as my priestly spirit is concerned, but it may also contribute something positive to the life of the Church; one positive aspect, for example, might be the acquisition of a more objective view of the structure to which I belong but in which I have played less a role than others who, though perhaps better equipped than I to analyze, are more caught up in the very phenomenon which I am trying to describe. When I considered the possibility of a post in the chancery as sociological investigator, I knew that this meant my being separated from the poor and introduced into the closed circle of an organiza¬ tion which belongs to the powerful of this world. And when I thought about how I should focus the investigation, I became aware of certain theoretical problems which I am afraid I would solve in a fashion distinct from, or even opposed to, the views of the hierarchy who are to make use of the data investigated by me. It is vital that we solve these problems from the outset, I believe, for the investigation’s success and its orientation depend on the theory behind it, and as it is impossible to investigate everything, the results ought to correspond to a point of view common both to the in¬ vestigator and to those responsible for the implementation of a pastoral plan in the archdiocese. Regarding my own personal viewpoint, I want to outline it here under three headings so that Your Excellency may be in a position to judge whether I am really the person you are looking for to un¬ dertake the proposed investigation. 1. In order to be on common ground regarding the essence of a pastoral plan, there must be agreement about what, in fact, is the Kingdom of God; and in order to orientate an investigation, there must be agreement about a series of hypotheses concerning present-day Colombian society. a) The Kingdom of God. To extend the Kingdom or to establish it is a question that has to do with

life.

Therefore the

activities to be exercised in order to make the Kingdom grow are those which lead most surely and most efficaciously to life itself. There are priorities of course. As I see it, the means for establishing the Kingdom ought to operate in the following order (without denying the fact that these means are not mutually exclusive, but complementary):

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

227

the leading of people to love, a self-giving love (agape) —the preaching of the Gospel —external worship: the Mass, Sacraments, etc. b) Colombian society. Colombian society is Catholic insofar as most of its inhabitants practise the external rites; but the majority are ignorant of Christian doctrine, even though they may be able to recite by heart a list of catechism answers. At the same time there are many Colombians who love their neighbour but reject the Church of the clerics. 2. If the pastoral effort is concentrated on maintaining this situation it is unlikely to establish or augment the Kingdom of God. If, on the other hand, love is given number one priority, and the preach¬ ing of the Gospel is given greater importance than external wor¬ ship, the hierarchy will have to embrace a pastoral plan of a missionary nature. 3. A Missionary Pastoral Plan implies the following: an emphasis on quality rather than quantity, more insistence on personal con¬ viction, the giving up of an exclusively Church-dominated educa¬ tional system in favour of a pluralist one, and the elimination of social and psychological pressures which prevent the individual from making his own personal decision about the

Church.

Amongst such pressure we could mention the Church’s eco¬ nomic and political power, the latter both officially (by means of the concordat) and in practise (by means of the clerics with their domineering interference in temporal matters). Other unfortunate factors which impede the Church’s mission are the separation be¬ tween clergy and faithful, the Church’s lack of solidarity with the poor and her lack of a truly scientific spirit. If the pastoral program adopted by the archdiocese is one designed to simply preserve the status quo I doubt that I would be of much use, as I would be acting out of mere obedience but against my better judgement. That is why I am letting Your Excellency know how I see things; to do so seems to me a matter of basic honesty.

This time he “remained fraternally” before signing off. Even so, His Excellency, he knew, would hardly be pleased with the letter, so he thought it best to present it personally and explain its meaning point by point. He appeared in the bishop’s study on Easter Monday morning.

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Dialogue, however, proved impossible. His Excellency was polite, as always, but had no wish to go into details. His task was simply to communicate the will of the cardinal, namely that Camilo resign at once from the ESAP and take up duties in the chancery. Was there no alternative? The bishop could see none. A return to the sociology faculty perhaps? Quite out of the question. But if the suggestion be put to the cardinal? It had been already, by the faculty’s dean, Fals Bord'a, in person. (“Good for Orlando, anyway,” thought Camilo, imagining how little his friend must have relished an interview with the cardinal.) And what was the result? His Eminence was adamant. There was nothing more to discuss. If Camilo’s pride prevented him from accepting the cardinal’s gen¬ erous offer, His Excellency said, then they had obviously reached a stalemate. The pause that followed was long, empty and, for Camilo, highly uncomfortable. But the bishop seemed unruffled. He suavely fingered the chain of his pectoral cross and watched his victim unblinkingly like a cat. Camilo finally succumbed and mumbled something about postponing decisions until after he had taken out his doctorate in Louvain. At this the cat sprang. An excellent solution, it seemed to His Excellency, but this time it should not be left in the air as a mere possibility. Steps would be taken at once to arrange Camilo’s de¬ parture and his sojourn in Belgium. And with that Camilo found him¬ self ushered out. The next day the bishop approached Nannetti in the cardinal’s name and was most obliged when the ESAP’s director saw his way clear to keeping up Camilo’s nominal deanship during his forthcom¬ ing absence from the school. This gesture, he felt, would avoid bad feelings and any possible gossip. Both Nannetti and the bishop hastened to assure Camilo that he would not be prejudiced financially; he would continue to receive his salary. They went on as if what really mattered to him was the money. Orlando Fals, when he heard of this, promised to get Camilo a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. He would not have his friend humiliated.

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At the end of April, Camilo began despondently to make bookings and pack his belongings and write Monsieur Urbain and other Lou¬ vain people to expect him towards the end of the next month. There seemed no other way out. His overtures to the ELN people had met with no response, and in the three months that had passed since Papayal, no one had heard a further peep out of them. He even won¬ dered if they had been wiped out. As for the other opposition groups, they indulged in endless squabbles over the “ideological content” of his platform and let his hopes for a United Front wither on the branch. The country was still tense and full of expectations, but the Left was in the doldrums and Camilo did not feel he was the man to save the situation single-handed. Maybe a few months’ absence would be all to the good. In Louvain he could take a harder look at himself; and the political unrest he left simmering at home might get to brew¬ ing while he was away. Or so, at least, he tried to convince himself as he dialed Air France and reserved a seat on a flight to Paris for May 22. It was now the ELN’s turn to act. Despite Camilo’s fears, the guerrillas had not been wiped out. They were consolidating. And Fabio Vasquez, with his long-range view of revolutionary warfare, knew that it was not enough to carry out a series of successful operations in remote rural areas; his organization needed to make its presence felt at the national level. The backing of a figure like the cura Torres would really put them on the map. By this time Camilo inspired less distrust than he had a few months earlier. ELN undercover men in the city had given Fabio con¬ sistently good reports on him. Then he had shown his mettle in Medellin, and as for the platform, it spoke for itself. The ELN had published its own platform under the cumbersome title of “Program¬ matic Principles of the Army of National Liberation,” a program similar to Camilo’s but which had not made nearly the same impact. In fact it went virtually unnoticed. Fabio saw that from a propaganda point of view the cura could prove vital to the ELN. From the jungle of Santander he sent orders to Bogota that everything possible be done to see that Camilo not leave the country. These orders were transmitted to some of the top men in the Na-

230

CAMILO TORRES

tional Student Federation, the FUN. The FUN’s president, Galo Burbano, was a member of the liberation army and its secretary, Julio Cortes was both an ELN sympathizer and an old friend of Camilo’s. Now from the moment Camilo announced his trip to Lou¬ vain, the FUN had planned a grand farewell in his honour; it was to be held in the university grounds on the very day of his departure. In view of the instructions from the guerrilla chief, Galo decided to turn the farewell into something better still: a national tribute to Camilo. He and Julio and their helpers sent out invitations to all and sundry. Julio knew Camilo well and was quite sure that, face'd with a mam¬ moth act of national solidarity, he would not have the heart to catch his plane. Camilo, meanwhile, had not been idle. His official sabbatical leave notwithstanding, he kept working at the school and lecturing around the country to a wide variety of gatherings. Mid-May found him in Popayan giving an ESAP course on rural sociology to a group of sani¬ tary inspectors. He followed this with an address to the students of the University of Pasto and another to students in Cali. Wherever he spoke, he spoke straighter from the shoulder than he ever had be¬ fore. His public cheered him from one town to the next, and as the days went by he felt less and less inclined to leave for Europe. His natural reluctance was increased by the fact that Colombia’s political climate was warming up. From the doldrums of April, revolu¬ tionary spirits reawakened in May. The new month had begun with the disembarking of U. S. Marines on the shores of Santo Domingo, a violation which recalled the Bay of Pigs invasion four years earlier. Demonstrators surged in the streets of every city. In Medellin they were put down brutally and troops invaded the university with the rector’s explicit approval. This produced a chain reaction of indigna¬ tion in universities all over the country, and by the third week of May most student bodies were out on strike as a mark of solidarity with their Medellin comrades and in protest against the Yankee treat¬ ment of the neighbouring island republic. At the same time, terrorist bombs exploded at night in various cities, and in the country two multimillionaire landlords disappeared. One of them was shortly found dead, and the other, Oliverio Lara, held captive. Lara’s kid¬ nappers had not asked for ransom money; they had demanded the

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

231

immediate withdrawal of troops from the Independent Republic of El Pato. But the government refused to accede. Then, as tension heightened, on Thursday, May 20, the military police in Bogota beat a student into unconsciousness; the boy died that night in hospital from the wounds. The next day, Friday, May 21, the government declared a state of martial law and forbade all public meetings. And on the day following, Saturday, May 22, Camilo was scheduled to make his farewell appearance at the National Uni¬ versity. He got back to Bogota from Cali late on the Friday afternoon and found three people waiting for him at the airport-his mother, Guitemie and Gustavo Perez. The first two he had expected, but not the third. It was ages since he had seen his old friend, and it was hard to believe that Gustavo had taken the trouble to go all the way out to the airport simply to welcome him off a local flight. As they carried his luggage through the car park he found a mo¬ ment to whisper to Guitemie: “What’s Gustavo here for?” “Oh, he’s been hanging around the flat all afternoon, insisted on accompanying us. I think he wants to talk you out of going to the Na¬ tional tomorrow.” Sure enough, Gustavo hardly had Camilo alone than he began talk¬ ing about prudence and not sticking out one’s neck and, coming to the point, about the university reception. What with the martial law and everything, he thought it would be foolish of Camilo to attend. Camilo smiled at the very idea of missing the national tribute; he was all keyed up for it. They drove back to the flat, and after Gustavo had left, other friends arrived and they sat around chatting for hours in gleeful antic¬ ipation of the next morning’s bombshell. Isabel was as excited as anybody. No amount of barricades or martial laws were going to keep her out of the university, she said; she would be there by Camilo’s side. Guitemie was of the same mind, but the chancery priests, she warned Camilo, were almost certainly not and would want to place him under orders not to appear. “I bet Gustavo was sent by them to try and persuade you,” she said. Suddenly the phone rang. Guitemie answered.

CAMILO TORRES

232

“Umana? Umana who? Eduardo?”-thinking it was

Camilo’s

cousin but unable to recognize the voice—“Oh! Ernesto. I beg your pardon. Just one moment please.” She cupped her hand over the receiver and turned to Camilo. “Who is Ernesto Umana?” “Monsignor Ernesto Umana, the chancery’s director of pastoral planning,” said Camilo. “And I’m not here.” “No, I’m sorry,” Guitemie lied splendidly, “Father Camilo has not yet arrived. We are expecting him either tonight or in the morning.” And she rang off. Suppressed laughter gave way to guffaws. Guitemie, they all agreed, was the best of watchdogs. Early the next morning there was a nervous knocking at the door and Guitemie, who had stayed the night, opened up cautiously to dis¬ cover their friend Eduardo Franco on the mat, flustered and out of breath. “Where’s Camilo?” he demanded, hurrying into the flat and closing the door. “There are two suspicious-looking clergymen parked out¬ side in a Volkswagen. We’ve got to get Camilo out of here!” He bustled him out through the tradesmen’s entrance just as Monsignor Ernesto Umana came up the stairs and found that the bird had flown. By 10

a.m.

an immense assembly was milling on the lawns outside

the university cafeteria. Thousands of students had turned out to defy the military policemen with their helmets and batons and shields who formed a wide circle around them, glowering as more and more boys and girls streamed out of the surrounding avenues and flowed into the parklands of the White City. Expectancy buzzed in the still morn¬ ing air and the atmosphere was electric. Dominating the scene stood a catafalque draped in black. It had been erected in memory of Jorge Useche, the lad the police had beaten to death two days before, and the organizers announced a symbolic funeral in his honour. The na¬ tion had been shocked by the student’s murder, and it was partly Useche and partly Camilo who had attracted a number of people who normally avoided any kind of public demonstration. Sedate professors and even the rector of the university himself could be seen amongst

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the crowd. At ten-thirty Camilo drove up and the police cordon opened with reluctance and let his car pass through. Camilo emerged from the car and helped his mother out. Imme¬ diately they were swallowed up in a sea of laughing, shoving, clapping, . shouting people who lifted them almost bodily and swept them wave by wave across the lawn until they fetched up at last on the edge of an improvised dais. They .took their places, the din died down and the speech-making commenced. As Julio Cortes took the microphone and began to speak, Camilo let his eye stray distractedly over the expanse of upturned heads. He had faced many audiences, but this one was especially his. They num¬ bered several thousands, yet he had the odd sensation that he knew them all by name. Impossible, of course; but he did know many of them, hundreds of them in fact. Dozens of the old Tunjuelito gang were there and most of the Muniprockers, and he recognized some who had been his pupils and youngsters in the Community. In those days they had all thought themselves very radical; he wondered how revolutionary they were now. His gaze ran over the surface of foreheads and eyes, faces tilted up towards where he stood, and he picked out the features of professors and tutors and lecturers, men he had worked with day by day, semester after semester, in those white cement pavilions which this morning formed a backdrop to his tribute and farewell. He looked towards the sociology building, the one he and Fals had built and Cardinal Concha blessed. This was the world to which he most be¬ longed. Or was it? His eye came to rest on the chapel. . . . A burst of applause for something Julio had said brought his at¬ tention back to the crowd gathered at the foot of the dais. Julio must have said something in praise of him, for everyone was looking in his direction and smiling and clapping. Most of them were teen-agers, he noticed, as fresh and rebellious as the swarm of bus-burners who had challenged him by the gates of the White City six years ago when all this had begun. He became aware that Julio was winding up and was about to call on him to speak. “Father Torres has acquired for all of us the value of a symbol.” The phrase grated on Camilo, but he knew that Julio said it in all

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sincerity. And a lot of people listening remembered how Camilo had been ousted from the National in 1962 for defending Julio and his friends. They pardoned Julio his excesses. He finished with a flourish and presented Camilo, who came for¬ ward to meet a new outburst of cheers. He wore a serious expression. The moment seemed a solemn rather than a festive one: the empty black coffin evoked the presence of the dead. With a gesture he asked for silence and a hush fell over the crowd. “Comrades,” he began, “I am deeply grateful for this act of recog¬ nition which the National Student Federation is offering me today, a tribute which has been extended to include, unfortunately, our de¬ ceased comrade Jorge Useche. However, it would be a shame if this tribute were limited to individuals. The death of Jorge Useche and my temporary exile are but episodes in the much greater struggle of the Colombian people.” He commented briefly on both episodes. His exile, he said, was “due to pressures brought to bear on the hierarchy to have me re¬ moved from Colombia.” But he did not want to insist on this point. “With one of our comrades fallen under the violence of the regime we have no right to think solely of individuals; we must think about Colombia and the need for an authentic revolution. In times like the present we must not shed too many tears over personal episodes.” He let it go at that and launched into the substance of his discourse. This was not to be a traditional farewell address full of corny reminis¬ cences; it was an openly political speech and its central theme was a call for the union of all revolutionary forces to combat the ruling oligarchy. “We must

achieve revolutionary unity

over

and

above the

ideologies which divide us. We Colombians have been notorious for our philosophical discussions and speculative divergences. We get bogged down in debates which, though all very fine in theory, given the country’s present woeful state, are in fact quite Byzantine. Many friends here present with whom we worked in communal action at Tunjuelito a few years ago will recall how, when they accused us of collaborating with Communists, I used to reply that it was absurd to suggest that Christians and Communists could not work together for the good of mankind. We shouldn’t waste our time, I used to say,

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

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discussing the immortality of the soul while forgetting to do something about a question on which we are all agreed, namely the mortality of the people’s hunger. “Ideological problems,” he went on, cutting short a sudden chuckle from the crowd, “ideological problems can be left for after the triumph of the revolution. At the moment what we need is unity. There is no sadder sight in Colombia than the spectacle of the Left. For while the ruling classes lay aside all their philosophical and politi¬ cal differences and unite to defend their common interests, the popular classes, whose one great advantage is their numerical strength, are split up into little groups by leaders who often give more importance to internal wranglings than to the struggle against the governing classes. The Soviet line fights the Peking line; the MRL ‘soft’ line fights the MRL ‘hard’ line; the MOEC fights the FTJAR; and each one expends more energy attacking the other than any single one of them does attacking the oligarchy. “But this must not be let to continue. Just as Simon Bolivar de¬ clared his ‘war to the death’ against the Spanish, we today ought to join forces with our fellow-revolutionaries of whatever tendency or sect and declare war to the death on all anti-revolutionary elements.” Out of his pocket he pulled the platform. “Now I have here a program which we have been working on with groups of young people, students from all over, some belonging to this or that revolutionary movement, others to none at all. It is a resume of the long-term aims of revolutionary action. I would like to read it to you.” As he read it, each item brought a round of applause. He proposed a radical redistribution of land and an urban reform which would give a home (and no more than one home) to every city dweller. He advocated the nationalization of the banks, the hospitals, the insur¬ ance companies, public transport, radio and television, and the exploitation of all natural resources by the state. His governmentdirected economic planning, his income-tax laws, his social security schemes all struck at the roots of the Colombian system. Regarding the role of the armed forces in the revolutionary society, he stated that “the defence of the nation will be in the hands of the entire popu¬ lation.” The tenth and last paragraph in this concise list of reforms

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was a defence of women’s rights. “Women will participate on an equal footing with men in the country’s economic, political and social activities.” The females in his audience yelled and clapped. Camilo calmly folded the platform and put it back in his pocket. “Those are our aims,” he said, “but aims are not enough. To bring about a revolution we will have to give ourselves wholeheartedly to the cause and be faithful right to the end. A lot has been achieved already in the struggle for power, but what remains to be done will be harder still, and we don’t know to what extremes the ruling class will be prepared to go in resisting the pressure of the 'masses. Our last resort will be revolutionary violence. Violence is not part of our basic creed; and if it comes it will be in the people’s defensive war against the aggression of the upper classes.” He paused and looked down. Everyone was jumping with excite¬ ment and some glanced nervously over their shoulders to see how the policemen were reacting. Camilo felt neither nervous about the police nor carried away by the crowd. He had only one fear, and that was that before long these revolutionary youngsters would lie down like good dogs, as their predecessors had done, and stop barking. He wanted to warn them against coming to compromises with the status quo. He addressed them in a different tone. “When you students leave the university, your nonconformity will probably disappear. Those who are the most fierce revolutionaries in student days frequently turn around afterwards and ask the oligarchs to forgive them their youthful misdemeanours. As professional men and women they become the staunchest defenders of the bourgeois symbols of prestige.” Every one of his listeners was saying to himself: “That won’t hap¬ pen to me,” and Camilo, sensing it, redoubled his effort to shake them up. “You think that sounds unlikely, but don’t be too sure of your¬ selves. Those prestige symbols are a dangerous and subtle trap. Ours is a bourgeois society and you students subconsciously share the values of that society even though, at the conscious level, you reject them. You show your rejection by growing beards, for example, or by wearing shabby and extravagant attire; but nonetheless you often retain a completely bourgeois image of what a model professional man

the cassock or the revolution

237

should be like. How do you imagine a doctor, for example? He is smartly dressed, lives in a well-furnished apartment and drives a car. He has an office complete with typewriters and a secretary. In other words the very student in the sandals and sloppy sweater with his unkempt beard and the works of J. P. Sartre under his arm is liable to think that once he becomes a doctor of medicine he will need an auto¬ mobile, an umbrella and a bowler hat.” They laughed. “Now that just sounds like a joke,” he continued, “but it isn’t as far-fetched as you think. Put it this way: if an economist just out of the university were asked to keep accounts for one hundred pesos a month, what do you think he would say? He would say: ‘Oh no, in Colombia today an economist earns anything between 2,500 and 3,000.1 couldn’t possibly do it for less.’ And why is that? Because he needs that amount of money in order to acquire the prestige symbols that go with his job, and so he has to charge what is called an adequate remuneration. Of course he still considers himself very radical, but he lives in bourgeois comfort and Colombia gains one more ‘cafeteria revolutionary’—one of those types who will talk to you for hours about a revolution which never takes place.” His young audience had stopped laughing and were watching him intently. “It would be preferable by far to see a student living in a workingclass district rather than wearing a beard; or instead of simply follow¬ ing the fashion of wearing odd clothes, much better if he put on a workman’s overall. In that way he would really be getting ready for revolutionary action right from his days at the university. “Take it from me,” he insisted, “as long as we remain incapable of leaving our bourgeois way of life, we can never be revolutionaries. Nonconformity has its price, a very high price. Not to conform may imply a lower standard of living or the loss of a job. The nonconform¬ ist will probably have to give up his suburban residence and his flashy clothes. A nonconformist architect, for instance, ought to be ready to work as a bricklayer if that is the price the present structures make him pay for the right to subsist without betraying his revolu¬ tionary convictions. Any real nonconformist will be ready to move from the city to the country, if needs be, or even to the jungle.”

238

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He was deadly serious and some of his hearers wondered if he were not addressing his words more to himself than to them. “As the Gospel says, ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive.’ The sacrifice of all these bourgeois impediments will make us much happier, much freer, much more authentic people. It will leave us ready to face anything. Up to the present the masses have not had leaders prepared to make that sort of sacrifice, leaders ready to live not just for the poor, but with the poor.” The reference to leadership brought him back to his main theme: the need for unity amongst the leaders of the Left. “Our integration with the masses is essential for the revolution and a prerequisite of unity. For unity is not ours to give; it is some¬ thing which belongs to the workers and peasants of Colombia. They are the ones who will demand unity, who will impose unity over and above all our groups and caudillos. Anyone who has had close con¬ tact with our people will agree that Gaitan’s famous phrase—‘the peo¬ ple are greater than their leaders’—is not just empty demagogy. It is absolutely true. I am convinced that unity will not be brought about except by the dynamics of action. And when all is said and done, the ones to act are the people. No one can be a revolutionary if he does not have faith in the values of our people.” He enlarged on what he meant by the people’s values and brought his discourse to an end. His hearers clapped until their palms were red and sore; but no one cheered as they had done earlier. Camilo’s words had had a sobering effect on everybody. The clapping had not ceased before a student agitator sprang up, grabbed the microphone and began an impromptu harangue. “The moment for action has arrived!” he proclaimed in a high and hysterical voice. “The vile assassination of our comrade Jorge Useche, innocent and defenceless victim of this fascist regime, is a call to action. Faced with this new crime perpetrated against the people by the puppet government of Guillermo Leon Valencia,

self-

acknowledged running-dog of Yankee imperialism and one of the most subservient lackeys the oligarchy has ever lifted into the presi¬ dential chair, with this crime, I say, all student revolutionaries have been mobilized and take up arms to defend themselves. If we have no other weapons, we must take up stones! As Camilo says, we have

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

239

the advantage of numerical strength. Let’s break through this circle of military pigs! Let s storm the presidential palace! Let’s demand, here and now, that the body of Jorge Useche be handed over to us . . . !” Camilo acted quickly. He did not know whether the speaker was a . genuine rebel or a government provocateur; all he knew was that he had to stop him. If not, the morning would end in bloodshed. He pushed the man aside and, took back the mircrophone. ‘‘No, this is not a battle to be fought with stones,” he said. “Stones against machine-guns? It would be utter stupidity! This is my last word to the students: don’t be hoodwinked into picking up useless stones with fingers that are meant to handle real weapons. Why throw away your young lives in vain? Wait for the day you can take up arms that are much more powerful than a mere handful of pebbles. Fight when you have arms equal to those used against you!” The crowd responded to Camilo with fresh applause, and he was aware that he had not only averted the danger of senseless blood¬ letting, he had also committed himself, in no uncertain terms and in the presence of several thousand people, to the people’s war. He felt exhilarated. “Let’s wait for the right moment,” he said. “Let’s prepare for it. And let us, not the oligarchy, be the ones to choose the time and the hour of battle. For the moment we will proceed together to the na¬ tional cemetery in silence and pay our last respects to our fallen com¬ rade.” Walking behind the pall bearers and the coffin wrapped in crepe, Camilo led the silent march of some ten thousand students out through the university gates and down the road which led to the public burial ground. The policemen flanked them like a guard of honour, leaning on their rifles and watching the column of mourners which stretched for more than a mile along the wide avenue and bunched together at the entrance to the graveyard, where Camilo’s cousin, Eduardo Umana, looked around for a disused headstone, climbed up onto it and said a few words in the name of all present on the death of Jorge Useche. He was brief and poignant and when he had finished Camilo intoned the Our Father. The crowd recited the prayer and then dispersed, almost in whispers, and went away. Camilo made his way to a car with a mind to going home for a quick

240

CAMILO TORRES

snack before catching his plane. His flight left at one o’clock in the afternoon. Before he reached the car, however, he was intercepted by Julio Cortes and a group of FUN organizers who said they had some¬ thing urgent to talk to him about. If he would just spare them a few minutes. . . . They led him to a sidewalk cafe and sat down in a quiet corner over cups of coffee. They liked Camilo’s speech, they said. They had liked it very much. Especially his call to arms at the end. It was a damn shame he was going away! Why couldn’t he stay on in Colombia? Camilo reminded them that the trip was not exactly his idea. “And you’re going to let old Concha shove you around!” they teased him. He laughed, but they knew that he was wavering. “Don’t you see?” they went on excitedly. “This is the moment we have all been waiting for. Thanks to the Santo Domingo business, the students are out in the streets and spoiling for a fight. The regime has never been so weak; no one even respects the martial law. Valencia has lost control of the economy and the workers won’t put up with one more rise in prices. And when have you even seen such a feast of kidnappings and car-burnings and Molotov cocktails? We can get away with anything! Even world commentators are watching us. The other day the ex-U.S. Vice-President Nixon predicted that Colombia would be the next Latin American country to ‘go red.’ Overseas news¬ papers have sent a drove of foreign correspondents especially to cover our revolution! Oh no, Camilo, you can’t desert us now!” Apart from a few youthful exaggerations, what they said was true. The time for revolution had never seemed riper. Economically the country was on the brink of disaster; and as the peso dropped and the dollar rose, one more government commission was dispatched to Washington to beg for alms. Valencia’s haywire economics shot up the price of bread and butter, and the exasperated working classes looked for someone who could guarantee a change. But there was no one on the horizon. Ex-General Ruiz Novoa had abandoned his own demagogic movement and joined the Liberal Party; the other general, old Gustavo Rojas, was still campaigning, and his ANAPO, for want of some genuine popular front, had gained a certain following. As for the traditional political heads, they were jostling like prima donnas for

THE CASSOCK OR THE REVOLUTION

241

nomination to the 1966 presidential candidacy and had lost all credi¬ bility with the masses. Camilo felt that he was the only person in Co¬ lombia at that moment in a position to give the people a lead. But first he had one question to put to his friends: what would his ■role be? Public agitator? If that was all, then he was not interested. He had seen too many charlatans build up false hopes in the masses. Until he had behind him an organization ready to meet the enemy on an equal footing he thought it dishonest to go on preaching revolution. The only thing that could save the Left from mere wishful thinking would be the existence of an armed guerrilla vanguard to back up words with actions. All else was pure poppy-cock. Now after Simacota he had put his hopes in the Army of National Liberation, but lately the ELN seemed to have folded up. The young men glanced at one another; this was their cue, and they took it. They informed him that they were in a position to speak with authority on the activities of the ELN and that the liberation army was flourishing. Fresh recruits were joining the fighting front, both peasants and students, and if they had not staged any new military operations, this did not mean they were idle. Their political work went on apace and they were in training for combats in the near future. Camilo could rest assured that they would answer any call to action which he might propose to the masses. Before the coffee was cold in their cups they had convinced him. Briefly they filled him in on their leader, Fabio Vasquez, and talked of the ELN’s immediate tactics and long-term strategy. They wasted no words; it was not wise, they whispered, to prolong this type of meeting; it could arouse suspicions. At the appropriate moment they would arrange an interview for him with the leaders of the organiza¬ tion. Meantime they would keep in touch. They told him that he would henceforth be referred to as Alfredo or Alfredo Castro, and that Fabio’s alias was Helio, and each one repeated his own code name for Camilo to commit to memory. Then they got up, shook him fervently by the hand and disappeared. Camilo hurried back to the flat to confide the news to Guitemie and make new plans. On the way he invented two specious reasons for missing his plane; neither the ESAP nor the chancery had yet

242

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provided him with official written permissions. He had no intention of leaving without them; in fact he had no intention of leaving at all. He thought of the invitations piled on his desk asking him to present his platform at a dozen different universities. He would accept them. There was one for the very next day to speak at the University of Tunja in Boyaca. He would begin there. “Guitemie,” he said as he came in the door, “please call up Air France and cancel my booking.” At the moment she rang the airport to notify that Father Torres was unable to travel, the loudspeakers were calling Air France pas¬ sengers aboard the flight to Paris. Then Camilo rang the chancery and asked to speak to Monsignor Umana or the auxiliary bishop. The bishop came on the line. “Camilo here, Your Excellency. You wanted to speak to me?” Isabel and Guitemie nearly choked swallowing their laughter. “We did want to speak to you, Father.” The bishop’s voice was be¬ low freezing point. “Yes, we did very much want to speak to you. But at this stage there doesn’t seem to be any point.” At the chancery both the bishop and the cardinal were fuming. They received detailed accounts of Camilo’s speech at the National and did not take kindly to his accusation that they had acted under pressure. “A public attack,” they said to themselves, “deserves a public refutation.” So the cardinal wrote a curt rejoinder and sent it off for publication in the daily papers. It came out on Wednesday morning, May 26. The cardinal archbishop of Bogota makes the following declaration: 1. It is absolutely inexact to say that the proposed journey of Father Camilo Torres is due to orders from his ecclesiastical superiors or to pressures exerted on those superiors. It was Father Torres him¬ self who, some months ago and on his own initiative, requested the archbishop of Bogota to concede him leave of absence from the archdiocese in order to present his doctoral thesis at the Uni¬ versity of Louvain. This permission was granted and subsequently reiterated by the auxiliary bishop on the occasion of Father Torres’ repeating the request. 2. In the platform of socio-political action presented by (or in-

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voked by) Father Torres there are certain points which are at variance with the Church’s teaching. Luis Cardinal Concha Archbishop of Bogota Camilo was very much annoyed at this and rushed into the chan¬ cery to see the bishop, with the newspaper in his hand. “Why this statement to the press?” he wanted to know. “Why didn’t you call me in for a chat? There was no need to air our dirty wash in public!” As for the rejection of “certain points” in his platform, he was anxious to know which points, and also why the cardinal had not dis¬ cussed it with him first. There had been ample opportunity. After all, the chancery had published its own special copy of the platform. The bishop waited imperviously for the storm to abate and then advised Camilo to put in writing first his request to travel to Louvain and secondly any further queries regarding the cardinal’s declaration. Both letters would receive prompt replies. There was nothing more to detain them for the moment, His Excellency thought. The chancery much preferred to conduct its affairs by written correspondence; it was safer that way. Camilo went home and angrily began to draft the two letters. The first, he realized, was a trap; they wanted to be able to prove that it was he, not they, who had brought up the Louvain business. He de¬ cided to show that they had left him no alternative; but overanxious, maybe, to make his point, he bungled it. Instead of simply repeating the real reasons why he had felt himself unable to accept the post at the chancery, he threw in a further argument, namely that “the remu¬ neration would be relatively slight—a fact that would necessarily affect my mother’s physical and mental health.” This remark proved dis¬ astrous; the bishop seized upon it and quickly spread the rumour that what Camilo was interested in was a better salary. His second letter to the cardinal was more happily worded. Your Eminence, On May 26 I was surprised to read in the press a declaration by Your Eminence regarding my proposed journey and certain ideas which I have “presented or invoked.”

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On reading it, I went at once to the chancery to speak personally with the auxiliary bishop. It seemed to me more fitting to clear up any misunderstanding personally rather than through the pages of the press, as I consider the relationship which ought to exist between Christians, above all between a priest and his bishop, to be of a family nature, based on mutual trust. Now in the light of Your Eminence’s declaration I consider it imperative for my personal peace of mind, for that of all Colombians involved in a change of temporal structures with a view to establish¬ ing a more just society and for that of all those whodook to the Church’s teaching as to a beacon which illumines progress and who would feel themselves excluded from history if they were unable to take part in the fundamental socio-economic changes required by mankind in order to fulfill, if only in part, the supreme gospel precept of love—in a word, for the peace of mind of all these people. Your Eminence, I consider it imperative that you give me a reply at least to two essential questions: 1. To what socio-economic platform was Your Eminence referring in the declaration of May 26? [Camilo knew that the cardinal possessed a copy of his original unpolished platform, and he was keen to know which one the old man objected to—that, or the revised version he had read at the National.] 2. Which points defended by me does Your Eminence consider “at variance with the Church’s teaching”? In the absolute certainty that Your Eminence’s paternal benevolence will receive my petition benignly since it concerns not only me but the temporal action of so many Christians, and with the assurance of my complete submission to the judgement of the Church, I remain, Your Eminence’s filially in Christ, Camilo Torres Restrepo He delivered the letters himself and waited for the promised prompt reply. Days went by; a week went by; and at the beginning of the second week he followed the cardinal’s example and sent both letters to the press. They were published in the Sunday papers on the morn¬ ing of Pentecost, and the cardinal ruminated his reply in the cathredral sacristy before Mass. One witness to the cardinal’s Mass that morning was an Italian

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news correspondent who had been sent to cover the Colombian revo¬ lution and, so far not having found it, wandered aimlessly off the plaza into the vast, empty cathedral just as a flutter of young clerics steered the old man as solemnly as possible down the aisle, hoisted him up the red-carpeted steps and lowered him with a heavy sigh onto his high tin throne. The journalist looked on fascinated as they dressed up the cardinal’s fat little figure in damask tunics and dalmatics, red velvet gloves and embroidered slippers to the accompaniment of aged canons croaking psalms from the wooden stalls of the choir. “It was the re¬ enactment of a bygone age,” he wrote afterwards, “like a Hollywood costume movie.” His Eminence, however, was not aware that he belonged to the past. In his thundering sermon he called for “virility in the defence of the Church,” as if unaware that his congregation consisted of a hand¬ ful of old ladies sprinkled around the pews in the almost deserted nave; and after Mass and the prescribed quarter-hour of thanksgiving, he repaired to the palace to dictate his final word on the question of Camilo Torres and his famous platform. He would put that young man in his place. The Holy Spirit, he firmly believed, was with the Church. When one of her princes spoke, his word was law. And if Camilo Torres was impatient for a reply, he would receive one very swiftly, so swiftly in fact that a copy of it would appear in the papers before the original had reached his mailbox. “In your letter of May 28,” he dictated, “you ask me to state which of the points in the programs you have so profusely promulgated are contrary to the doctrine of the Catholic Church.” The fingers of his young priest-stenographer flew to keep pace. “I do not understand, or rather I prefer to ignore, the reasons that have led you to put the above-mentioned query. You are perfectly familiar with the teachings of the Catholic Church concerning the points referred to in your programs and you have willfully turned your back on those teachings. I believe in calling a spade a spade.” He paused and puffed and said: “New paragraph.” “I would like to add that since the very beginning of my priestly ministry I have been convinced that papal decrees expressly forbid priests to take part in political activities or in matters of a purely tech¬ nical kind in the realm of social action strictly so-called. Because of

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that conviction, over the long years of my episcopacy I have made a special point of keeping the clergy under my jurisdiction from partici¬ pating in such activities. . . . Period, open new paragraph. . . . The issue under discussion may now be considered as closed.” He suddenly remembered that he was not only a prince but a pastor; combining the two roles was sometimes a delicate business. “However,” he added, “if you should desire to speak to me on any occasion you may be sure to find me with an open door. Affection¬ ately in the Lord . . . comma . . . Luis Cardinal Concha . . . full stop.” ' That was all. The statement was typed up, signed, sealed and sent to the papers. But contrary to the wishes of the prince, it did not close the issue; it reopened it. The public took great delight in this exchange of correspondence between the fuddy-duddy old prelate and the dash¬ ing young priest, and the papers played it up. Letters poured in to the editors voicing views both pro and con, and columnists outdid one another, some in praise, most in condemnation of Camilo. Those who saw no more than a dispute between the priest and the cardinal applauded Camilo’s reformist programs; but the more astute, per¬ ceiving the radicalism of his platform, attacked him for disobeying his bishop. If he had been simply taking a rise out of the hierarchy they would probably have been pleased. There was no shortage of angry young priests airing personal grudges against their bishops, and they were always applauded for it in the press. But the disconcerting thing in Camilo was that he addressed the cardinal courteously and seemed unconcerned about any petty injustice which might have been com¬ mitted against himself; what he objected to were the grave injustices which the system inflicted on the masses. This was not overlooked by the traditional defenders of the system; editorialists did not let up on him. As he sped around the country from one town to the next address¬ ing ever larger audiences of university students, trade unionists, politicians and professional associations, he was followed by a gaggle of reporters and a string of abuse. In a matter of days they turned his name into a household word. His fame snowballed. Criticism begot adulation, and vice versa, and during the month of June hardly a paper had him off the front page.

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Only the spectacular death of a local bandit on June 10 was considered newsworthy enough to relegate Camilo to the inner pages, but he was back in the headlines again the next morning. This wave of publicity afforded him a chance to reach the widest possible public. Over the radio and in the press he replied to dozens of questions on the details of his platform and his future political plans. His critics, however, chose to overlook most of his views and clutched at isolated items such as his statement in favour of the expropriation of Church property and his opinion that “the Church in Colombia is one of the most backward in the world.” They strove to find him guilty of mere backbiting against the Church. In those days a priest from Boyaca named Martin Amaya appeared on the scene preaching against the doctrine of the Real Presence and the Church’s law of celibacy. This gave the papers a golden opportunity, and they did their best to identify Camilo’s cause with Amaya’s and so confuse the public. Priest-columnists also helped create the false impression that Ca¬ milo’s attack was aimed principally at the Church. “Father Torres’ dis¬ courses,” wrote one, “have not brought about one single act of love for God nor the repentance of a single sinner. But they have reaped, in less than a month, such a harvest of hate for the Church and the clergy as has never been obtained by mocking comrades and un¬ believers in all their years of wicked campaigning.” Even the more or less sympathetic often missed his point. Another priest, for instance, wrote an article saying that “Father Camilo ought to humbly put things right with the cardinal, make a public statement that he is not leaving under pressure, and take his little trip around Europe but without forsaking those very excellent ideas of his.” This was considered an unwarranted defence of Camilo and its author’s superior immediately published a counter-statement in which he affirmed that Father Torres was “a madman, quite off his head.” In almost a month of journalism not one writer raised a single issue that was central to Camilo’s thesis. Passions simply ran riot. Most passionate of all perhaps were the complaints which provin¬ cial bishops lodged at the Bogota chancery. They strongly objected to Camilo’s preaching revolution within the confines of their dioceses;

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however, since he was not their subordinate but Cardinal Concha’s, they had no way of silencing him. They petitioned the cardinal, there¬ fore, to curb Camilo with a fitting ecclesiastical penalty. The cardinal hated to have people telling him what to do, and in¬ stead of censuring Camilo, which in any case would only have given him greater notoriety, he decided to undo the damage and placate the bishops with another, and this time (he hoped) conclusive, state¬ ment to the press. It came out on June 19. The Cardinal Archbishop of Bogota considers it his duty,in conscience to point out to all Catholics that Father Camilo Torres has deliber¬ ately rejected the doctrines and ordinances of the Catholic Church. If one does no more than open the encyclicals of the Sovereign Pontiffs one becomes aware of this regrettable fact, a fact all the more regrettable when one takes into account that Father Torres is preaching revolution, and even a violent seizure of power, at the precise moment in which the country labours under a crisis caused, in great measure, by the violence which the authorities are making every effort to remedy. The activities of Father Torres are incom¬ patible with his priestly character and with the ecclesiastical habit he wears; and it would be unfortunate if his clerical status should lead certain Catholics to follow the erroneous and pernicious doc¬ trines which he propounds in his programs. At the moment this appeared Camilo was in Medellin caught up in a series of public speeches and round-table conferences. He had become such a national figure that most opposition groups had judged it worth their while to accept his platform as a basis of unity, and he was laying the foundations for the United Front. Members of every single left-wing sect took him aside and described their maquis of fully trained guerrilla fighters; they were only waiting, they said, for Camilo to give the word. Trade-union chiefs and Communist Party cadres painted him glowing pictures of urban guerrilla contingents which, in fact, simply did not exist. And they all found Camilo very credulous. An army chaplain even convinced him that “the military people are all with you—from the colonels down.” To give expression to his growing movement he planned to get out a newspaper with the title Colombian Revolution and figured on selling half a million copies. Never in his life had he been so buoyed up. Then suddenly out came

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the cardinal’s chilly comunicado. He felt as though someone had doused him with a hose. The time had come, he realized, to talk to the cardinal personally and iron the problem out. His priesthood was vital to him and he could not go on indefinitely bandying it about in the press. On Mon¬ day, June 21, he cancelled all immediate engagements, including an appearance in Cali, and-rang Bogota long-distance to ask for an au¬ dience with the cardinal. It was granted for ten o’clock the following morning. He flew straight back to Bogota and spent the evening with Catholic friends discussing the possible outcome of his interview. He hoped to clear up once and for all, he said, what it was in the platform that the old man objected to. By a curious chance a Dutch bishop by the name of Blomjous—an authority on the Church’s social teaching and mem¬ ber of the Ecumenical Council Commission on The Church and the World—was passing through Bogota. He attended the informal meet¬ ing that night, read Camilo’s platform carefully and gave as his opinion that it contained nothing that could be considered at odds with the papal encyclicals. This restored Camilo’s optimism to such an extent that by the time he stepped out of a car next morning and walked up the palace steps he had almost persuaded himself that everything would be put right. After all, Cardinal Concha was a reasonable man, a fatherly person at heart; Camilo needed only to sit down with him and have a good, long chat. The cardinal, however, was in no mood to chat. He had no inten¬ tion of playing the gospel father going out to embrace his prodigal son. Before bidding his secretary to show Camilo in, he called for his vicar-general and told him not to leave the room as he wanted a wit¬ ness. He had dealt with politicians before, he said, and liked to avoid any danger of being misquoted. As soon as Camilo opened the study door and met the cardinal’s glacial stare and the scrutiny of the vicar-general he abandoned all hope of a pleasant fireside conversation. The old man held out his ringed hand for Camilo to kiss and told him to be seated. “Father Camilo,” he began without further ado, “as you know very well, your political activities and your priestly office are two incom-

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patible roles. You can’t have it both ways; it has to be one thing or the other.” Camilo had half-prepared a few explanatory phrases about the origin and content of his platform, but no sooner had he begun than the cardinal interrupted. “No need to repeat all that. I’ve read all your . . . er . . . thin¬ gummy bobs. I know them by heart. All I say is that as a priest you can’t go on like this.” Camilo attempted to begin again. “I have no wish to discuss matters with my priests. Besides, there is nothing to discuss. Your duty is simply to submit.” Camilo felt an urge to get out of the cardinal’s stifling office, out of his presence, out from under the inquisitorial eyes of the vicargeneral. He muttered something about needing time to think. “And pray,” barked the cardinal and told Camilo he might leave. The interview was over. It had lasted no more than two minutes. Out in the passage Camilo ran into a little circle of chancery mon¬ signori who began buzzing around him full of concern and offering bits of advice. Amongst them was Monsignor Ernesto Umana, who manoeuvred him artfully through a back door (to dodge reporters hanging about on the palace steps) and led him to a parked car. Camilo agreed to accompany the monsignor to his home for a drink and a post-mortem over the truncated interview; Ernesto Umana, he figured, was as close as anyone to the cardinal’s ear and might help him decide what his next move should be. A few minutes later they were settled in armchairs sipping whisky and soda and teasing out his knotty problem. Monsignor Umana let Camilo talk. He told of the people who were counting on him, the mass movement he was building, the danger that if he renounced the leadership it might be taken up by “someone who would not share the humanistic aims we Christians strive for.” The monsignor gave him a good hearing and then, when his turn came, explained things from the cardinal’s point of view. “His Eminence, you see, is under pressure from the rest of the hierarchy. Naturally he doesn’t relish the idea of suspending one of his priests. Not a bit. But others will probably force him into it. As you know the annual episcopal conference begins just ten days from now

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and every bishop in Colombia will be coming to Bogota. They are all going to insist that the cardinal penalize you, and since you continually go outside the archdiocese and trespass on their territories you leave His Eminence with no alternative. If you don’t want to lose your priest¬ hood, Camilo, I’m afraid you’ll just have to knuckle down and keep the rules of the game.” Camilo was faced with' an inescapable choice. All the premonitions he had felt during the retreat at Paipa had suddenly become real. Umana, seeing him cornered, closed in on his prey with clerical diplomacy. “You might be well advised,” he said, “to anticipate events and ask for exoneration from your priestly duties before being obliged to abandon the ministry. Better to go out gracefully, don’t you think?” Camilo could only agree. From a purely political point of view, of course, a punishment from the cardinal would enhance his public image; he would appear as the innocent victim of repression. But Camilo dismissed out of hand any temptation to exploit the Church’s foibles. He wanted only to follow the dictates of his conscience, he said, “without bringing any harm to the Church.” He thanked the monsignor for helping him see things in a clearer light and promised to visit him again on the following evening. What was left of that Tuesday, the afternoon and the evening, went in long conversations with Catholic intellectuals. These people had al¬ ready been outraged by the cardinal’s high-handed treatment of Camilo in his statements to the press and some weeks earlier had written a joint letter begging His Eminence, with all due respect, to enlighten them regarding the errors said to be contained in the plat¬ form. Like Catholic intellectuals everywhere they were concerned to see their Church put on a new look and dreamed of dialogue with their spiritual leaders. But the cardinal had evidently dropped their letter into his waste-paper basket, an event which might have dampened their reforming spirits forever had Camilo not appeared that day, downhearted, with his tale of the two-minute interview. They re¬ solved to go to the palace in a delegation and try their luck. The next morning when he heard they were downstairs asking for an audience, the cardinal decided to receive them. “But only,” he told

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them when they had come in and kissed his ring and taken their places, “only out of deference, for we have nothing whatsoever to discuss. He obviously thought them an impertinent lot, and when someone touched on the platform he got quite angry and declared that it flew in the face of the Church’s teaching on every single issue-nationaliza¬ tion, extinction of private property and so forth. “It seems that the Church’s social doctrine is unknown to you people,” he added insultingly. “I advise you to study it. You’ll find that it sets out clear-cut remedies to all problems in the social order and leaves no possible question unanswered.” With that he had hoped to terminate the interview which, like Camilo’s, was destined to be brief. One member of the delegation, however, controlled his temper long enough to formulate a question to which the Church’s social teaching had given no reply. “Since, as Your Eminence has stated, the Church is the defender of private property, I would like to know exactly which type of property ownership is defended by the Church. For example, land acquired by expropriation? Or with money earned in shady deals? Or by devalua¬ tion, which forces the poor to sell and leaves the land piling up in the hands of a few? After all, these are the commonest forms of ac¬ quiring land in Colombia.” The cardinal got up trembling from head to foot. “I am not disposed,” he said, “to continue this conversation,” and he tottered out of the room. The Catholic intellectuals were shown to the door and from that day forward applied themselves to more feasible tasks than the modernizing of the Colombian Church. In the afternoon Monsignor Ernesto Umana arrived at the palace with heartening news: Camilo, he felt sure, was about to apply for an exoneration. The cardinal heaved a sigh of relief and began to talk at once of the rescript he would have to obtain from Rome and wondered how long it might take. The wheels of Rome, he remem¬ bered,

turned very slowly.

The monsignor suggested that His

Eminence grant the laicization right away; Rome would confirm it later. The cardinal was surprised at this. Did he have power to laicize a priest? The monsignor pulled the Codex Juris Canonici down off a shelf and read him Canon 81, which stated that an “ordinary” (local

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bishop) had indeed no right to dispense from Church laws “nisi in mora sit periculum gravis damni.” The learned monsignor translated: “except when a delay might occasion grave harm.” A delay in this case would certainly place the Church in a very awkward position. The ordinary was therefore empowered to dispense. The cardinal was delighted with the monsignor’s handling of canon law and instructed him to prepare the pertinent documents so as to have everything ready for Rome as soon as Camilo decided to act. Meanwhile Camilo was, as they had hoped, drafting a brief note re¬ questing reduction to the lay state. He was also preparing a statement for the press. In the evening he visited the monsignor and told him of his decision. He would present his petition personally the next day. The cardinal received him the following afternoon in his private villa and a much milder mood. He expressed profound regret over Camilo’s retirement from the ministry and averred that he would always be glad to welcome him back into the fold. Camilo, noting his unusually paternal attitude, began to speak of his present activities and bis hopes for the future, until he noticed that the cardinal’s eyes had closed behind his thick rimless spectacles and he looked for all the world like a wizened old bullfrog dozing beside a pond on a hot sum¬ mer afternoon. Camilo could see no point in going on. His official re¬ lations with the Church had come to an end. The general public learned of this when they read his statement in the papers or heard him read it over the air, and many were deeply moved by it. It was the end product of the eighteen years he had spent within the heart of the Catholic Church. When circumstances exist which make it impossible for people to give themselves to Christ, a priest is called upon in a special way to make war on those circumstances, even if this leads him to forfeit the celebration of the Eucharist; for the Eucharist, if it is not ac¬ companied by the self-giving of Christians, is a ritual devoid of meaning. In the present structures of the Church it has become im¬ possible for me to continue exercising my priesthood as far as external worship is concerned. However, the Christian priesthood does not consist only in the celebration of external rites. The Mass, chief goal of all priestly activity, is fundamentally a community action. Now the Christian community cannot offer the sacrifice of

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the Mass with authenticity if that same community has not been practising beforehand, and in an effective way, the love of neighbour which the gospel talks about. I chose Christianity because I believed it to be the purest way of serving my neighbour. I was chosen by Christ to be a priest for all eternity, and I was urged on by the desire to dedicate myself twentyfour hours a day to the love of my fellow-man. As a sociologist I have tried to make that love genuinely efficacious by means of scientific research and technical advances. Analyzing Colombian so¬ ciety I have come to realize that the country needs a* revolution in order to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked and provide well-being for the majority of our people. I believe that the revolutionary struggle is a Christian struggle, and a priestly one. Indeed, in the present specific conditions of Colombia, participation in that struggle is the only way men can show love for their neigh¬ bours as they should. Ever since I became a priest I have tried in a hundred different ways to encourage laymen, whether Catholic or not, to join the revolutionary struggle. However, as these laymen’s actions have drawn forth no response from the masses, I have resolved to dedicate myself to the cause, thus fulfilling part of my priestly mission of leading men to the love of God by the sure path of love of neighbour. As a Colombian I consider this activity to be of the very essence of my Christian life and of my priesthood. As things stand at present in the Church mine is a mission at odds with the hierarchy’s will. I do not wish to disobey that will, nor do I wish to be untrue to my own conscience. For that reason I have asked His Eminence, the cardinal, to relieve me of my clerical obligations in order to serve the people in the temporal sphere. I am giving up one of the privileges I hold most dear (the celebration of the Church’s ritual) in order to create conditions which will give to that ritual a more authentic meaning. If I make this sacrifice I do so in the belief that my commitment to my fellow-countrymen obliges me to it. The ultimate criterion on human decisions is love, supernatural love; I am prepared to run all the risks that that love may ask of me.

The news of Camilo’s reduction to the lay state was splashed across the newspapers on the same day as an announcement by Cardinal Concha that Bogota had been chosen as the site for the International

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Eucharistic Congress of 1968 and that the Pope would probably be coming. Nonetheless, Camilo quite stole the limelight, and the cardinal was not amused. He had thought the Father Torres business dead and buried and now felt haunted as if by Camilo’s ghost. Two days later the chancery notified Camilo that he should hence¬ forth consider himself a layman; as a special favour, however, they gave him permission to offer Mass for the last time on the following morning, which was a Sunday. That Sunday, June 27, he planned to fly to Lima. The reason for his trip was an invitation of some months standing to a seminar on community development. He might have cancelled the appoint¬ ment, if it were not for the fact that he needed, in any case, to get away for a few days. His ordeal with the cardinal and his loss of the priest¬ hood had hit him hard; but as if that were not enough, it had been aggravated by the efforts so many people made to “save” him. Priests he had hardly seen since seminary days reappeared like figures from the past and did their level best to persuade him “not to throw in the towel.” None of them seemed to understand that, for him, submission to the cardinal would have been the easy way out. They were convinced that he was shirking, and their total incomprehension only increased his nervous strain. Some had even swallowed the story that his main grievance was against the low wages offered by the chan¬ cery, and this really saddened him. He thought that his friends knew him better than to believe that. Not all of them, however, thought his motives so unworthy; some felt that he was simply suffering from a temporary loss of balance. Amongst these was Miguel Triana, who, as a seminarian, had been his self-appointed spiritual counsellor. Miguel had not changed. He sought Camilo out again and tried to win him back. “The Church,” he said, “has need of your talents, Camilo. There are many ways of serving God. Look at my case, for example.” (Ca¬ milo thought of Miguel’s chaplaincy to “the High” in El Chico and the painted little snobs who traipsed after him.) “I share your ideas, Camilo, but I believe in the apostolate to the oppressor class.” Not only fellow-priests but laymen tracked him down for days in¬ sisting that he should retain his priesthood if for no other reason than

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not to lose his grip on the masses. “Take off that cassock,” they said, “and no one will listen to you.” No wonder he felt exhausted and was glad to have the Lima invitation as an excuse to disappear. His flight was scheduled for the Sunday morning. The locale for his last Mass was the colonial church of San Diego. Camilo arrived at the church with Guitemie just as dawn was breaking over the city and, while he vested in the sacristy, she went in and knelt amongst the servant girls who formed the major part of,the congrega¬ tion. The girls had come, as they always did, to the earliest Mass in order to keep their mistresses’ strict orders that they be home before seven to heat the household’s breakfast. “The enslavement of these girls,” Guitemie mused, “is another wrong Camilo hopes to right with his revolution.” At the ringing of a little bell there was a scraping of pews on the stone floor as everyone stood up and Camilo, preceded by an acolyte, walked out onto the dimly lit sanctuary. He bent to kiss the altar, his green chasuble almost touching the ground. He adjusted the chalice veil and swung around to look at the people. They thought he was about to make some announcement but he seemed unable to find words and quickly walked down to the bottom step and turned his face again towards the altar. “The servant girls,” thought Guitemie, “have no idea of the ordeal Camilo’s going through.” She alone knew why he traced the solemn gestures slowly in the air as if bidding them farewell and recited each Latin syllable with such special deliberation. “lntroibo ad altare Dei,” he enunciated. “Ad Deum qui laetifkat juventutem meam” the altar boy rattled back. There was no sermon, no hymn-singing. Camilo celebrated his last Mass in the most austere version of the Roman rite stripped of all adornments. By six-thirty they were driving back to the flat. Over breakfast Guitemie noticed that he was unusually silent. Before driving him to the airport she and Isabel helped him pack and made suggestions about what he might wear now that he had to appear

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as a layman. He put on a black shirt, buttoned up to the neck, and a dark grey suit. “You still look like a priest,” they said. “Well after all,” he raised a smile, “that’s what I am!” His trip was a change, though hardly a holiday. As well as the daily debates on community development, his Peruvian hosts kept him on the go with lectures to students at the universities of San Marcos and La Molina and interviews for the press. Everywhere he was given celebrity status and used it to publicize his ideas; the wider the support he won at a continental level, he thought, the greater prestige would his United Front have at home. He had a version of his platform cir¬ culated in Lima as “A Latin American Platform for Popular Unity,” and rang Matos Mar and other leading lights of the influential Social Progressive Movement and invited them to his hotel to discuss revolu¬ tionary prospects. But they were not impressed. The Camilo they had known as a fellow-academic at various international gatherings was more to their taste than this new Camilo converted into a rebel leader of the masses. His present role seemed somehow infra dig. His week in Lima, though busy, left him time to have lunch one day with his old friend Father Gustavo Gutierrez. The Peruvian priest’s temperament was very different from Camilo’s. Although he was deeply moved to see Camilo shed tears at the recollection of his last Mass, Gustavo regretted his friend’s resignation from the priesthood for reasons that were more political than sentimental; Camilo’s open alignment with the Marxists would be detrimental, he thought, to the acceptance which other progressive Latin American clergymen, like himself, might gain within the Church. And besides, though he did his best to see things from Camilo’s angle, the very idea of a priest as politician sounded to him like clericalisme du gauche, and he re¬ jected clericalism of whatever flavour. Father Gustavo did not hide his feelings from Camilo. On the con¬ trary, his criticisms were both fraternal and extremely frank. He dis¬ agreed, for example, with the theological content of Camilo’s press statement. “If we can’t celebrate the Eucharist until we have attained the perfect society,” he objected, “then we will have to wait till we get to heaven—in which case the Eucharist will be superfluous!”

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He was annoyed also by Camilo’s contention that Marxists were invariably more generous than Christians. “That’s just a sort of upside-down snobbery!” he said. Despite their minor differences, however, Camilo and Gustavo shared basic convictions on Christianity and social change, and Ca¬ milo was anxious to discuss everything with his friend. So he asked Gustavo what he thought of the guerrillas. Gustavo thought immediately of guerrillas in Peru, the MIR in¬ surgents who just that week had killed two civil guards in the moun¬ tains of Junm. He said he reckoned their chances of success were far from bright. Camilo opened up and told him of his commitment to the ELN, and Gustavo once again felt his friend was making a mistake. “I admire you for it, Camilo. I admire you very much. But I don’t see you as a guerrilla fighter. I mean I just can’t imagine you shooting soldiers. And I can’t imagine you, either, tramping through the jungle for years on end. If you do decide to join the guerrillas, the best thing that could happen to you—forgive me for being so frank!—but the best thing for you would be to get shot with the first bullet that came your way!” In Colombia, the ELN people were worried about Camilo. During his lecture tour in June he had let himself be surrounded by a hetero¬ geneous lot of left-wingers and guilelessly seemed to believe every¬ thing they told him. Fabio Vasquez decided it was time he talked to Camilo and co-ordinated the United Front projects with the tactics of the ELN. From his hidden encampment in Santander he sent a note to the chief of his clandestine network in Bogota with orders that Camilo be brought to him as soon as he got back from Lima. “And don’t bring him up here for nothing more than a nice chat,” he wrote. “If he comes, he comes as a member of our organization, which is what I understand he considers himself.” On Saturday, July 3, Camilo stepped off his plane at the El Dorado airport in Bogota to meet a tumultuous reception. It was a bright sunny day and the crowd was thicker, if anything, and more wildly enthusi¬ astic than the thousands who had cheered him at the university on the day of his farewell. They carried him shoulder-high across the air-

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port lounge and proceeded in a cavalcade of hooting buses and cars up El Dorado Avenue to the National University. Once there he was bustled up a staircase onto the roof of the cafeteria, from which he was to address the crowd. His speech was short and emotional and contained almost nothing new. What people most remembered after¬ wards was that he had come back to Colombia to fight for the revolu¬ tion and his promise never to leave his country again until the day the fight was victorious and the people had come to power. When the crowd had broken up the ELNers took him to one side and told him of Fabio’s orders. That night they would drive him to Bucaramanga. At eleven o’clock a car would call at the flat to pick him up. The flat was full of friends and hangers-on toasting his health and wishing him well. During the evening Isabel saw him go to his room. She followed him in and found him throwing a change of underwear into an overnight bag. “I’m tired out,” he said. “A friend has invited me to spend a few days in the country. I think I need the rest.” Around eleven he excused himself and slipped away. And before midnight he was speeding along a country road bound for Santander.

Chapter 10

THE UNITED FRONT *

They drove all night in silence. The man at the wheel was the student leader Galo, obeying orders and keeping his mouth shut. Camilo was not inclined to talk either. He was sleepy from a week of late nights in Lima and hoarse from speech-making. As the car lurched along the rough mountain highway, he doubled up uncom¬ fortably on the torn upholstery and tried to doze off. Within a matter of hours he would be with the guerrillas. A broken seat spring was digging into his back. He wriggled and wedged it under him and closed his eyes again. Visions came to him of Fabio Vasquez and his bearded men in jungle greens; and this time he fell fast asleep. At dawn the car serpentined down a rocky pass into warmer country, and in the early morning reached the town of Bucaramanga. Camilo jolted wide awake. They were parked outside a dingy house in a back street. “This is what we call ‘the Cave,’ ” Galo informed him. “A couple of the boys should be waiting for us here.” They hurried inside and were met by two young men. One was a student whom they referred to as Juanito; the other was Jose Martinez, just out of law school and known in the ELN underground by the name of Martin. They seemed in high spirits. Had Camilo heard the news? they asked. No. What news? That they had settled accounts with the Parrot. He was still none the wiser.

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The Parrot, they explained, was their nick-name for Florencio Amaya, a farmer from San Vicente who had talked too much. He talked about Fabio and the ELN, and worst of all he talked to army intelligence men. As a result, one night during the previous week he had got several bullets in his back, but survived, unfortunately, and was brought into Bucaramanga to a hospital. The ELN had to silence him at all costs. He was such a fatal talker. So on the Saturday after¬ noon—about the same time, as a matter of fact, that Camilo was wav¬ ing to the crowds in the El Dorado airport—a couple of peasants had walked into the Bucaramanga clinic and told the nurse on duty that they wanted to visit Florencio Amaya in room number seventeen. It was visiting hour, so she let them go in. But their visit, she noticed, was very brief. A few moments later she leaned over Amaya’s bed and found him covered in blood. His eyes were fixed forever in a look of terror and his body was full of gashes from a knife. Naturally enough, on that Sunday morning everyone in Bucaramanga was read¬ ing the newspaper accounts of how the ELN had executed the Parrot. The story shocked Camilo. They told it in such a matter-of-fact way. He had imagined the guerrilla movement as something a bit more romantic than this. For the moment he made no comment, but they noticed he was keeping very quiet, and a little while later he blurted out the question he had been bottling up: “What do you people really think of this Parrot business?” It was Martin who gave him the answer, speaking in the same un¬ emotional tone he had used to relate the Parrot’s death. “In the revolution, Camilo, there is sometimes dirty work to be done. This is not for fun, you know. The Parrot was a traitor to his own people.” Juanito watched Camilo closely to see how he was taking it. Later, when they were alone, the young man asked him: “Camilo, could you kill a man?” and Camilo said: “We’ll talk about that later, O.K.?” They kept Camilo in hiding all day Sunday, and to his impatient “When do we get going?” they replied: “Take it easy, Camilo. Take it easy. There’s been a slight hitch in our plans.” On the Monday morning they drove him to a point on the San Vicente road where a jeep was waiting to take him aboard. Half an hour later the jeep stopped for a second on a lonely dirt road to let

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him get down with one of the men. As the vehicle drove away he followed his companion into the jungle along a labyrinth of hidden tracks, and after an hour’s walk they were welcomed into a peasant’s hut and invited to sit down and take coffee. They would have to wait there for another guide. They spent the whole day listening for any sound outside which might be a signal from the guerrillas, but heard nothing. The hours dragged by, rain drops drizzled on the tin roof and Camilo sweltered in the heat. In the evening some workingmen came in $nd exchanged a greeting with Camilo’s guide, who was obviously well known to them. Then they shook the stranger by the hand and invited him to take a bowl of soup with them. They all bedded down early and the rain pelted on the roof all night and still no word came from the guerrillas. “Something’s gone wrong,” muttered the guide. “It seems they didn’t get our message.” The next day, enervated by the delays and the disappointment, Camilo decided not to wait any longer; he would leave a note for Fabio and return to the city. He tore a page out of a notebook and bent over a wooden table to begin. “My esteemed comrade Helio,” he wrote, using Fabio’s code name. “Only on my return from Lima did I learn of your wish that I come up here to co-ordinate our actions. . . . Tomorrow, Wednesday, I have to attend a big demonstration in Cali which was cancelled on a previous occasion. So if the guide doesn’t arrive, I’ll go back to Bucaramanga. I quite understand that my trip to Lima made it diffi¬ cult for the comrades in Bogota to co-ordinate things better. How¬ ever, through them we can keep in touch. . . .” This kind of contact with the chief was a poor substitute for a per¬ sonal meeting. But what else could he do? He filled two sheets of note-paper with an account of his activities and future plans; then folded the letter and entrusted it to his companion. At the moment Camilo was about to leave, a man walked into the hut and beckoned to him and his companion to step outside. Once out of earshot of those inside he gave them a handshake and apologized for the delay; until late last night Fabio had had no idea that they were waiting for him. The man glanced down at Camilo’s

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boots as if wondering whether they would withstand the rough hike ahead and, apparently satisfied, led them into the forest. They fol¬ lowed him for hours in single file along muddy tracks and down steep ridges until, at nightfall, they entered the guerrilla camp. A tall, lithe figure of a man, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and a broad smile, strode out to meet them. “Fabio,” he introduced himself-. “Welcome, comrades. Sorry about the hold-up. We didn’t get any word from Bogota. I’m afraid our bush telegraph just isn’t working too well.” With an infectious laugh he smoothed the incident over and put Camilo at his ease. The two men walked together across a clearing and bent down to avoid bumping their heads on the lintel of the squat peasant’s hut which served as Fabio’s headquarters. He presented Camilo to Victor Medina, Dead-eye Afanador and another peasant guerrilla fighter, Jose Ayala. The men all drew up stools. “You are with the general staff, Camilo,” Fabio gestured towards the others. “The rest of the men needn’t be told who you are. It’s better that way, for security reasons.” For the first few minutes Fabio and Camilo talked of personal things, each man sizing up the other. “While I was in your home town in June,” Camilo said, “I called on your family and did my best to explain to them the full Christian meaning of our revolutionary battle. I think they understood all right. Your mother said that she was praying for the cause. I think my visit comforted her.” Fabio smiled. Camilo’s remark about “the full Christian meaning” of the revolution amused him. But he was grateful that the priest should be concerned for his mother, and thanked him for it. “Now let’s get down to business,” he said. Camilo agreed; and to begin, suggested Fabio read the note he had written him that morning. It was the best summary of his views. He handed it to Fabio and waited for his reaction. The guerrilla leader furrowed his brow as he read; for Camilo’s letter contained an itemized list of the most dangerous errors of judgement a revolution¬ ary could make. The situation could not be better. The trade unionists are ready to

264

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support armed insurrection. So are certain sectors of the middle class, the university students and even some sectors of the upper class. Be¬ sides there is a chance that we can divide the Army. . . . Now I don’t know what you people think, but it seems to me that our strategy should be as follows: 1) strike time and time again, thus strengthening and widening our support at the grass-roots level; 2) try to co-ordinate the actions with other groups, especially with the MOEC, MRL Vanguard, the New Party, the ORC, the Christian Democrat Youth and the Communist Party.'All of these have trained guerrilla detachments; 3) create urban guerrilla groups; 4) buy a printing press (we already have nearly enough money to finance it); and 5) bring about a split in the Army. If all goes according to plan we then organize a march on the cities and seize power. In that event I would join you people, once I had made sure at least of neutralizing the Army. . . . “Up to this point,” Fabio thought, “this letter sounds like a school¬ boy’s essay.” But he kept reading. You may be sure that, with God’s help, I will put aside all other considerations whatsoever for the good of the revolution and will accept whatever post is assigned to me. I have no wish to be a leader, only a servant of the revolution, and I am prepared to do whatever is required of me. If you think that my presence is more necessary here than outside, then please tell me so. . . . In any case I hope to have the honour of being numbered amongst your men at the earliest appropriate moment. Meanwhile accept my most sincere greeting both as a brother and an unconditional comrade in the struggle for national liberation. Fabio looked across into the candid eyes of the man watching him. He saw that Camilo was waiting for his comments, like a schoolboy waiting for an exam result. So this was his “brother and unconditional comrade.” If that were so, he had better put Camilo right on the false premises in his five-point plan. “How long do you intend to spend with us?” “Well I did have a date in Cali tomorrow.”

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“Forget about it, Camilo. We have a lot to talk about.” That night they talked. Fabio took Camilo’s letter point by point and showed him how grossly mistaken it was. For a start he pointed out that the trade unionists were by no means ready for insurrection; in Colombia the workers’ movement was still monopolized by bu¬ reaucrats. He also reminded Camilo that he could count on the fingers of one hand the “sectors'of the middle class” who were ready to back the insurgents, and that only an infinitesimal number of students had the courage or conviction to follow the revolutionaries into armed conflict. “Most of them,” said Fabio, “won’t even send us a tin of sardines or a packet of aspirins for fear of being caught.” As for the “sectors of the upper class,” Camilo could discount them; the most he could hope for was an occasional individual like himself. Regarding the “split in the Army,” it was highly unlikely to occur; the soldiers were indoctrinated in the philosophy of followthe-leader and it was nonsense to think that they were all with Camilo “from the colonels down,” as the army chaplain had said. But Camilo’s gravest mistake, in Fabio’s opinion, was his naive belief that every threepenny-halfpenny self-styled revolutionary sect had guerrilla groups under its command. At best they had a few ir¬ responsible youngsters mad enough to place a bomb in a minister’s car; and some of the groups Camilo mentioned, the Christian Demo¬ crats for instance, hadn’t even so much as a homemade hand grenade. The Communist Party, it was true, controlled the guerrillas in the Southern Bloc, but the Central Committee men were jealous of Fabio and were making it hard for him to get in touch with the fighters in Marquetalia and El Pato. “You must realize, Camilo, that in Colombia the Communist Party plays the game according to the rules of bourgeois democracy. The ‘comms’ are sometimes useful in a tactical alliance, but when the going gets rough we can’t count on them.” To Camilo all this sounded very disheartening, and he said so. “Your problem, Camilo, is that you think the revolution is just around the corner. But don’t worry. We’re all like that at the begin¬ ning. Until we discover that the guerrilla is what we call ‘the buggery’ —buggering the enemy, and buggering ourselves too. The revolution-

266

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ary struggle, you see, is going to be a long drawn-out affair—as Mao says, ‘a prolonged war.’ That’s the first lesson we have to drum into every new revolutionary who joins us.” And he started right away drumming it into Camilo. For he saw that the cura had not come just to talk, but to enlist. Camilo hadn t said so in so many words. He didn’t need to. It was obvious from the tone of his letter and from his eagerness to learn guerrilla strategy and his openness to criticism. So Fabio gave him his first lesson. The guerrilla army, he said, was just in the process of formation. Only as recently as 1963, after he and Victor had done their training in Cuba, did they return to Colombia to look for recruits. He ex¬ plained why they had chosen Santander as their field of operations and how they had met up with Jose Ayala, a peasant from the San Vicente area, who at that time already had a small rebel band under his command. Ayala was a nonconformist but he lacked any kind of political education, which was precisely what Fabio and Victor were able to give him. So with him and Parmenio and others they formed the nucleus of the liberation army. Their first military action at Simacota was a success; so was their second at Papayal. But this was no reason to think that they were ready to “march on the cities and seize power.” Fabio laughed at the idea. What was slow, he explained, terribly slow, was the educating of the peasants. A lot of them were influenced by the priests and other local authorities who told them to have no truck with the “bandits,” and anyone who collaborated with them did so at the risk of being detected and tortured, maybe killed. But their greatest obstacle was the people’s own resignation. Many of them could see no way out of their misery. No wonder their political awakening took time. The guerrillas, Fabio explained, had to perform a twofold action: occa¬ sional military blows as a show of strength, and the gradual winningover of whole peasant areas. This region to the south of San Vicente, for instance, was already theirs. They could move about in it “like fish in the sea.” Fabio’s lesson began to have its effect, and as Camilo’s notions about the guerrilla’s early triumph gave way to realism, a number of doubts about the future surged in his mind. “What,” he wondered, “was the over-all long-term plan? And how could he help? And what

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about the United Front idea?” But before he had put the questions, Fabio sketched out some of the answers. The war would be a long one, he said, but it would not last forever. There were a number of factors in their favour. The first was what he called the “objective conditions,” in other words the misery and hunger of the masses. That, in itself, cried out for a remedy. The guer¬ rilla’s job was to prepare the “subjective conditions,” or to put it more plainly, to rally the peasants and arm them for the fight. Now in the long run, he said, a guerrilla army was unbeatable. It might lose this or that battle; individual fighters might fall; but in the end it had an insuperable advantage over the enemy; for while regular army troops felt their way clumsily through hostile forests, the guerrillas moved at their ease under the natural cover of the jungle. Another point on the credit side: they were not alone. Guerrilla groups were being planned by the new Maoist Communist Party; moreover,

the

Marquetalia Southern Bloc was a force to be reckoned with for the future. Eventually the ELN hoped to co-ordinate actions with them, and with any other group that recognized the need for guerrilla war¬ fare. With time they would build a united guerrilla front. As for Camilo’s United Front, it was to act as a catalyst. Camilo himself would continue his program of political agitation all over the country, spelling out the facts about exploitation in a language that the common man could understand. The printed word was vital; so with the money he had obtained for a press, he would buy a small off¬ set machine to publish regular news bulletins and instructions for militants. He would give this the widest possible circulation. Presum¬ ably the masses would continue to flock after him, with the result that every political opportunist under the sun would clamour to join his United Front until the day the government began to take repressive measures, at which point the pseudo-revolutionaries would take fright and abandon his movement. This would be the cue for Camilo to hammer home a great lesson to the Colombian workers: namely that they should not put their faith in every soap-box orator who talked of revolution, that their sole salvation lay in armed combat. This would be followed by a gesture unparalleled in any other leader in the history of his country; Camilo would back up his words with ac-

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tions and join the liberation forces. Once he was with them, they would make a public statement, a proclamation. That, at any rate, was the way Fabio saw Camilo’s role. He sug¬ gested they sleep on it, however, as it was getting late. They would talk more about things in the morning. Camilo tossed in his hammock, listening to the night sounds of the jungle and letting Fabio’s words sink in. A few hours before, when he had arrived at the camp knowing next to nothing about Fabio and his men, he had been ready to throw in his lot with them. Now he really had much better reasons for doing so. But the very seriousness of the commitment obliged him to weigh his decision carefully. There would be no turning back, the war might last for years and there was no guarantee that he would be around for the final victory. He heard a sleeping man’s heavy breathing in the dark and the soft pad of a sentry walking up and down on guard outside the hut; and the patter of rain on leaves lulled him finally to sleep. Any lingering doubts he might still have felt were dispelled the next morning. He was up at dawn mixing with the men and spent most of the day in their company. The majority of them were peas¬ ants, and Camilo especially liked the way those who were not—stu¬ dents like Victor, for example, or Fabio himself—mixed so easily with the rough farmers and seemed indistinguishable from them. This identity with the poor had been Camilo’s dream ever since the days he had met the priest-workers in Paris and Louvain. He noted also how the men shared every duty, and their camaraderie was contagious. They were the revolution’s front-line fighters, and Camilo wanted to be with them. Revolutionary theorists and politicians whom he knew in town seemed drab and stodgy alongside the guerrillas who had left home and family for the cause, and he would not be happy until they had admitted him into their ranks. Fabio sensed this and took it for granted that Camilo had accepted the plan he had proposed the night before. He had only to insist on a few details. First and foremost, Camilo from now on should con¬ sider himself a member of the organization “on commission in the city,” in other words the guerrilla fighter’s normal place was in the jungle and only because of exceptional circumstances was Camilo being directed to return to Bogota. Secondly, he must observe the

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rules of strict secrecy. Third, an adviser would be appointed by Fabio to counsel him at every moment, since Camilo’s lack of experience in political matters might prove dangerous. And the fourth and final in¬ struction Fabio gave him was to be ready to leave for the jungle as soon as he, Fabio, gave the order. Camilo accepted these stipulations gladly. Not only was he con¬ vinced of guerrilla combat as the only path to revolutionary change, but Fabio’s persuasive character also exerted a strong attraction over him. They swapped confidences, and each man told the other of how he had come to the revolution. Fabio talked of his childhood in a small town of coffee-growers during the dreadful years of the Violence. His family had been Liberal Party supporters and Fabio, while still only a boy, had seen his father murdered by the goths. Then, as he grew up, he came to understand how wrong his father had been in staking his hopes on the Liberal Party. The Liberals, he saw, were controlled by the oligarchs just as the Conservatives were. Colombia needed a com¬ plete overhaul. In the late fifties he left home and went to Bogota to look for work. He got a job as a bank clerk and took a room with his brother Manuel, the studious member of the family, who was studying law and reading the works of Karl Marx. Fabio didn’t do much read¬ ing; but he used to listen to his brother talk, and sat in on discussions with revolutionary students and heard them planning strikes and demonstrations. They taught him a lot. Above all he learned what socialism was. “Oh, so you’re not an illiterate bandit, as the papers say?” Camilo interrupted jokingly. “No, and I’m not a bloodthirsty social outcast either, obsessed with revenging my father’s murder!” They both laughed, recalling the current descriptions of him in the press. Once Camilo had warmed to Fabio and felt completely at ease with him, he spoke of the Parrot’s death and of how the account of it had shocked him. He realized that that sort of thing was necessary, but expected Fabio would understand how it went against all his years of training as a priest and the nonviolent doctrines of his Christianity. “When I’m eventually here to stay,” he said, “maybe I could be use-

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ful in the guerrilla without actually having to kill. You see, Fabio, I don’t think I could bring myself to shoot a man.” Fabio told him not to worry about it, and changed the subject. Two days later Camilo arrived back in Bucaramanga with mud all over his boots, his feet full of blisters, his trousers torn and his legs scratched, but his spirits higher than ever. He bore a letter from Fabio for the Bucaramanga student leader Jaime Arenas, and Juanito took him to deliver it. Jaime was already something of a national figure. It was he who had instigated the stu¬ dent march on Bogota the year before and led the three-month stu¬ dent strike. He was widely known as a gifted and convincing public speaker; what people did not know, of course, was that he was a mem¬ ber of the ELN. His first meeting with Camilo was memorable. He had admired the revolutionary priest from afar and had liked his platform, but nothing had prepared him for what Fabio had written in his letter. “Alfredo Castro,” it said, referring to Camilo by his alias, “is going to work with us. He will obtain an off-set press with which to edit a newspaper as propaganda for Eliseo [code name for the ELN]. All this must be kept under our strict control, and care must be taken that Alfredo does not change his mind. The Communist Party people are very wily and apparently don’t let him out of their sight. A mem¬ ber of our organization, therefore, must remain constantly by his side. Make sure that it is someone intelligent and capable of handling the situation. Alfredo will return here to us as soon as I give the order.” And, as if anticipating Jaime’s incredulity, the letter added: “This is not just wishful thinking; it is a clear agreement I’ve made with him.” Jaime might well have felt incredulous. He had half-hoped to hear that Camilo was willing to collaborate with their organization, but he never expected to learn that he had unconditionally joined them. This news changed the complexion of things. Jaime’s political acumen told him that, with Camilo, the ELN might quickly grow from a tiny nucleus into a mass movement. In any case it would attract sym¬ pathies from amongst thousands of the priest-revolutionary’s follow¬ ers. That was obviously Fabio’s idea, and to Jaime it seemed very sound.

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With Camilo he began, there and then, to plan activities. First the propaganda newspaper. Camilo told Jaime that he had a cheque for 50,000 pesos (about $4,000 U.S. currency) donated by a wealthy lawyer. With it he reckoned they could get the paper under way; later it should support itself. As soon as he got back to Bogota he would begin organizing the first edition. Then they discussed his future itinerary. Jaime suggested that, since they had good contacts in Bucaramanga and the Santander Province in general it might be just as well to begin his new series of public appearances there. So that was decided upon. He would fly back to the capital and meet up with Jaime, who would travel by road. Once there they would make ar¬ rangements about the paper and then set out on their tour of Santander. As they talked and plotted together the two men struck up an easy friendship; and they were soon to become inseparable. Jaime assumed the role of Camilo’s political adviser and was to remain by his side, as Fabio had ordered, day and night for the following three and a half months. On every platform where Camilo stood up to address a crowd, the lanky red-headed student would be standing beside him. Jaime was to sit in on all his political conferences, closed meetings and open discussions. He travelled with Camilo the length and breadth of the country, often sleeping in the same hotel room, and when they were in Bogota, he virtually lived in Camilo’s flat. In fact, in the months ahead, only one person in the world was to be closer to him than Jaime Arenas. And that was Guitemie Olivieri. She was waiting for him on his return to Bogota, and rubbed her hands with delight as he told of Fabio and the men of the ELN. It was almost ten years since she had met Camilo for the first time in Paris, in the days when they had made friends with the exiled Algerians and felt themselves accomplices in their anti-colonial war. From then on Guitemie’s life had been closely linked to Camilo’s. Her Catholic mysticism had evolved and her religious zeal had expanded, like his, to include the mystique of the class war. The fact that their spiritual development should have been so similar was no mere coincidence; as from 1962 they had worked together day after day in their office at the ESAP, and Guitemie constantly goaded Camilo into battle. When he was inclined to be conciliatory, she became even more in-

272

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transigent. Over the Yopal contract, for example, or the first mild rubs with people in the INCORA, while Camilo tended to shrug his shoulders, Guitemie would spit out her throaty “Pahaaaw!” and call his adversaries “a pack of bastards!” Later, when Camilo took a stand against Alvaro Gomez and came out in open conflict with Nannetti, her loud guttural laughter spurred him on. By 1965 the pair of them had grown so radical that nothing less than an all-out brawl with the ruling classes could possibly have satisfied them. On learning of his plans, therefore, Guitemie swore her unreserved allegiance to the cause of the ELN and promised Camilo to be with him in the fight right to the bitter end. Her decision may well have been influenced, unconsciously at least, by an additional circumstance. In those very days she had terminated her relationship with a man who had absorbed her affections and much of her energy since her arrival in Colombia several years be¬ fore. That affaire was now at an end, and Guitemie needed an outlet for her passion and vitality. The revolution provided it; and so did Camilo. Overnight she became his constant companion and most devoted disciple. She received his phone calls, handled his mail and made practically all his appointments. Anyone who wanted to get in touch with Camilo, whether old friend or recent acquaintance, had to do so through Guitemie and be vetted first by her. Along with Jaime she acted as Camilo’s manager, as it were, and from the second week of July onwards it should have been obvious to everyone that the three of them were running the United Front. It should have been; but it wasn’t. Most of the people called upon to collaborate in the movement which sprang up around the figure of Camilo honestly thought that the United Front was meant to be just that: a sort of open-ended political sack into which every shade of leftist could quite conveniently fit. So, at any rate, it was understood by Israel Arjona, the first man Camilo asked to take part. Arjona was well known as a maverick amongst Marxists and as editor, over the years, of various papers and periodicals of a radical kind. Early in July he got a call from Camilo and was invited (“summoned,” he said afterwards) to “an important meeting.” Camilo wanted him to take charge of his revolutionary newspaper. Arjona hurried to keep his appointment in Camilo’s flat. In his

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already fairly long career of pamphleteering for the revolution he had never known a moment so propitious as the present nor a more com¬ pelling caudillo than Camilo. He was delighted that the priest should want him at the paper’s helm. The meeting, however, was not a success. For a start there were too many people present, all talking at once, and several of their pro¬ posals seemed to Arjona preposterous. Camilo, for example, insisted that the first edition come out the following week in half a million copies. Arjona protested that he needed at least a month in order to ensure material for the first several issues, and that a weekly news¬ paper of this kind could never hope to sell more than about thirty thousand, or forty at the most. He also objected to the suggestion that each of the groups affiliated with the United Front put a repre¬ sentative on the editorial board to veto any article which might dis¬ agree with their particular party line. Arjona pleaded that a paper with that sort of staff would be quite impracticable. But nothing was decided. The meeting ended, as it had begun, in utter confusion. The next day, at a quieter meeting with fewer attendants, Camilo placed the management of the paper entirely in Arjona’s hands and agreed that it be called Frente Unido (United Front) and that it ap¬ pear first on Thursday August 26, and then on every succeeding Thursday without fail. Camilo promised to write something himself for each issue, and the rest of the copy could be put together out of articles provided by United Front members. Confident that he had left the matter in capable hands, Camilo went off at the end of the second week of July with Jaime on their tour of Santander; and fsrael Arjona began gathering up material for the paper and looking around for a printer, for Camilo’s idea of buying an off-set machine proved to be quite beyond their means. Although the newspaper was only a month from publication, its purpose was far from clear. At all events no two people saw it in quite the same light. Arjona did not consider it the official organ of the United Front since the front, as such, did not yet exist. He envisaged it rather as a decisive instrument in the formation of a movement which, for him, was not to be so much a union of existing groups— he distrusted every one of them!—as a chance for the great amorphous masses to organize themselves politically. A different view was held

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by most of the opposition groups. They looked upon the forthcoming paper as Camilo’s personal newssheet and, since he was the man the crowd went after, all of them, Christian Democrats and Communists alike, hastened to include themselves under his banner in the hope that he would soon be included under theirs. But for Camilo him¬ self the paper was simply part of his plan to stir up the masses before he left for the guerrilla army. As such it was a potential propaganda sheet of the ELN. Thus, a month before it appeared, Frente Unido contained the embryo of various irreconcilable opinions, and was to be edited, in a sense, under false pretences. Nonetheless no one doubted that it would sell like hot cakes. As long as it bore the legend “Director: Camilo Torres” it would be sure of success. For Camilo’s popularity was growing. During the last weeks of July and on into August, while the paper was in preparation, he made a triumphant tour of Santander, as well as the province of El Valle and a number of cities on the Atlantic coast. He began in the town of Cucuta, where a crowd met him and Jaime at the airport and carried them off to a demonstration in the main square. From there he travelled overland to Ocana, Concencion, Rio de Oro and back to Bucaramanga. He spoke in union halls, uni¬ versity lecture theatres, professional clubs and above all in the streets. Towns which had heard Jose Antonio Galan’s call to revolt in the eighteenth century now echoed with Camilo’s fiery discourses in the open air at El Socorro, Suaita, Barbosa and under the twisted trees in the plaza of San Gil. And he brought his Santander tour to an end with a gigantic manifestation in the petrol town of Barranca. He was in ELN territory, and pencilled a note to his commanding officer in the nearby jungle. My esteemed brother and comrade Helio: The revolution surges ahead. It’s really stupendous. And the popu¬ lar support is unanimous. Fabio, on reading this, was disappointed to see how little Camilo had taken his lesson to heart. Evidently the cura was still hoping for quick results. Everywhere I speak, the letter continued, I try to explain the pres¬ ent situation and predict future events. In each place we have

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formed a co-ordinating committee of the United Front, and the majority of the members are people unaligned with existing political groups. Communist Party types have caused a few problems, as usual, in their effort to control things, but they seem to be gradually learning. They’ve helped us a lot. I keep on insisting on the need for local committees to discuss and distribute the platform in the first place, then for the distribution of the paper and later for the formation of regional committees and a national one. The National Committee, of course, will give the United Front members their orders for the seizure of power. I explain this power takeover in the following way: I show that, despite the present state of martial law, we have taken a plaza or a town by means of a manifestation, and that in the same way we could take power the day the peasants get control of a hacienda, say, or a whole area, or a road, or a factory, or a town. As you see any listener can deduce from my expose that “the buggery” is ab¬ solutely necessary. Apropos of that, just let me repeat that I would not be speaking in public the way I am if it weren’t for what you people are doing. What I saw in the jungle has been a constant stimulus as well as a guarantee of genuine backing throughout this whole campaign of political agitation. The campaign continued. From Barranca he flew back to Bogota and from there, a few days later, to Cali. The city of Cali had twice before been promised a visit from Camilo and on both occasions he had failed to make a showing. This time he was three hours late. The crowd, however, was prepared to wait. From five o’clock in the after¬ noon the Plaza de San Nicolas was full of people clapping and stamp¬ ing and shouting slogans until Camilo, who had missed the flight on which he was booked, arrived finally around eight and was carried above the people’s heads amidst a thunder of laughter and applause. He alighted on the back of a truck and pronounced, for well over an hour, a scathing denunciation of the oligarchy. The Calenos cheered him to the echo. He gave much the same speech in the neighbouring towns of Palmira, Buga and Sevilla during the days that followed. In Sevilla he spoke on a Sunday morning in the plaza, and had to shout to be heard above the raucous voice of the local pastor roaring hymns through a loudspeaker in the church tower and calling down anath-

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emas on any of his parishioners who dared stop and listen to what the “renegade priest” had to say. From town to town the clergy came out in force against him. And so did the Army, since his mass meetings went clean against the martial law which President Valencia had decreed in May. However, short of mowing down Camilo’s followers with machine-guns, there seemed to be nothing they could do to stop him. He carried on with¬ out restraint. On August 2, Colombia’s port down on the Pacific witnessed the greatest public protest in its history: Camilo addressing thousands of Negro dock-workers from the slums of Buenaventura. Three days later he was on the Atlantic coast drawing the crowds in Barranquilla, Santa Marta, and, on Sunday, August 8, in Cartagena. From there he intended to fly to Medellin, where a big demonstration had been or¬ ganized for him. However, the people who ran the Cartagena agency for Avianca were instructed from higher up that he was not to be given a seat on any flight. The governor of Antioquia had decided to keep Camilo out of Medellin. The governor was encouraged in this by Medellin’s archbishop, Monsignor Botero Salazar. That Sunday morning Archbishop Botero had ordered a message to be read from every pulpit of his archdiocese condemning the doctrines of “Mr. Camilo Torres” and advising the public that “Mr. Torres, by the very fact of having renounced the exercise of his priesthood, can no longer be considered a clergyman nor claim a clergyman’s rights and that, as a result, both the civil au¬ thorities and the faithful ought to treat him as a simple citizen.” The Church, in other words, bestowed its blessing in advance on whatever treatment the governor had reserved for the troublesome ex-priest, should the latter appear. Camilo did in fact appear, and in quite a spectacular way. At five o’clock on the Monday afternoon he flew into the Medellin airport in a specially chartered Cessna and was met by hundreds of sup¬ porters shouting from the terminal rooftop and a platoon of military policemen who ran out onto the tarmac as soon as the little plane landed and formed a cordon around it. When Camilo got out, however, the lieutenant in charge seemed to take fright and after a cursory regulation search let him go past into

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the airport building. Then he and Jaime Arenas led the jubilant crowd of demonstrators out of the airport and down the street towards the Plaza de Cisneros some two miles away. But they did not get very far. The men in uniform had blocked off one of the main bridges which gave access to the city and, on reaching it, the marchers halted in their tracks, dismayed. Camilo and Jaime saw an opening and did not hesitate. They dashed across an unguarded footbridge, hopped aboard a passing bus and disappeared. Two blocks down the street they got off the bus and hailed a cab. The Plaza de Cisneros? The taxi driver thought it was no use trying to get to the plaza; it was in a tumult. The police, he said, were dispersing the mob with their batons. So Camilo got him to drop them off at the ASA, headquarters of the Antioquenian Unionists Association, which was sponsoring his visit to Medellin. Once inside the union building the rumpus really began. Thanks to a local radio reporter Camilo got on the air and broadcast that the meeting was far from cancelled; it would be held at the ASA. At this news a great crowd of enthusiasts, some of them black and blue from blows received in the plaza, came rolling up undaunted to the new rendezvous, and by nine o’clock in the evening were overflowing into the courtyard and onto the street. Camilo addressed them through loudspeakers. The governor was hopping mad and sent the police down to break them up. It was Camilo’s audience, however, who be¬ gan breaking up the police with sticks and stones, and after a couple of constables had been taken off to the hospital, reinforcements were sent to surround the ASA, with orders to take some prisoners and let no one out. Camilo and a hundred or more of his followers were held in the union offices that night and all the next morning. They didn’t mind. They marched up and down singing revolutionary songs and grinning at the policemen on the other side of the wire¬ netting fence, and in the morning they gathered around Camilo smiling and making victory signs with their fingers for the cameramen who came to take their photos. Several of these photos would be used in Frente Unido, where the incident would be presented as “the United Front’s baptism of violent persecution.” But in fact, the only people who got hurt were the two unlucky policemen. Camilo and his friends were set free at one o’clock in the afternoon; and on Thursday,

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August 12, after giving a couple of talks in Medellin and holding a few private meetings, Camilo returned to Bogota. For the next week he worked mainly on the newspaper. Even though his movement was now a national phenomenon and he himself was mobilizing masses of Colombians as no other leader had done since the days of Gaitan, nonetheless the United Front had hardly any full-time workers at its disposal and very limited funds; and since its sole co-ordinating force was Camilo’s own personality, he had to bear the burden of supervising the paper, not only its content, but also the teams (“brigades” as he called them) of boys and girls who had offered to sell it on the streets. He also had in mind to write a series of personal “messages” to different sectors of the population in which he would synthesize the main points he had been making in his speeches. He would have liked to sit down quietly at a desk and compose these messages with the greatest of care. But there was no time. Instead he dictated them to Guitemie from under the shower or across the breakfast table or, when he was out of town, over the telephone. For all that, they came out pretty well. The first one bore the title “Why I Am Not Participating in the Elections” and was to be pub¬ lished on the front page of the first number of Frente Unido, a paradox if ever there was one, for the touchstone destined to divide the mem¬ bers of his United Front was Camilo’s (and the ELN’s) open hostility to electioneering. Vote-seeking, they knew, was merely playing into the oligarchy’s hands, and on that point Camilo, with Jaime’s ready approval, decided to take a firm stand. “The whole electoral apparatus,” he shouted from under the shower, “is controlled by the oligarchy. The scrutineer, not the voter, is the one who does the electing. The man who counts the votes is the man who decides the outcome. The elections don’t take place at the ballot boxes but in the government offices.” Camilo gave several more reasons for refusing to take part in an election campaign. “In the present system,” he pointed out, “the popu¬ lar classes of Colombia, in order to vote, are obliged to opt either for Liberals or Conservatives. This divides the people. And whatever divides the people is contrary to their true interests.”

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He went so far as to contemplate the hypothetical case in which the oligarchy might one day count wrong and let the opposition win. “Even then,” he said, “an oligarchy which has killed off revolutionary leaders without batting an eye, and submerged the country in violence, an oligarchy which installs and deposes military dictators at will, is hardly likely to hand the power over to the people just because the opposition parties happen to win a majority of votes at the polls.” He capped it all in one of his speeches. “The cardinal has said on various occasions that it is a mortal sin to abstain from voting. I say that it would be a mortal sin to abstain from the revolution.” Camilo’s abstentionist policy displeased the Communist Party peo¬ ple, but they did not, because of it, relinquish their right to participate in his United Front. Rather they tried to keep a tighter check on him. Camilo did not object to their presence; for after forty years of po¬ litical activity, the Communist Party had its cells operating in every comer of the country and was the most valuable group of all when it came to organizing meetings or setting up “local committees” to publicize the platform and sell the paper. The party’s Central Com¬ mittee, then, instructed Alvaro Marroquin, their youth organizer, to follow Camilo around, and from August on, Marroco, as he was called, was beside him on every platform. If the Communists didn’t like Camilo’s anti-electioneering stance, still less did it appeal to people like Carlos Lleras, who was com¬ mencing his presidential campaign, or to Alfonso Lopez, the head of the MRL, who would later be Lleras’ foreign minister. These men were spending anything up to 200,000 pesos on each of their public meetings and even then they were struggling to half-fill a plaza. Camilo, on the other hand, with fifty pesos worth of posters and a second-hand amplifier, was packing people into the plazas and telling them not to vote. The politicians made an effort to stop him. To this end Alfonso Lopez, one of the country’s most distinguished political figures and heir-apparent to the Liberal throne, was sub¬ jected to the ignominy of asking for an audience with Camilo. And to make sure of being received, he made his advances through a friend at Camilo’s court; he rang his colleague, Luis Villar, and said: “We’ve got to talk to Camilo. Would you see if you can arrange it?”

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Luis spoke to Camilo, who consented to a meeting with Lopez; he was curious to see what the man would propose. They met the next morning, and Lopez did his best to dissuade Camilo from going ahead with his campaign. It was political suicide, he said. “The papers will wipe you off the map, Camilo. That’s their technique, you know. They give you loads of publicity today, in order to overwork your image and discard you tomorrow. I don’t know if you are familiar with the story of what tire ancient Aztecs used to do with their leading warriors. It was like this: when a warrior won a battle, they promoted him to commander; if he won 'another, they appointed him to govern a province; but if he won a third, they cut off his head. That’s what they’re planning to do with you, Camilo. I’m warning you. I have it on the best authority.” Camilo was not intimidated, just a bit amused. As he was, also, when old General Rojas, the leader of the ANAPO, sent an envoy round to try and bribe him. If Camilo would desist from his abstentionism and make a pronouncement in Rojas’ favour, the old ex¬ dictator promised him that, once the ANAPO came to power, he could have any post he liked: an embassy in Paris or London, or the cardinal’s hat if he preferred. One last fruitless effort to divert Camilo’s course was made by Gustavo Perez. On a hectic mid-August night when Camilo’s flat was fairly buzzing with people planning articles in the bedroom and de¬ bating in the bathroom and making long-distance phone calls in the hall, Gustavo arrived and was let in, reluctantly, by Guitemie. He wanted to talk to Camilo. But not in that bedlam. They went out into the street and sat in Gustavo’s car. Then, without further ado, Gustavo began to give him advice. “Look here, Camilo, why don’t you go back to Louvain and get your doctorate? Maybe publish a book. That would increase your prestige enormously. People would really sit up and take notice of you.” Camilo got annoyed. He had more people sitting up and taking notice of him than Gustavo would ever have. “Publish a book, Gustavo? How many books have you published? And what good have they done? This is no time for writing more books. It’s a time for action.” Gustavo said that that might be so but he didn’t want to see Camilo

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go off half-cocked. “You need support from the clergy,” he suggested. “Now I could get a hundred priests behind you if you like, and we could challenge the cardinal to a public debate on the Church’s social doctrine—” “The problem is not with the Church, Gustavo. I’m not interested in reforming the Church. I’m interested in the revolution.” Which reminded Camilo that he had a bone to pick with Gustavo. At a symposium in Cali the previous week, Gustavo had blamed most of the country’s ills on the “demographic explosion” and the Church’s condemnation of birth control. “That’s a typical Yankee attitude, Gustavo. But what about the social and economic factors? You don’t even mention them!” They argued on, heatedly, for hours. Gustavo could scarcely square his recollections of the mild-mannered Camilo with this stubborn, passionate man sitting beside him on the front seat. Camilo took him to task for the way he was running his institute and the pro-capitalist flavour he gave his publications. Gustavo replied that he had to be careful not to offend the Americans and West Germans who financed him. “Oh, so that’s it,” cried Camilo. “You’ve sold yourself to the Yankees! You’ve become very bourgeois, Gustavo, since the days we made our plans together in the ECISE at Louvain. Yes, very bourgeois, and very concerned about prestige.” Gustavo couldn’t stand any more. “O.K. So I’m bourgeois and concerned about prestige!” he repeated. “If that’s what you think, Camilo, then there’s no point hi trying to discuss matters any further.” He looked at his watch; it was almost three o’clock in the morning. He turned the ignition key and began to warm the engine. Camilo got out of the car and closed the door. Gustavo never thought a conversa¬ tion with his old friend could have been so disagreeable or end so abruptly. He said “good night” and drove away, leaving Camilo on the curb. One by one Camilo broke his old ties. Gustavo would never see him again; nor would a lot of other one-time friends. The ladies and gentlemen of El Chico, in whose salons he had once fraternized, were now frankly vexed at his behaviour. “Poor Camilo seems to have lost all sense of proportion,” said the ladies, and the gentlemen said

282

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harsher things. Some of them, irate over his pin-pointing of the oli¬ garchy and a few remarks he had made about the twenty-four families who ran the country, called him up and invited him to Mr. So-and-So’s home to discuss matters. The tone was anything but friendly, and Camilo was really too busy to accept. Nevertheless he did accept. He took note of the address and arrived at an elegant mansion at the appointed hour. A dozen or so society men well known to him were moving about impatiently in the drawing room like an arena full of lions waiting for a Christian to be shown in. Camilo had hardly got his nose inside the door than they fell upon him. After the briefest possible formalities they began, almost in chorus, to quote and misquote and criticize and ridicule his public utterances. “Just a moment!” Camilo held up his hands. “Just a moment! You people are drinking whisky, if I’m not mistaken. It’s been a long time since I had a glass of whisky in my hand. Getting around with the people I do, you’re lucky to get an aguardiente. Now don’t be mean. How about pouring me a drink?” His host fumbled awkwardly for the decanter. “Thank you,” said Camilo, accepting the hospitality. “That’s better. But the nice thing about a glass of whisky is not so much the whisky itself as the company. There’s nothing like a whisky sipped in a com¬ fortable armchair amongst old friends.” He let himself down into the leather cushions of a settee. His op¬ ponents glanced at one another, disconcerted; they had expected him to be more antagonistic. “Look, I understand you people,” he went on, “perfectly. I enjoy the life of an oligarch myself when I can get it. I love to sit and chat with nice people in a pleasant setting with a good thick carpet on the floor and original Boteros on the wall. An oligarch’s life is great. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that.” One or two suspected a sting of sarcasm in what Camilo was saying. But most of them were simply relieved. This was just like the old Camilo. He hadn’t really changed at all. More whiskies were poured all round and they began to draw him out on social and political affairs and let him explain his views at length. He felt like Daniel; the lions were eating out of his hand.

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By the time the fourth whisky had been put down, or the fifth, they were listening to Camilo in a most sympathetic fashion, and one man, warming his coat-tails by the fire, interrupted to put a question. “If things are as you say they are, Camilo, then I’d like to help change them, naturally. I’m a professional man myself, a lawyer. What do you suggest 1 could do?” Camilo put down his whisky and stood up. His whole aspect had suddenly changed. “There is nothing you can do now! It’s too late. I told you all this a hundred times before, and you took no notice of me. Well now we are at war. We’re fighting in the streets. If I win, you’ll all be hanged from the lampposts. If you win, you can hang me!” And he walked out. People were shocked at what seemed to them Camilo’s “change of personality.” The self-complacent passed judgement on him without understanding the seriousness of his purpose. But many sympathizers, too, resented his acerbity and oversimplifications. They thought he had lost his balance. They had not the slightest inkling, of course, that everything he said was given a special, almost prophetic urgency by the fact that he would be leaving shortly for the guerrilla front. That decision coloured everything and gave an edge to all his speeches and the articles he wrote for Frente Unido. Their meaning was lost, however, on the vast majority of his hearers, who understood it only after the event. For the moment not even many of his close collabora¬ tors knew that Camilo was a member of the ELN. This was known only to Fabio, Jaime and Guitemie and a handful of young men work¬ ing for the ELN underground. Unfortunately, due to the indiscretions of those men, the secret would soon be shared by the last people in the world Camilo wanted to know of it. In a box in someone’s flat in Bogota the ELN undercover men had stored a pile of letters containing, amongst other things, detailed references to Camilo and his relation with the guerrilla forces. It was vital, of course, that this correspondence not be discovered. Yet the man in charge of it, a young lawyer, Martinez, the one they called Martin, was already being closely watched by secret service agents. Early in August he received a warning: Fabio Vasquez sent him word that one of the ELN’s peasant-collaborators in Santander had

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been arrested while carrying “three letters and other matters of great importance.” Since this material was now in the enemy’s hands, Fabio instructed Martinez, as he had done a hundred times before, to “take all necessary security measures.” Even so, Martinez underestimated the danger. Instead of destroying the boxful of correspondence, he simply transferred it to what he thought was a safe place; he left it, along with several pistols and revolvers, in the spare room of an apart¬ ment he shared with a dentist friend. Meantime the army chiefs put experts to decipher the papers found on the man they had captured in Santander, and despite the use of code names, they deduced that one of the documents was a letter written by their suspect, Martinez, to the leader of the guerrilla army. They immediately set a score of detectives on Martinez’ trail, and after observing him for a fortnight supplying rifles to a guerrilla training camp in the country, the intelligence people decided to act. On Monday evening, August 23, a patrol car pulled up outside the dentist’s office. Military police ordered the dentist aboard, drove him to his apartment and told him to open up. Within minutes they were in his spare room pulling firearms out of the closet and prising open the box of documents they had discovered under a bed. Later that night Antonio Vasquez, Fabio’s younger brother who also worked undercover in Bogota, burst into Camilo’s flat with the full story. After the raid the police had taken the dentist prisoner and plainclothesmen had waited for Martinez to appear. At about eight o’clock Martinez arrived at the apartment accompanied by two other leading members of the ELN. They had walked right into the trap, and the three of them, Antonio Vasquez reported, were now under arrest. As Camilo listened to Antonio he felt an emptiness in the pit of his stomach. This meant the end of his open campaigning, he thought; he would have to go into hiding and join the guerrilla forces immediately. Once in possession of those letters the government could be expected to take the most drastic measures against him. He and Jaime sat for hours with Guitemie and Antonio discussing all possible angles. They cursed themselves for not having made sure the tell-tale letters were destroyed. It had been someone’s foolish idea to preserve them for posterity. Now the enemy had hold of them,

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and no doubt would act swiftly. Nonetheless, despite the serious risks involved, Jaime said that Camilo was not authorized to make any fundamental change of plan until he had received orders from the chief. His political agitation and work on the paper should go ahead as normal. The armed member of the ELN who had been acting as his bodyguard would be alerted to the new danger, and reinforce¬ ments would be engaged if possible. But nothing must be altered. They would let the enemy make the first move. Days went by, and nothing happened. Valencia’s government was giving Camilo more rope. The military police continued to break up his meetings or menace the participants with a display of machineguns. But that was all. And it was normal enough, given the prevailing martial law. There was no evidence of anything like an attempt on his life. Yet he and Guitemie spent each day waiting for the worst. One night the phone woke them at 2

a.m.

Guitemie answered it. A

man’s voice was on the line asking to speak to Camilo. She passed him the receiver. The man identified himself as a resident of one of the popular quarters of the city. He had just been evicted from his house, he said, and did not know where to turn. He wanted Camilo to come down and help him. He gave the address and Camilo scribbled it on a scrap of paper and said that he would be there right away. “Don’t go yet, Camilo,” Guitemie held out her hand. “Wait and see if he calls back.” She made coffee and they sat by the phone for an hour. No call came. The next day Camilo got someone to make enquiries at the address the man had given him. No one of that name had ever lived there; and there had been no eviction. The incident remained a mystery. There was no positive proof that someone had been laying a trap for Camilo but this sort of thing did nothing to calm his nerves, nor Guitemie’s. From the last week of August they lived in a suspense which could be broken only by a word from Fabio Vasquez; and Fabio’s orders were not to reach them until the first week of October. Fabio and his men had more to think of, at that moment, than Camilo. Before news of the detected letters reached them at the end of August, they had embarked on a new series of offensives. The

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guerrillas’ tactic of rapid surprise attack and withdrawal, repeated over and over again against army detachments in different parts of the occupied zone, was designed to exasperate military patrols and keep them in constant fear of their invisible enemy. It was the “war of the flea.” On August 15 a guerrilla column under the command of Victor Medina led an army jeep into an ambush at Cruz de Mayo, a lonely spot near San Vicente. Victor’s idea was to capture arms and am¬ munition, but he and his men were routed and forced to flee with one guerrilla dead and another badly wounded. Nevertheless' their spirits remained high; they could account for four soldiers killed in the am¬ bush and three others wounded. The combat had been far from a failure. As a result of it the Army feared the guerrillas more than before, and the peasants felt growing confidence in them. Two days later, near Bucaramanga, they blew up two giant pipe lines of crude oil that belonged to the Texas Petroleum and Cities Service com¬ panies. The dynamiting caused the companies serious damage, and gave the exploited petrol workers a new hope of vindication against their Yankee bosses. In those days the guerrilla fighters of the ELN felt more than usually optimistic. Colombia’s economy was going from bad to worse, more and more workers were out on strike, President Valencia was asking Parliament for “special powers” so as not to lose complete control of the country and Camilo’s meetings continued to weaken the government’s moral authority by making nonsense of the martial law and mobilizing the masses. The enormous prestige Camilo was gain¬ ing would soon redound, the guerrillas knew, to the ELN’s advantage. On the international scene, too, the tide seemed to be turning, in mid-1965, in favour of guerrilla warfare. The landing of the U. S. Marines at Santo Domingo had earned increasing unpopularity for the Americans in all the Latin countries. Fidel Castro, in his July 26 dis¬ course, had enunciated Cuba’s frank policy of support for all libera¬ tion movements; in Venezuela the guerrilla forces were consolidating after some near-fatal defeats; chain guerrilla actions broke out across the Andes of Peru and harassed the demagogic government of Belaunde; and in secret revolutionary circles it was already known that Che Guevara had left Cuba to organize an international army of

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freedom fighters somewhere in the centre of the Latin American continent. Fabio’s calculations were not based, therefore, on some vague dream of future victory, but on a very real strategy in which Colombia’s ELN was an integrating factor in a continental plan of insurgence. He knew very well that the chances of success could be thwarted by the least slip-up in security, and was furious when he learned, in the last week of August, that Military Intelligence had captured Martinez and the letters to and from Camilo. This meant an immediate change of tactics. The guerrillas shifted camp and took special precautions to cover their tracks. They would have to reconstruct their channels of supply and logistics, both amongst the peasants and in the city, and by means of ruses and de¬ coys do their best to throw the enemy off the scent. Meantime they would diminish their offensives; it was too soon to cope with the on¬ slaught of a total anti-guerrilla war such as the American military mission was apt to unleash against them. For the moment, from Sep¬ tember onwards, they bore the brunt of intensified patrolling and in¬ vestigation which the soldiers quartered in Bucaramanga carried out under orders from their newly appointed chief. The chief was Colonel Alvaro Valencia Tovar, whose officers had, until recently, been get¬ ting Civic Action courses from Camilo at the ESAP. Valencia Tovar had been sent to deal with the “serious disorders” in Santander, and on September 1, with special instructions from the War Ministry, he took charge of the Fifth Brigade. The colonel’s special instructions were clear enough. His mission was to wipe out the Army of National Liberation. He could use what¬ ever methods he chose. Maybe he could quell the rebels with Civic Action, as he had done with Tulio Bayer in Los Llanos. But the min¬ ister doubted it. Fabio Vasquez, in his opinion, was a much tougher proposition than Dr. Bayer. And if Camilo Torres joined the ELN, as he evidently proposed to do, the spark lighted in Santander might turn into a national conflagration. In any case the matter was in the hands of an expert; Colonel Valencia Tovar was known to be the coolest head in the Army when it came to dealing with revolutionary insurgents. Fabio knew this. Consequently he and his general staff made plans

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to step up the political indoctrination of the peasants in order to off¬ set the mixture of Civic Action propaganda and terrorist tactics initiated by Valencia Tovar. At general staff meetings the subject of Camilo also came up for discussion. Some were for instructing him to join the guerrillas im¬ mediately. Others preferred to take a risk and let him continue his political campaigns; the more impact he made now, they argued, the more the ELN would benefit in the long run. Fabio was undecided; and during the month of September, Camilo received no orders. He re¬ mained in suspense. Fortunately the increasing tempo left him and Guitemie no time to get jittery. Public demonstrations in Villavicencio and other towns around Los Llanos, plus a series of semi-secret meetings in the bar¬ rios of Bogota, gave them no let-up. And on August 26, as planned, they published the first issue of the newspaper. Thirty thousand copies sold in the first couple of hours, and the printer rushed another fifteen thousand off the presses. He would have printed more, but he ran out of paper, as no one had anticipated that, before evening, there would not be a single copy available in Bogota and only a few left for sale in the provinces. Camilo’s brigades of volunteer street vendors were exultant with success, amongst them his mother, Isabel, who had rallied to the launching of her son’s revo¬ lutionary paper. A few months earlier she had been impatient with Camilo for his reluctance to break with the Church. “If you were not so obsessed with all this nonsense of being a priest,” she had expostulated, “you could become a bigger figure than Gaitan!” Now that he had risen to fame, some of his limelight reflected on her; and she basked in it. Al¬ most seventy and dressed in elegant black, with her white permanent wave dyed the faintest blue, she cut an incongruous figure selling papers on a street comer. People stopped to look and laugh and finished up obliged by her to buy a copy; and press photographers came down to take her picture. She felt she was back in her heyday when she had led protest marches against the Rojas regime. Frente Unido’s wholesale reception was due to Camilo’s charismatic image, not to its own intrinsic merit. For despite Israel Arjona’s best

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intentions, the paper was a hotchpotch. It was laid out like some sort of erratic crossword puzzle, and only the most persevering reader could follow its articles as they jumped from one column to another and from one page to the next. Most of the writing was difficult enough to understand in any case. Apart from Camilo’s “Why I Am Not Participating in the Elections” (which began on the front page and finished on the back) and his “Message to Christians” on page three, the rest was couched in unwieldy and abstract prose. For example: “Violence,” one paragraph read, “has been institutionalized with the institutionalization or legalization of the economic injustice and the aberrant social inequality.” The reader's confusion was further increased by a large advertise¬ ment for a beauty salon which was printed directly underneath Camilo’s “Message to Christians” with the title “Message to Parents” and no indication that it was paid publicity. It urged mothers and fathers, apparently in the name of the revolution, to send their teen¬ age daughters to learn make-up at “the National School of Beauty affiliated to the Colombian Hairdressers’ Association.” Obviously running short of material, Arjona padded with a reprint of Camilo’s platform and part of one of his old lectures on the vicious circles, which might have been digestible in a sociological review, but was completely out of place in what pretended to be a popular political newspaper. Another space-filler of Arjona’s was an extract from one of his own articles, culled from a Marxist review, and a highly misleading piece written by the national secretary of the Christian Democrat Party which depicted Camilo as an avowed anti¬ communist and stated that “Father Torres is not, nor ever has been, a rebel. And if he is a revolutionary, then the Church is revolutionary too, and so is the Vatican Council. Revolution,” the Christian Demo¬ crat insisted, “is not synonymous with violence, and Father Camilo Torres has never preached a violent revolution, nor does he propose to do so.” This in Camilo’s own official organ! No wonder Frente Unido was not destined for a very long life. With its publication the political divergences amongst Camilo’s followers emerged in a clearer light. Indeed, once they appeared in print, they were seen to be incompati¬ ble; and the editing of a paper, so far from welding the United Front

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together, proved to be the swiftest and surest way of bringing it to an end. “Camilo, it’s time we had a serious talk about the paper.” It was Jaime. He had come in, frowning, on a September after¬ noon, just as Camilo and Guitemie were sitting down to lunch. Camilo told him to pull up a chair and join them, and said: “What’s the matter, Jaime? The paper’s doing all right. This week’s is number three and we’re still selling fifty thousand.”

,

“Yes,” said Jaime, “but did you read it?” “Well. . . er . . . no,” Camilo admitted, “not all of it.” “Just take a look at this, then.” And Jaime opened it up on the table at the centre-page spread. Camilo took in the headline—“Alliance AGAINST Progress: a Plan to Perpetuate Underdevelopment”—and began to read the article that followed. When he got to the end of the first column he looked up at Jaime and said: “What’s wrong with this? It’s an attack on Kennedy and Johnson and Alberto Lleras . . . !” “But just wait a minute. You haven’t finished yet. You didn’t read what the writer suggests as an alternative.” Jaime put his finger impatiently on a paragraph he had underlined in red pencil. “The choice is no longer between Fidel Castro and the Alliance for Progress,” Camilo read. “Between progress and the firing squad. Other alternatives have arisen.” “What’s this article getting at?” “It’s a plug for Frei and the Christian Democrats.” Camilo’s eye picked out a phrase: “Eduardo Frei . . . who has recently become president of Chile by means of an electoral victory which is beyond all criticism.” “Do you get it now, Camilo? This is both anti-‘comm’ and proelectoral. Not exactly your line!” “Who wrote it?” Camilo wanted to know. “Pedro Acosta,” said Jaime. “Look. He even signed it.” Camilo had not wanted Pedro Acosta on the paper in the first place. He was Israel Arjona’s bright idea. Arjona said he was a slick writer. But Camilo had known all along that Acosta was a militant anti-

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Marxist and would use Frente Unido to make propaganda for the Christian Democrats. “I’ll have a word with Arjona,” Camilo promised Jaime, “and make sure he doesn’t let any more of this sort of stuff through.” “But it’s not just this one article,” Jaime argued. “The paper needs to be gone over from top to bottom.” To make his meaning clear, Jaime took Camilo through the pages of Frente Unido's first three issues and showed him how confusing they were. “The paper ought to trace out one consistent line. You know what I mean, Camilo: our line. We’ve got to break once and for all with the vote-mongers. The United Front is for the nonaligned, remember. How about writing one of your messages for them?” Jaime’s idea, in fact, was to devote a whole special number to the nonaligned. He already had in hand an article prophesying that the nonaligned would be the only people left in the United Front once election time came round and “scattered to the four winds all groups that look for seats in Parliament”; and Julio Cortes had written a piece which invited the Communists to leave the United Front if they dared, but declared them incapable of disbanding it. All Jaime needed, to set the general tone of the next issue, was a “message” from Camilo. Camilo had no trouble writing it. As far as he was concerned, the nonaligned were the only ones who mattered—ex-members of the Communist Party, for example, or people who had never at any time joined any party at all. The rest were shilly-shalliers. Anyone who participated in an election campaign was compromising with the status quo; and the 70 per cent of potential voters who had stayed away from the ballot boxes in 1964 were a great human reservoir waiting to be tapped by the revolution. “The abstentionists,” he dictated optimistically, “are those revolu¬ tionaries who are not organized in political groups. . . . The majority of Colombians have joined the United Front without becom¬ ing members of political groups already in existence. Those groups will have to understand that the principal activity of the United Front ought to be the organization of the nonaligned.”

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Guitemie jotted this down and smiled to think of how it would offend a few sacred cows in the Communist Party. And she was not the only one to enjoy the prospect. The paper’s manager, Israel Arjona, was another. He was a veteran opponent of the Communist Party line. Modelling himself on Trotsky, he had fought a losing battle against the party for close on thirty years. So when Jaime walked into the office and showed him the material for issue number four, Arjona glanced through it and said it was just what the paper wanted. He especially liked Julio’s hard-hitting article and decided to feature it with a banner headline on the back page. The paper came off the presses, as usual, on a Wednesday after¬ noon, but Camilo was in the provinces and did not see it until Thurs¬ day, September 16. He was in Tolima and flipped through its pages on his way to the Plaza of El Libano, where he was to address a meet¬ ing. He liked the look of the current issue; it was better laid out than previous ones and its three articles on the nonaligned were printed prominently and gave the paper an over-all leitmotif which it had lacked before. It was on sale in the town of El Libano and many of his spectators were reading it in the plaza as they waited for him to appear. When he did, they waved it above their heads and shouted: “Viva el Padre Camilo! Viva el Frente Unido!” Backstage, however, the paper was not so well received. Marroco, the Communist Party’s man, was turning shades of mauve deepening into scarlet as he read the conspicuous article on the last page entitled “The United Front Is Neither Communist Nor Christian Democrat.” Paying no attention to the background noise of Camilo’s voice coming indistinctly over the loudspeakers, Marroco went in search of the article’s author, Julio Cortes. He found Julio listening to Camilo from a comer of the plaza and dramatically held the paper up under his nose with the back page plainly visible. Then, without a word, he tore the page right down the centre, joined the pieces together again with the tips of his fingers and tore it across, and most deliberately, in Julio’s presence, proceeded to tear up the whole Frente Unido and scatter the shreds of it around him. “That,” he was saying in effect, “is what the Communist Party thinks of your fancy United Front for the nonaligned!”

THE

UNITED FRONT

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Next it was the Christian Democrats’ turn to take umbrage. But not so much for what Camilo had printed in the paper as for the way he behaved at a three-day gathering they convened in Medellin. This event had been conceived originally by the student federation, but the Latin American Confederation of Christian Unions (the CLASC), which enjoyed financial backing from European Christian Democrats and was hence a much stronger outfit than the student federation, took control of organizing the First National WorkerStudent-Peasant Meeting, as it was called, which was due to begin on Friday evening, September 17, the day after Camilo’s appearance at El Libano. The organizers had billed Camilo as the main attraction and went so far as to charter a small plane to fly him from El Libano to Medel¬ lin. They were rather taken aback, however, when he arrived escorted by what they considered to be a pair of dangerous extremists, Jaime Arenas and Julio Cortes. These two student leaders had not been in¬ vited and the CLASC officials refused to let them in, to which Camilo replied, very calmly, that Julio and Jaime were accompanying him as members of the editorial staff of Frente Unido, and that if they were not accredited to attend the meeting, then he would not be participat¬ ing either. Much against their will the CLASC people were obliged to issue the two men with entree cards so that the opening session could begin, which it did as scheduled on the Friday night, with Camilo presiding but with a bad taste in everybody’s mouth. The spokesman of the CLASC, Heliodoro Agudelo, according to himself its only official spokesman, announced at the first meeting that, of the Christian Democrats present, he alone was authorized to vote on any motion which might come up and would do so on behalf of all his co-religionists. Agudelo was an officious little bureaucrat and his ruling antagonized everyone, above all the Christian student delegate who was closer to Camilo than most other Christian Demo¬ crats. Agudelo, however, did not let him say a word; the student sat on the sidelines all weekend and watched the debate which ensued between Camilo and the CLASC. It took the following form: to begin, the seven hundred or so participants were broken down into four more manageably sized groups. Each group was assigned a topic for discussion and asked to

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submit its conclusions to a general assembly which would terminate the meeting on the night of Sunday, September 19. The Saturday went by in relative calm, apart from a few raised voices and occasional flashes of passion from the debaters, and the general assembly be¬ gan without incident on the Sunday afternoon. The first two groups presented their findings on matters concerned with workers and peas¬ ants, and everyone automatically approved them. Then came the students’ expose, which proposed, amongst other items, a condemna¬ tion of American imperialism. At this the CLASC man, Agudelo, jumped up and said that the Christian Democrats would not accept this unless the document were broadened to include condemnations of what he termed “the Soviet and Chinese imperialisms” as well. The majority scornfully overruled Agudelo’s anti-Communist sugges¬ tion, however, and left the document unaltered. They moved on to the propositions about “Political Problems in General,” which were to be presented, on behalf of the fourth discussion group, by Julio Cortes. Agudelo was immediately on the qui vive. He was still annoyed that a Catholic priest, of all people, should have introduced this Marxist element into his meeting; and, as he had expected, every point in Julio’s speech ran counter to Christian Democrat policy; his unqualified praise of Cuba, for example, and his unambiguous de¬ nunciation of the United States. The Christian Democrats did not object to support for Cuba (as long as it was duly qualified) or to air¬ ing the facts on United States intervention (as long as they were well watered down). But the frank way Julio stated things was altogether unacceptable. And what made Agudelo even angrier was Julio’s abstentionism and his extolling of armed insurgence as the road to revolution. As soon as he had finished speaking, the CLASC man sprang to the defence of “the Christian values,” by which he meant the maintaining, at all costs, of the established order. He did so in the name of “the peaceful Christian revolution” as opposed to the violent Marxist one, and warned his listeners against the terrible menace of communism. This speech sparked off a chaotic bout of bellowing, with every¬ one trying to have his say at once. Camilo restored momentary order, but when he began to speak in favour of Julio’s viewpoint, Agudelo

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leapt across, wrenched the microphone out of his hand and began a new diatribe, this time against “people deliberately trying to sabotage our meeting.” “They’re trying to get us mixed up in politics!” he yelled against the yelling. “This was never meant to be a political meeting! It was meant to be a purely unionists’ meeting!” “Then why did you put politics on the program?” Jaime or Julio or someone shouted mockingly back. It wasn’t long before insults were ping-ponging to and fro across the floor; and Camilo’s supporters, the more numerous and the louder shouters, carried the day against Agudelo and the CLASC. Indeed by midnight the CLASC men were wilting under the attack and, at a sign from Agudelo, began to withdraw. They were followed by the Communist Party cadres, who were not prepared to vote for an abstentionist clause in Julio’s motion. By an early hour on Mon¬ day morning, therefore, the only ones left in the hall were ELNers and ELN sympathizers, like the pro-Chinese Communists, who passed the motion unanimously and, before going home, listened sleepily to a little speech by Camilo in which he declared the First National Worker-Student-Peasant Meeting officially closed. Next day he rang Arjona at the Frente Unido office in Bogota and said would he please wire him some money. The CLASC had financed a special flight to get him to Medellin, but hadn’t given him the price of his fare home. Israel Arjona thought Camilo had made a mistake in breaking with the Christian Democrats. Not that the Christian Democrat Party represented a great number of people—it was, in fact, very much a minority group—but Camilo’s connections with it, Arjona thought, were good for his public image. He had criticized Camilo on an earlier occasion for accepting an invitation to speak at the Communist Party headquarters on the grounds that the undue publicity given the event, by both the party and the press, equated Camilo with the Commu¬ nists, and that, said Arjona, in a Catholic country like Colombia, was simply not politic. Now this public rupture with the Christian Demo¬ crats, in Arjona’s opinion, only made things worse. But he accepted it as a fait accompli and begged Camilo to take an evening off to meet

296

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with the editorial staff and make the necessary adjustments to the paper’s future policy. One night towards the end of September they gathered around a conference table in Frente Unido’s little downtown office. There were three groups present. Camilo, at the head of the table, flanked by Jaime and Julio Cortes, represented the ELN. On his right sat Arjona with his friend Pedro Acosta; they stood for a vague thesis which included the expulsion of the Communist Party and the organkation of the nonaligned. The third group, which, consisted of Marroco and another member of the Communist Party, still hoping to use the United Front movement to their advantage, was placed, by a droll minor accident of history, to the left of Camilo. Arjona took the floor. In the subdued and measured tones of an old campaigner he examined the United Front phenomenon and Camilo’s rise to prominence. Camilo, he maintained, was a perfect model of the nonaligned man: a citizen devoid of any previous politi¬ cal history. Yet, paradoxically, to form his United Front he had aligned himself with two diametrically opposed parties: with the Christian Democrats and with the Communists. The first of these alignments had been undone irreparably in Medellin. That being so, Arjona was for undoing the second. The masses, he reckoned, were still ready to follow Camilo, but only on the condition that he make a clean break with the Communist Party and dedicate his energies, as he had promised, to the organization of the nonaligned. That break, he concluded, had virtually been made already; he called upon Camilo to ratify it. Arjona’s plea was eloquent, and he gloated inwardly at the visible discomfort of the two party members opposite him. He sat down, self-assured, and waited for Camilo to say a few words and clinch the matter. However, to his utter astonishment, Camilo flatly contradicted him; he knew he needed the Communists and therefore endorsed his alliance with them. At which Marroco and his companion heaved a joint sigh of relief and grinned across the table at Arjona. The latter got slowly to his feet again and began a short, sad speech of farewell. “Camilo, I respect your decision, but I confess that I don’t under¬ stand what’s come over you. You preach the organization of the nonaligned, yet you rule out all possibility of ever achieving it by giv-

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ing your support to the Communist Party. I just don’t understand you!” The man was evidently overwrought. “Frente Unido has no further use for me, Camilo. As from this moment I resign from the management of the paper and hand it back to you. You can organize it as you think fit. I have nothing more to say!” He pushed back his chair and walked, dejected but resolute, to the door, and his colleague, Acosta, got up and trotted out after him like a squatter’s dog. Camilo motioned to Jaime to follow them, and every¬ one sat silently in the awkward vacuum left by the sudden exit of the two staff members. A few minutes passed before Jaime reappeared and said: “I tried to talk sense to Arjona, but he wouldn’t listen. He’s obviously through with Frente Unido. He just kept repeating ‘I’ve nothing more to say!’ ” Camilo seemed unconcerned about the crises within his increas¬ ingly disunited front. It was enough that hundreds and thousands of “nonaligned” still listened to him. Despite his limitations as a public speaker—after all, he was more a university lecturer than a mob orator—he held the people’s attention, nevertheless, with the sheer simple truth of what he was saying, and his discourses reached the widest possible gamut of the country’s labour force, from the hard¬ bitten cow-hands of Los Llanos to the United Fruit Company’s banana-pickers in the Magdalena delta and the Negro rice-growers of the Sinu. Everywhere he went he found himself amongst old friends: people he had come in contact with in a land reform survey, for ex¬ ample, or who had taken part in his ESAP courses or been his pupils in the UARY at Yopal. He was no stranger. Crowds of eager disciples crammed into every village square to hear him. He announced a “great convention” in December, and invited to it “not the powerful, nor the rich, nor the learned . . . but the weak, the ignorant and the unwise—unwise, at least, in the eyes of the oligarchy.” His words had a biblical, almost Messianic ring. “We don’t want the well-born or the wealthy,” he said, “we want the hungry and the poorly clothed, those who possess nothing more than a revolu-

298

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tionary ideal in their consciences and the struggle for our brothers in their hearts.” From byways and hedges the lame, the halt and the blind felt themselves called by Camilo into the Kingdom of God. At first he spoke as if that kingdom were close at hand; in August, for example, he had talked of the national committee, which was to be elected at the convention, as “deciding on the tactics to be em¬ ployed for the final seizure of power.” But as the weeks went by, the United Front’s diminishing strength caused him to be more circum¬ spect, and he began to refer to the revolutionary struggle in Fabio’s phrase as “a long drawn-out affair.” For, once the agitational phase was over—that is, after he had spoken in almost every decent-sized town in Colombia, as well as in a considerable number of villages—and the time came to organize, he was aware of just how “rudimentary,” as he said, the United Front’s political machinery was. Dozens of the local committees created in his wake had met no more than once or twice, and many of their mem¬ bers were thrown into confusion and doubt as news filtered down to them of Camilo’s break with the Christian Democrats and his strained relations with the Communists. He lacked well-trained revolutionary agents to revisit the local groups and encourage them to carry on. He also needed propaganda squads; for despite the paper’s now con¬ sistent policy (or maybe because of it) sales had dropped to half. Communist Party people, usually good distributors, often refused to handle it. The situation called for a new promotion campaign. Yet to meet all these demands, the United Front could count on only four full-time workers—Camilo himself, Jaime, Julio and Guitemie—and of these, two would not be engaged for much longer in open activities; Camilo was awaiting orders to leave for the guerrilla army, and Guitemie was hoping to get orders to go with him. They were both a bit on edge. Guitemie because she did not know whether or not Fabio Vasquez would accept the request Camilo had made that she join the guerrilla band; and Camilo, because every time he got up to speak before a general audience, he half-expected some hidden hired gunman to take a shot at him. “It’s quite possible,” he repeated dramatically more than once in public, “it’s more than possible that, before I have had time to get the

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nonaligned properly organized, the oligarchs will have killed me. They wouldn’t be so stupid as to lock me up or submit me to an open trial. I think it much more likely that they have me murdered.” Fabio Vasquez made up his mind about Camilo in the first week of October. Reports from Jaime and others had made him more and more doubtful that his organization could answer for Camilo’s personal safety. Measures were being taken of course. Wherever Camilo went a tall, beaky young man, a member of the ELN, followed close be¬ hind him with a pistol in his pocket; and throughout several of his tours a bruiser from the Communist Party, likewise armed, also formed part of his escort. But these bodyguards were inexperienced and, in any case, inadequate to put down any really well-planned plot on Camilo’s life. In two street skirmishes they had been forced to stand by helpless while Camilo received a bashing from the police, first in August, in the town of Girardot, and then in Bogota on Friday, October 1. This last—the October 1 incident—was what finally decided Fabio. Though conceived as a multitudinous demonstration in the Plaza de Bolivar, it had been suppressed in half an hour by military police. Three or four men in uniform had fallen on Camilo, thrown him to the ground and flayed him with their batons. One baton broke across the broad of his back, at which Camilo struggled up off the pavement, tore another baton from the hands of one of the policemen and struck out blindly, fiercely, at his aggressors. As they fell back he broke free and ran up Jimenez Avenue laughing and brandishing his trophy. He took refuge finally behind the steel doors of an old stone office build¬ ing. Thus the afternoon’s spectacle, which began in near tragedy, finished as a farce. Nothing about it appealed to Fabio; and what he liked least was Camilo’s obvious lack of support in the capital city. Nowhere else had the authorities been able to break up a meeting, except in Girardot, and then against tremendous odds. But in Bogota they had done so with no trouble at all. Camilo had been accompanied by only a few dozen students. The working masses of the city were not be-

300

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hind him; which confirmed Fabio’s thesis that the battle was to be waged first in the rural areas. The cities would be left to last. So, in the fight of all this, he called Camilo in. His instructions were communicated to Camilo orally a few days after the Friday afternoon fiasco. The departure date was set for Mon¬ day, October 18. A car would be sent from Santander to transport him, by night, to the guerrilla area. He would meet the car at a spot yet to be determined, presumably in one of the city’s Streets. And he would travel alone. Guitemie was not to accompany him. Only one female guerrilla fighter had joined them before—Mona Mariela—and she had been a hindrance and no longer belonged to the organization. Fabio said he was sorry, but he preferred not to assume the responsi¬ bility of another woman in the guerrilla army. One last detail: no one, absolutely no one, was to be told of the decision, and right up to the last minute Camilo would carry on his normal activities exactly as if nothing had changed. Camilo sat with Guitemie and listened to these orders without either of them making a comment. It was not what they had hoped for. They thought he would leave only after the convention at the end of the year, and had imagined his entry into armed combat as a widely publicized event fit to shake the conscience of the nation. This fur¬ tive disappearance seemed almost meaningless. But if that was the way Fabio wanted it. . . At once Guitemie changed the subject. Neither she nor Camilo wanted to discuss the separation. It was there already, only two weeks away, waiting in the shadows of a street comer; but they made a kind of unspoken agreement not to mention it. They talked about the next Thursday’s edition of the paper and the “message” Camilo planned to write for it. He had made a few notes beforehand and suggested Guitemie take down his final version and type it up for the printer. Since it was to be one of his last mes¬ sages he decided to make it blindingly clear. If he could have had his way he would have shouted “guerrilla war!” from the rooftops, though he knew that would be madness. Yet it seemed no less absurd that Military Intelligence should be better informed about his next move than the hundreds and thousands of simple people who pinned

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their hopes on him. Well, if he could not refer to his leaving for the front line in so many words, he would leave the announcement very lightly veiled in this “Message to the Peasants.” He began with a de¬ scription of the Violence in the forties, and ended calling the peasants to war. The Violence took place principally amongst the peasants. Liberal Party oligarchs paid Liberal peasants to kill Conservative ones, and Conservative Party oligarchs paid Conservative peasants to kill Lib¬ eral ones. The oligarchs, of course, were left unscathed. Then, when they had no further need of the peasants, they declared them “ban¬ dits” and hunted them like wild animals and published photos of their corpses on the front pages of the newspapers and patted them¬ selves on the back for having killed them in the name of peace and justice and legality. The government’s violence, financed by the oligarchs, taught the peasants many lessons. It taught them that their real enemy is the oligarchy. It also taught them to flee; then to defend themselves; and finally to take the offensive in order to get what the oligarchy had got by means of violence: namely, farms, harvests, cattle . . . and power! The system doesn’t give the peasants these things. It gives them the very opposite: low wages, few schools, the worst possible housing and no hope of progress. Yet, even after the oligarchs had killed off the best-known rural leaders, there still remained peasant zones controlled by the farmers. Naturally enough the policy of repression which the United States imposes on the Colombian ruling classes could never allow these “suspect” zones to exist. The government says that the peasants began the Violence. The peasants say the government started it. From France a group of intellectuals of all possible political colours came and investigated the matter. They say that what the peasants say is right. I challenge the government to let the United Nations send an investigation commission with members chosen from amongst neutral countries like Egypt, for example, and India and Chile, to pass verdict on the cases of Marquetalia and El Pato. But I doubt if the government will dare to take me up on it. Just as the U. S. Marines disembarked on the shores of Santo Domingo, so too the Colombian Army, under instructions from the American military mission, disembarks in the Independent Republics. The Army begins with its so-called Civic Action programs, and

302

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ends up machine-gunning; the soldiers begin by pulling the people s teeth, and later fill them (the peasants, not their dental cavities) with lead. The peasants know very well that the army men have two hands. With one they hold out a piece of bread; but the other is hid¬ den behind their backs and holds a dagger. The Dependent Republic of Colombia continues to obey the Americans’ orders to destroy the other republics of independent Colombians. For so the U. S. Senate has decreed. Our peasants know what is in store for them. They know what they have to get ready for. They are not the ones to tush into any adventurous escapade; but they don’t run away either. The oligarchy, with its martial law, has driven the people from the public square. The government has hunted the people down in the narrow streets with machine-guns. . . . Well, when they make it impossible for us to live in the cities, we have to take to the country. But from there we will not let ourselves be pushed into the sea. We will fight back. That is what the peasants should be getting ready for: organizing United Front commands in groups of five or ten; purging every area of traitors to the people’s cause; storing up food and clothing; pre¬ paring for the prolonged war. They must not let themselves be led into a trap, nor fight when the enemy has the advantage. The oligarchy is sure to keep on confirming what the peasants al¬ ready know: that their only hope lies in supporting the revolutionary forces. The Simacota guerrillas, for example, have not been de¬ feated. And why? Simply because they have the support of the peasants. When the oligarchy leaves the revolutionaries no other road open, the peasants are called upon to give us shelter in the countryside, to protect the workers and the students. For the moment, then, the peasants must unite and organize and be ready to receive us, and with us to begin this war’s long final haul. This message was published in Frente Unido on Thursday, October 7, and Camilo began his final campaign tour, as prearranged, on Saturday, October 9. He spoke in several towns along the Magdalena River, first in Honda, then in La Dorada and, on Sunday, in Puerto Boyaca. The crowds were as numerous and as excited as ever, and after the Puerto Boyaca meeting someone proposed they go in proces¬ sion to the graveside of a guerrilla fighter who had been shot and

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buried nearby. It was the grave of Federico Arango, Maria’s brother, executed by the police in 1963. In the cemetery there were speeches, and then a long minute of silence during which Camilo stood with bowed head before Federico’s headstone remembering the young engineer and his rash guerrilla adventure and wondering, perhaps, what his own fate was to be. . . . On October 14 he' travelled south to Popayan, capital of the province of Cauca, for an address to the students at Cauca University. He spent three days in the area; and one night in the countryside the jeep he was in broke down and left him stranded in rainy weather ten miles from the nearest village, where he knew a plaza full of people was waiting to hear him. Camilo immediately made up his mind to walk there, despite the protests of Marroco and the rest of the com¬ pany. As they trudged along with him through the mud, he laughed at their reluctance. “I put it to you,” he said. “What kind of a revolutionary would a man make who could be stopped by a few drops of water?” His joke had

a sting.

Camilo had seen plenty of pseudo¬

revolutionaries disheartened by what amounted to little more than a shower of rain. Many of his followers had already taken fright at the animosity of the military police; yet that was nothing compared with the repression which would follow once he was in the guerrilla army. And Camilo knew it. By this time he no longer put false hopes in the enthusiasm of the crowds. He knew that when it became known that he had joined the ELN, the United Front would begin to disintegrate. Even amongst his active associates there were not many likely to re¬ main loyal. “Even should I have none left with me but a handful of determined men, in the company of those men I will keep fighting. For this war may well prove to be a very long one, and every man who makes up his mind to fight in it should be prepared to carry on to the very end.” With these sober words he began a peroration to the National Stu¬ dent Council in Bogota on Sunday night, October 17. From Popayan he had flown back to the capital in time to attend the closing session of the students’ meeting, and drove straight from the airport to the National University. The students were assembled in their conference

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hall, the place where, three years before, they had proclaimed him as their rector. Tonight they were ready to name him commander-in¬ chief of the revolution. Each short, challenging sentence he spoke was followed by a deafening acclamation. “This moment is a turning point in history. ... In Colombia to¬ day we can no longer use those few methods of protest and combat which are normally permitted by law. The oligarchy is preparing to wage a war to the death against our people. But we will not give up the fight. We will organize a relentless battle against our enemy. Against the present system we will have recourse to the highest forms of revolutionary warfare.” The youngsters relished this open reference to the guerrillas and redoubled their applause. None of them, of course, imagined that Camilo was really serious. They were accustomed to these rhetorical phrases on the lips of student orators. They did not know that the man who was speaking would leave for the guerrillas on the following afternoon. “We must totally commit ourselves—our lives, our blood, our sacrifice—in this long, hard fight for the country’s final freedom. Any¬ thing which constitutes an obstacle—our studies, our safety, our well¬ being, even our families—must be left aside in order to give ourselves fully to the struggle for the seizure of power. If need be, we will be ready to face death.” So Camilo concluded his last public speech. It was late when he got home that Sunday night. Guitemie was waiting up for him and they began to make final preparations for his departure. Everything had to be ready for the next afternoon. But really everything was next to nothing. He was taking only his pipe with him, and his little pocket-edition of the Bible. As for clothing, one of the ELN boys would have that ready to hand him in a bag at the moment he was leaving. So all he packed was an old black pull¬ over, not because he would really need it, but because he took it with him always, everywhere. That was all. And a scout knife-curacan opener Guitemie gave him as a going-away gift. They gathered together these few odds and ends and put them to

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one side as silently as possible so as not to awaken Isabel. By a stroke of good fortune she had retired early that night, which left Guitemie and Carnilo free to talk about her. It was not hard for them to predict how hysterical she would get as soon as she knew he was gone. Hysterical, and terrified of reprisals. Months before Camilo had dis¬ cussed the problem of Isabel with his brother Fernando, who was still teaching medicine in Minneapolis. Fernando had agreed to take care of their mother in case anything happened to Camilo. Well, tomorrow that something would happen; he was about to disappear. Guitemie accepted the invidious task of getting Isabel on board a plane and out of the country. Camilo had arranged for her to stay in Paris. It remained only for him to write her a note which Guitemie would give her as soon as he was safely in the guerrilla camp. As he began to write he couldn’t help thinking of another night, almost twenty years earlier, when he had left Isabel a note and stolen away from the house without saying good-bye. Poor Isabel! If she hadn’t been always so possessive he would not have had to act behind her back. But it was the only way. First he wrote down an English pet name—“Darling”—he liked to call her by; it dated from their first trip together to New York. He sat looking at that one word, “Darling,” on the empty sheet of paper. What more could he write? What could he tell her? He was about to leave her for who knew how many years, maybe forever; but he could not trust her to keep his secret. There was really very little he could say. After a moment’s hesitation he wrote the following lines: because of certain information just come to hand I’ve decided to go into hiding for a while until the situation becomes clearer. We once agreed that this would be the best thing to do. It will mean less worry for both of us. Your economic situation has been taken care of, both for the time being and in the event of any unforeseen occur¬ rence. I’m in a safe place and with trusted friends. I’ll write as soon as I can. Look after yourself. Remember that your courage has al¬ ways been an inspiration to me and that if I’m doing anything for Colombia it is in great measure because of you. I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion. I leave you my blessing; please send me yours. your adoring Camilo

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The next day, Monday, at dusk, a drizzling rain was falling as Camilo and Guitemie slipped away from a crowd of people in the Frente Unido office and walked out onto the darkening street. Within forty-five minutes a car would be waiting for Camilo at a certain spot on Eighty-second Street. Jaime joined them on the sidewalk and the three of them took a taxi and drove north. They had deliberately left themselves time to spare, so as to shake off any security agents who might be trailing them before keeping that date on Eighty-second Street. Their first dodge was to drop Camilo off at a hospital, as if he were visiting some patient. When he came out a few minutes later, he took another cab and picked up Guitemie and Jaime around the comer. Ten blocks farther uptown they changed cabs again and Jaime told the driver to take them to Eightieth Street. It was close on seven o’clock when they got out and the cab drove away. The tree-lined suburban avenue was deserted except for one or two pedestrians, with umbrellas up, hurrying home out of the rain. No one noticed the two tall men and the small woman who walked two blocks along the avenue until they were a stone’s throw away from a car parked near the comer. “That’s the one,” said Jaime. “Santander number plates.” “Well, this is it.” Camilo turned to Guitemie. “Not yet, Camilo. The man hasn’t arrived with your things.” Camilo had forgotten. He had instructions not to leave until some¬ one from the ELN had passed him a small leather suitcase. Whoever it was, he was late. They sheltered under a tree opposite the parked car and waited. The minutes dragged by, Camilo making small talk to keep Jaime and Guitemie calm. “Well, this is good-bye Bogota. It’s kind of funny to think I won’t be seeing these streets any more—not for a few years at any rate.” Jaime was nervous. “What the hell has happened to that man with the bag?” Camilo tried to make light of it. “Don’t get mad, Jaime. He’ll turn up. As a matter of fact I’ve got a soft spot for people who are not too strong on punctuality.” At that moment they became aware of a young man walking briskly

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up the wet street. He drew alongside the car, opened a door and threw a suitcase onto the back seat. “It’s time to go, Camilo.” The man was holding the car door open. There was only a second for a quick embrace. “Look after Isabel.” “She’ll be all right.” “Good luck!” “Thanks.” And he was gone. At dawn he was picking his way slowly along a narrow track through the jungle near San Vicente. A guide went ahead of him cut¬ ting back occasional brambles with a machete. Within less than an hour, he told Camilo, they would be in Fabio’s camp. But he was wrong. An army patrol from the Fifth Brigade was com¬ ing towards them along the same track. As he rounded a bend the guide spotted the soldiers before they saw him and in one swift move¬ ment flung himself into the dense undergrowth and pulled Camilo after him. From their hiding place, peering between bamboo stalks, they watched the men in uniform go by, a foot away from their faces. They lay there motionless; Camilo almost stopped breathing. Hours went by before the guide crawled out and went to see if the coast was clear. He came back a few minutes later and broke out laughing at the sight of Camilo still lying there helpless on his stom¬ ach. Camilo also saw the funny side of the situation. “And to think I almost didn’t get to first base!” he joked, stretching his legs and pulling grass-seeds out of his hair. “Not a very promising start to my new career!”

Chapter 11

THE GUERRILLA

“You’re going to have to carry everything on your back— food, clothing, pots and pans—the lot! As well as your ammunition, and your hammock, and this sheet of rubber to keep off the rain. You’ll also need a needle and thread to keep your clothes repaired; it’ll be a long time before you get a new shirt or another pair of pants. Of course the main thing are the boots; you’ll go through hell if you haven’t got good strong boots.” These were some aspects of guerrilla life which Fabio explained to Camilo on his first night in the camp. He also issued him with a knap¬ sack, an army-style uniform, a soft green beret, a belt and a pair of boots—all homemade. The boots, he said, were the work of one of the ELN’s collaborators, a shoemaker in San Vicente. Camilo tried them for size. They were a good fit. Next Fabio handed him a revolver in a leather holster and said it was the only weapon they could give him for the moment, but in any case it would be easier for him to manage than a rifle. Neither man mentioned Camilo’s request not to have to shoot. “There’ll be target practise in the morning,” Fabio said casually. “Oh, and another thing,” he added. “We’d better change your name. ‘Alfredo’ is too well known. In future you’ll be Argemiro. Now you’d better get some sleep, Argemiro. We’ll be up at five.” Camilo did not hang up his hammock right away. First he weighed

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the revolver in his hand, turned it over several times, then holstered it, fastened it to his belt and laid it on top of his pile of clothes. For a moment he pondered weapons, combat, killing; dismissed the thought; mused instead on the strange new name Fabio had given him. Years before, when he had dreamt of being a Dominican, he had wondered what name to choose the day he took the habit. Now that he had begun a different kind of noviciate they had christened him Argemiro. He guessed he would soon get used to it. A friend of his, Hermias, a young medico from Bogota, had gone through two name changes in a matter of months; he had become Hermes first, then Hernando. Camilo unscrewed the cap from a bottle of anti-malaria pills Hernando had given him that afternoon and took one. Then, follow¬ ing an old custom, he took out his little Bible and flipped through its pages. Here and there he paused and read a few familiar lines—words of “le Maitre,” as he and Guitemie always said. After reading distractedly for a few minutes, he stood up and be¬ gan to arrange his hammock. He noticed Fabio’s tall silhouette bent over a tiny portable typewriter. Later in the night, long after he had lain down and blown out his candle, he stirred, half-woke, to the taptap of Fabio still typing. He got up at the first grey light of morning, put on his uniform and went out to join a group of some thirty men who had formed ranks in a forest clearing. He saw that only two or three wore uniforms; the others were dressed in ordinary peasant’s working clothes. With them he began to go through a series of strenuous exercises. He was awkward and heavy; his arms ached with the push-ups and he ran out of breath. But though he felt like quitting, he kept at it for the best part of an hour. Finally, at six, there was a coffee break. The men sat round an open fire and one after another found some pretext for coming up and addressing Argemiro. One man made a comment on his revolver; another wanted to look at his watch; a third asked permission to take a puff at his pipe. They were like children, diffident and wary and curious all at once. Camilo understood this. He was relaxed and made no apparent effort to make friends. He had met most of them during his visit to the guerrilla camp in

CAMILO TORRES

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July. Now he began to learn their names-their monastic names; no one ever asked a man what he had been called outside. Here they were known as Juvenal and Isidro, Plutarco and Anselmo, Humberto, Libardo and Ismael. One was a thick-set heavy-shouldered man; they called him El Toro—the Bull. A tall good-looking youth was singing a sad Mexican love song in broken phrases as he washed his face. “That’s Silverio,” said a man beside Camilo. “He’s my nephew. My name’s Delio.” And he held out his hand. * Delio was the oldest member of the ELN, a man in his forties. He told Camilo that the next thing they had to do, once they had finished their coffee, was to get out their books and study. “It’s a pure waste of time,” he grumbled. “Me and Silverio, we never learned to read or write and we’re no worse off. Silverio’s never even seen a township, except the day of his baptism, and then he only bawled his head off.” Silverio dried his face with a towel and laughed. Ramiro, a young man with a big belly and a belt full of cartridges stretched across it, looked up from under a floppy straw hat and said: “Delio’s right. Them classes is a lot of bull shit. You don’t need to read books in order to shoot straight.” Nonetheless, when the order was given, they went reluctantly to their lessons. They sat around in little groups learning history, geography and elementary notions of grammar, as well as Marxism and guerrilla warfare. Their textbooks ranged from a first-grade reader to Mao Tse-tung’s Philosophical Theses; and their teachers were Hernando, Fabio, Victor Medina and a slightly built lad who wore thick spectacles and a sparse, droopy moustache. Someone told Camilo that the man with the glasses was Joaquin and that he had been a radio announcer in Bogota. He was one of the few guerrilleros with a college education. This last detail convinced Camilo that he too might be useful as an instructor. But for the moment he just sat in on one of the classes to get the feel of things. School was out at eight-thirty and the men lined up in front of a big pot on the fire while the cook ladled a small helping of boiled commash into each man’s tin plate. During breakfast Camilo got his first good look at the entire com-

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pany. He counted close on forty men, including three boys who were no more than thirteen years old and seemed small for their age. He asked Fabio who they were. “Those two over there are Pablo and Martin. They belong to the ‘Termite’ family, so-called because there are dozens of them and they’re all that small. The other boy’s name is Camilito.” Camilito was slightly taller than the other two, but was dwarfed by the M-l rifle on his shoulder. He was just back from sentry duty. “He mightn’t look much,” commented Fabio, “but he’s one of the best fighters we’ve got. Camilito,” he called, “come over here and meet Argemiro.” The boy came up and seriously shook Camilo’s hand without say¬ ing a word. “Camilito is from Rio Fuego. That’s just over the hill from here. He’s been with us right from the start. Did a great job at Simacota. Was also in the operation at Cruz de Mayo.” During this introduction Camilo noticed the embarrassment of his thirteen-year-old namesake. For a veteran Camilito was very selfeffacing. When breakfast was over Fabio took Camilo for a walk. They strolled under the early morning sun, sheltered in the shade of giant ceiba trees and algarrobos, and sat down beside a stream to talk. Fabio gave Camilo a clear idea of the ELN’s development since their meeting in July. Their numbers were steadily increasing, he said; they had made some very good recruits. But their position was far from secure. The regular army had tightened its control; Colonel Valencia Tovar had been preparing for the trouble which he antic¬ ipated once Camilo was in the area. “Now that you’re here,” said Fabio emphatically, “your friend the colonel won’t rest until he’s put you out of the way. We’re going to have to take care of you,” he added. “And you’re going to have to take care of yourself.” Fabio said he would teach him to handle the revolver and told him not to worry about his “scruple.” Camilo made no objection. If the danger was as great as Fabio said, it was crazy to go about unarmed. Besides, the more he thought of it, the more incongruous seemed the

312

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idea of a guerrillero without a gun. He decided to follow Fabio’s ad¬ vice and let the problem resolve itself with time. They talked of guerrilla strategy. With a stick Fabio drew a map in the mud. Here, running roughly from north to south, was the Cerro de los Andes; he marked the spot where they were camped. He then traced a parallel line to represent the mountain range which faced them to the east, the Cordillera de los Cobardes. Between the two there was a strip of rugged country in which, for the moment, they could move about at will, since the inhabitants were mostly on their side. To the north lay the village of El Carmen, where the Army had established a permanent outpost; southwards the vegetation grew even thicker and opened out into unexplored jungle around the Opon River and down to the Magdalena; that would be their escape route in case of emergency. But they would do their utmost to avoid emergencies. They did not plan to draw enemy fire. Their present tactic, said Fabio, was to keep quiet and fortify; only when they were strong would they strike swift blows against enemy patrols. He reminded Camilo of the guerrillero’s maxim: don’t attack until you are sure of victory. Then he asked about the United Front; he was anxious to know in what sort of state Camilo had left it. Camilo spoke of the problems; enthusiasm had waned he admitted, and finances were low, and full¬ time workers hard to find. “Of course we’ve got some good people. Jaime, for one. He’s in charge of the paper as well as the organizational side. And Guitemie is going to co-ordinate underground activities. But the ones I’m worried about are the rank-and-file members. Especially now that I’m gone and they don’t even know where I am. What we ought to do— this is just my personal opinion, mind . . .” He looked at Fabio; there was something about the chief which made him hesitate to offer the suggestion. “Well, what I want to say is, why don’t we publish a proclamation—as we planned, remember?—to let the people know I’m here.” “Not yet, Argemiro.” Fabio seemed to be smiling at his impatience. “Not just yet. Let’s wait awhile until you get used to things here. Maybe in a couple of months . . .” To Camilo a couple of months seemed too long. He imagined the

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reaction of his United Front people faced with such a lengthy and un¬ explained silence; they would feel disconcerted, deceived even. But Fabio must have good reasons, he thought, for keeping his where¬ abouts a secret. Perhaps he preferred not to make an announcement until he was quite sure Camilo could adapt to the new life. For the next two months, then, he was on probation. A couple of months, as it turned out, was more than long enough for Camilo to prove himself. It was also longer than the United Front needed to disintegrate. By the time Camilo had served his apprentice¬ ship as a guerrillero, his political movement would be in ruins. Once he had disappeared from public life, the Communist Party immediately withdrew its support; the party leaders guessed where he was and were angry at him for having hoodwinked them. Moreover they knew they had nothing left to gain from adhesion to the United Front. They foresaw its downfall. Other United Front members who came asking after Camilo were informed by Jaime Arenas that “Camilo is where his people require him.” Some drew the obvious conclusion and went pale with fright; others felt baffled by the reply. None of them came back to enquire again. They went home and waited for further developments. Within a week, therefore, of that Monday evening when Camilo had got into the car with Santander number plates, the little office downtown was almost deserted. Only Jaime and Julio Cortes and a few staunch ELNers managed to keep it open for a few weeks and get out the Frente Unido. The paper’s circulation was greatly reduced and it was laid out in smaller pages and on cheaper newsprint to keep down costs. It strove desperately to dampen the people’s renewed enthusiasm for election¬ eering, but with no success. For in the revolutionary ebb which fol¬ lowed Camilo’s withdrawal from politics, the oligarchy’s presidential candidate, Carlos Lleras, had caught the public eye. As a publicity stunt, Lleras forfeited his nomination in order to motivate a cam¬ paign for his return. In November he was brought back to lead the Liberal Party and was assured of victory at the polls. The braying of the liberal press quite drowned out any tiny voice of opposition.

CAMILO TORRES

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Camilo’s United Front had lost its political opportunity and the pa¬ per he had founded was taken no notice of. Jaime Arenas spent the afternoon of Monday, November 8, work¬ ing on an edition of the paper. Towards evening he walked out of the office into the waiting arms of four police officers with a warrant for his arrest. He was to spend the next two years in prison. After Jaime’s capture it became virtually impossible to keep the movement afloat. Frente Unido appeared for the last time at the be¬ ginning of December. , Guitemie, in hiding, wrote to Camilo on December 4: “We have nothing but debts ... the paper’s last issue was worthless, it wasn’t even readable. The end result doesn’t warrant so much effort. We’re worried about it.” In the same letter she enumerated disappointments and betrayals, complained of lack of funds and recounted the failure of a plan to free Jaime and other ELNers from prison. She regretted not having been able to purchase the weapons and the short-wave transmitter they needed. She also reported that Isabel, “la Belle” as she called her, had grown lonely in her exile in Paris and taken off for Min¬ neapolis to stay with Fernando; this, she said, made it difficult to get letters to her. Guitemie’s list of woes followed no special sequence. She inter¬ spersed it with words of assurance—“Don’t worry about me. Le Maitre is by my side”—and domestic news items—“yesterday Doctor So-and-So spoke of your father in an address to the Colombian Society of Pediatricians.” At one point she broke into French. “Le soleil brille,” she wrote, without conviction. Then added, more convincingly: “Je te pense enormement.” Camilo was not surprised by this inventory of failures; in October he had predicted the effect his disappearance would produce. But Guitemie’s letter did not discourage him either. He was so immersed in the daily concerns of guerrilla life, and so sure of ultimate success, that momentary setbacks were almost irrelevant. It no longer seemed vital to seize the precise political moment; in the long people’s war, one moment appeared to be as good as another. He knew that before

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long Fabio would make known his presence in the ELN and was con¬ vinced that the news would rally most of his old supporters. He was in high spirits. By this time he had totally overcome his mental block against shooting, had mastered the use of his revolver and was handy with a rifle and a shotgun; he had used both when out hunting monkeys and parrots and wild pigs. But since he had not yet engaged in combat, the revolver was still his only permanent weapon; he would not get any other until he had earned it, and “the guerrillero,” Fabio had explained, “wins his weapon when he brings down an enemy soldier and appropriates his rifle or machine-gun.” Camilo was looking forward to the day he might gain that trophy. Maybe within a month. In December the general staff began to talk of a possible operation for the new year. Also in December, Fabio suggested to Camilo that he give some thought to writing his statement for the press. He was pleased with Camilo’s progress; he had never expected him to adapt so fast. Not that he had doubted his good will, but given his age—at thirty-six, Camilo was ten years older than most of the men—Fabio had pre¬ sumed he would find the going hard. Camilo had found it hard, but made so light of things that Fabio hardly guessed what it was costing him. He made jokes about the mosquito bites and the itchy rash left by an insect called the pitu. Everyone groused about the pitu except Camilo, who paraded the ugly brown stains on his body as if they were tattoos. Clowning disguised his discomfort. But in fact, at the beginning, nothing had come easy. He found that he didn’t even know how to walk. It was one thing to walk down Seventh Avenue, even in a cas¬ sock, and quite another to keep one’s balance on the wet greasy logs the guerrilleros trod so as not to leave foot-prints. He slipped and slithered, clutching at branches that gave way and snapped, or stalks that simply came out at the roots and left him lowering himself back¬ wards, ungracefully, into the mud. Once he snatched for help at a harmless-looking weed which turned out to be a prickly hortigo that dug thorns into his hand. After that he learned to recognize each plant and looked twice before grabbing hold of one. What had made walking even tougher at first was the sheer weight of his pack. For apart from his own things, he had added to the pack

316

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a lot of extra articles like pots, trousers and bags of sugar, which the others asked him to carry for them. The cunning peasants had got his measure; Argemiro, they knew, could not refuse. But after he had fallen over for the seven hundredth time, he went about handing back belongings with a suggestion about where they could be stuffed. They laughed at the insinuation; this time Argemiro had got their measure. Camilo’s knowledge of men was a valuable asset. And so was his sense of humour. It broke down tensions at a time when tensions were mounting, for the men were getting bored. The guerrilla action Fabio had in mind for January was going to be their first combat since May, and such a long calm was enervating. They could bear short rations, incessant training, the heat, even the mosquitos—anything but inertia. At night, around the campfire, every man had the right to air his grievances. But dour peasants like Delio or timid boys like Camilito and the Termite brothers were slow to open up, while others—the Bull, for example—were gruff and crude and too plain blunt. The city men did not know how to handle them. Hernando, the doctor, was overserious. Victor Medina was better; he tried to enliven the atmos¬ phere with a few funny stories. But Victor was one of the founding members of the ELN, and after so long in the jungle his jokes had gone stale. Camilo’s arrival was a godsend. He not only brought with him a repertoire of totally fresh stories, but also got the men singing joropos he had learned in Los Llanos and the songs of the International Brigades from the Spanish Civil War. Victor improvised percussion on a kerosene can and Camilo led the choruses. When the music stopped and the men began their nightly sessions of what they called “criticism and self-criticism,” everyone was in a better mood and tempers were not so likely to flare. It was after one of those sessions, on a night in mid-December, that Fabio announced a new plan of action: as from January the guerrilla would take the offensive. Their comrade Argemiro, he said, was go¬ ing to compose a proclamation to be sent to the national newspapers along with a photograph, on January 7, exactly a year after Simacota. The papers would not be able to resist the document’s news value; by

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publishing it they would give the guerrilleros wide publicity, and this would be backed up by guerrilla action. As from now the Jose Galan Front would split into two “commissions.” The first, a small con¬ tingent commanded by Jose Ayala, would make reconnaissance in the region of Los Aljibes some two miles away; Ayala would decide on what action his commission should take. Meanwhile the main body of the guerrilla army would remain under Fabio’s command and would carry out a major assault on one of the military detachments that were patrolling the countryside. This news brought loud cheering and vivas for the revolution. To the guerrilleros Fabio’s announcement came like rain after a drought. Camilo felt the current of excitement. “Que viva Argemiro!” someone shouted. “Que viva!” The men were roaring, laughing, looking at him. They had wanted to fight, and he was giving them their chance. It would be his chance too, to win a rifle maybe, and to show he was good for more than songs and joke-cracking. They slung their hammocks late that night. First Fabio named the men to the Aljibes contingent and gave them detailed instructions. Then they all sat around speculating on what their next combat would be like. “I’ll be with Hernando,” said the Bull. “In case of accidents it’s nice to be near a doctor. And if there are any rifles to be got,” he told Camilo, “I’ll fish for them with a pole. There’s no point in stick¬ ing out your neck!” Young Camilito, the thirteen-year-old, was silent as usual. He sat on the edge of the circle writing verses in a scrapbook he kept in his pack. He wrote of Simacota and the hold-up at Cruz de Mayo. Then he jotted down a jingle. After the first fight came another but I never asked for rest ’til in the third a bullet, brother, went right through my breast.

He tucked the book away and showed it to no one, not even to Argemiro. The next morning Camilo had his picture taken. They put a rifle in his hand and he posed for several snaps with Fabio and Victor.

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Then, while someone took the film out of the camera Camilo began writing his proclamation. There was not much time. Ayala and Dead-eye Afanador were leaving with several men for Los Aljibes and had to deliver the docu¬ ment and the roll of film to a contact from San Vicente. In any case Camilo did not need much time; he had been chewing over his state¬ ment for days. He went aside and sat on a stump with a notebook on his lap, and almost without corrections or crossings-out wrote the following:

,

People of Colombia: For many years the poor of our country have waited to hear the call to arms which would launch them on the final stage of their long battle against the oligarchy. Every time the people’s despair reached breaking point the ruling classes always managed to deceive them, to distract their attention, to placate them with solutions that amounted to no real change at all. When the people looked for a leader and found one in the person of Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, the oligarchy had him killed. When the people sought peace, the oligarchy gave them violence. When the people could stand no further violence and organized guerrillas for the seizure of power, the oligarchy staged a military coup so that the guerrillas would surrender under false pretences. When the people asked for democracy, once again they were deceived, this time by a plebiscite and a National Front which imposed on them the dictator¬ ship of the oligarchy. Now the people are no longer so credulous. They do not believe in elections. They know that all legal channels of action have been used up. They know that the only road left open to them is that of armed struggle. They are desperate and have made up their minds to risk everything, even life itself, in order that the next generation of Colombians may not be a generation of slaves; in order that the children of those who today are prepared to offer their lives may re¬ ceive education, a decent home, food, clothing, and above all human dignity; in order that future Colombians may live in a homeland which is really theirs, free from American domination. Every sincere revolutionary recognizes that armed struggle is the only way left. Nonetheless the people hope that their leaders, by means of personal example, will sound the call to arms.

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I want to tell the Colombian people that the moment for battle has arrived. I have not betrayed them. In the plazas of every town and city I urged the organization of the popular classes for the seizure of power, and I have not ceased to insist that we give ourselves to this cause unto death. Everything is now ready. The oligarchy in¬ tends to organize one more electoral farce with all the usual trim¬ mings: candidates who resign and then accept again, two-party committees, renewal movements based on ideas and personalities that are not only obsolete but also have betrayed the people. What more are we Colombians waiting for? I have joined the freedom fighters. From this corner of the Colombian jungle I declare that I intend to fight and not to lay down arms until we have brought the people to power. I joined the Army of National Liberation because in it I found the very ideals that in¬ spire the United Front: I found the desire for grass-roots unity, and indeed the achievement of that unity amongst the peasants, leaving aside all religious differences and traditional party squabbles, leaving aside also the spirit of competition with other revolutionary groups of whatever sect, movement, party or caudillo; I found a group that fights to free the people from the exploitation of the Colombian oligarchy and American imperialism, a group that will not lay down arms until the power of government is completely in the people’s hands, and whose objectives are those of the United Front’s platform. Every patriotic Colombian ought to be preparing for war. In every corner of the country experienced guerrilla leaders will gradually arise. Meanwhile we must all be on the alert. We should gather to¬ gether arms and ammunition, train for guerrilla combat, discuss things with our most trusted friends, collect clothing, drugs, pro¬ visions, and get ready for a long drawn-out war. We should effect lightning attacks on the enemy whenever we are sure that the outcome will be in our favour; we can thus put so-called revolutionaries to the test and weed out the traitors. We must not overlook action, but neither should we be overimpatient. In a long drawn-out war we will all be called upon to act at a given moment; the important thing is that we be ready and armed when that mo¬ ment arrives. The individual is not expected to perform every single task; the tasks should be shared out. United Front members should be in the vanguard of initiative and action. We must be patient in the period of preparation, and confident that the final victory will be ours.

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The people’s struggle must eventually become a nation-wide struggle. And since the battle is going to be a long one, we have de¬ cided to begin now. Fellow citizens: listen to the people’s call, the call of the revolu¬ tion! Activists of the United Front: put your slogans into practise! For the unity of the popular classes, unto death! For the organization of the popular classes, unto death! For the seizure of power by the popular classes, unto death! Unto death, since we are determined to fight to the very end. Unto victory, since a people which gives itself to the cause unto death always achieves victory. Unto the final victory, then, faithful to the watchwords of the Army of National Liberation. Not one step back! Liberation or Death! When he had finished writing Camilo went back to the main group of guerrilleros gathered around the men who were about to depart for Los Aljibes. Fabio asked him to read his proclamation aloud for everyone to hear. He did so, and the men listened, critical at first, then enthusiastic and, towards the end, hammering home each sentence with full-throated war cries and a long, echoing round of applause. On January 7 the Bogota evening papers carried thick red head¬ lines announcing Camilo’s reappearance with a photo so fuzzy that it was hard to discern his features. He stood upright in the centre of the picture, half-bearded and smiling, with a gun tucked under his arm. The two men who flanked him, striking truculent poses, were presumed, the papers said, to be Fabio Vasquez and Victor Medina. Only one paper published the full text of Camilo’s proclamation; the others summarized it in half a column. The Communist Party weekly, Voz Proletaria, printed excerpts from it that were to the party’s liking, omitting passages which differed from the party line. All told it was given much less publicity than Fabio had hoped for. Although Camilo was still newsworthy, he was less so now than he had been a few months earlier. Not even in university circles, where he had his chief allies, did the news produce much impact. Post-Christmas was a soporific time: political campaigns had been

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suspended and the students were away on vacations. It was not the right season for proclamations. In cafes and bars men read editorial commentaries and made their own. Some said: “It doesn’t look much like Camilo to me.” Others said it was a ruse, and a few—really very few—reckoned it meant the start of a civil war. Most people denied this. “Camilo won’t last long now,” they said. “They’ll shoot him. That’s for sure.” From where Camilo was situated in the remoteness of the San Vicente jungle it was not possible to assess public reaction. But even if it had been, nothing could have disheartened him right then, when he and the guerrilleros were geared for a special mission; they in¬ tended to ambush a troop detachment on an out-of-the-way country road, kill as many soldiers as they could and confiscate their equip¬ ment. This action was timed to follow directly on the publishing of Camilo’s proclamation. On one of the last nights of December, Fabio took Camilo to one side and said he had to communicate to him an important decision which had been taken by the general staff, namely—and here Camilo saw that whatever the decision was, it was not easy for his chief to repeat it—namely, said Fabio as shortly as he could, that Camilo was not to take part in the ambush, that it was too soon yet for him to go into combat. Camilo, annoyed, argued that he was there to fight like any plain ordinary soldier, and would not accept special treatment. Fabio said he was sorry but that the general staff had put it to the vote and had decided that Camilo was too valuable for them to risk his life. It was a matter of discipline. Camilo got angrier. He had not lost his respect for Fabio’s author¬ ity, but it no longer overawed him as before, and on this one point he refused to obey. “First you help me get over my complex about shooting, and now that I’m raring to go you want to hold me down. You can’t have it both ways. Of course you think I’m too important to take a chance. But that’s just it. I don’t want to be important any more. I want to be just like anyone else.” But that was the problem: Camilo was not, in fact, just like anyone

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else. Which explained not only why Fabio wanted to keep him out of trouble, but also, paradoxically, why, in the long run, he would let him have his way. With another man he might have enforced his will, but the priest’s insistence disarmed him. So finally he gave up, over¬ ruled the order of the general staff and agreed to let Camilo leave for the ambush with the rest. On a morning in early January they abandoned the hut where they had spent over a month and climbed down the western slopes of the Cerro de los Andes towards the valley of Rio Fuego. They were set¬ ting out for their rendezvous with the enemy.

Chapter 12

THE AMBUSH.

A few nights later they pitched camp at a point overlooking a bend in the road which led from the town of Yarima to the outlying hamlet of La Mugrosa. The spot was known as “Devil’s Curve.” Army platoons moved up and down this road at regular intervals, and Fabio had information on a military detachment due to reach La Mugrosa from Yarima within the next twenty-four hours. His tactic was to let the troops go by unhindered; he and his men would be lying in wait for them on their return. The next day, from high above Devil’s Curve, hidden in the bushes, the guerrilleros saw the soldiers march up the red-mud road in the direction of La Mugrosa. They numbered about twenty. “They’ll be back tomorrow,” said Fabio, and ordered the men to take up positions. “Argemiro,” he said, “you stick beside me.” They descended cautiously until they reached the edge of the road. It was early evening. They kept still until nightfall. Then each man quickly dug himself a hole in which he could entrench amongst the wild plants. Spread out, they formed a chain a hundred yards long, completely invisible, only two feet from the roadside. Camilo burrowed with Fabio and, when they were finished, squatted beside him in the earthen barricade. “You’d better make yourself more comfortable,” said Fabio. “We’re going to be here all night.”

324

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And so they were. It was Camilo’s longest night, the first time in his life he had been unable to sleep. Fabio dozed off; he knew very well that if there were any danger the sentry would give a warning. But Camilo spent the night stretching his cramped legs, swatting insects and waiting for dawn and the troops to come back. In the early morning Fabio woke up and grinned at him. “You seem anxious to get a crack at the enemy. Well don’t worry, they won’t be long now.” Camilo and Fabio were hunched together at the farthest point from where the soldiers would appear. The guerrillero up at the other end of the line, who would be the first to sight them, had orders to give Fabio a signal as soon as the leading soldier went past; Fabio would thus be ready to open fire, and, once he did so, every man was to fol¬ low suit. The first guerrillero was to give the alert by tugging on a length of twine which ran from him down to Fabio. In case of emer¬ gency or counter-orders Fabio would pull the twine from his end in accordance with a prearranged code. Camilo spent the long hours of the morning glancing back and forth between a peephole in the bushes and the length of twine lying loosely in Fabio’s hand. Through the foliage he could glimpse a patch of road and, some distance away, a peasant’s shack which seemed to be deserted. There was no sign of human life, just the buzz of mosquitos and the long high drone of cicadas piercing the air like the scream of an electric saw. He was watching the shack when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked down. In Fabio’s hand the twine had gone taut. Fabio was lifting his Madsen sub-machine-gun. Camilo got his little revolver ready. He glanced back towards the shack. There was someone moving inside. Several soldiers appeared, not on the road but walking towards the shack. A man came out and spoke to the first soldier, then went inside again. The soldiers followed. Camilo looked across at Fabio, who had lowered his Madsen and was pulling at the twine. He was giving orders to suspend the operation. He looked furious. He motioned to Camilo to get down well out of sight. He had called the ambush off. For more than an hour they crouched in the undergrowth. The soldiers went back and forth between the house and the road until at

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last some of them formed a column and trudged north towards Yarima. The others stayed beside the shack. A few moments later they too walked up the road. As they passed Camilo’s opening in the scrub the sight of them so close made him feel all the more frustrated. Another silent hour went by before Fabio gave the order to retreat. That night at camp meeting Fabio had to use a lot of tact to smooth out tensions and explain'why he had ordered their withdrawal. He said that from the moment the soldiers changed course they had be¬ come a much less vulnerable target. They were dispersed and it would have been impossible to trap all of them within the guerrillero’s hundred-yard radius. “It would have been totally irresponsible of me to risk the lives of revolutionary comrades. We will attack only when we have reduced the margin of error to a minimum.” Several nights running they slept out along the Cerro de los Andes. The weather turned cold in the evenings and they woke each morning before sunrise shivering and damp from the rain. By day they made excursions into the surrounding countryside to talk with peasants and establish the position of military patrols. In the afternoon of January 22 a messenger reached the camp with a report from Jose Ayala and his Aljibes contingent: that morning they had made contact with the enemy, had brought down two soldiers and had expropriated weapons, equipment and clothing. At this news the men became exultant and even more impatient for com¬ bat. Fabio promised them an ambush in the very near future. It was almost a fortnight, however, before he made up his mind to act. He was informed that on Sunday, February 6, a platoon was go¬ ing to set out on a week’s patrol from a place called Dos Bocas; the soldiers would circulate in the region of Rio Sucio and La Pitala and return to the military outpost of El Centenario. After discussions with his general staff, Fabio called a meeting and outlined strategy: they would take up positions near El Centenario where there was a wild jungle zone ideal for an ambush. By the end of the week the soldiers would be returning to base; they would be tired and would probably have their guard down. It would be the right moment to attack. Fabio gave these orders on February 3, the day Camilo turned

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thirty-seven. A messenger was going down to San Vicente, so Camilo decided to send a word to the two people who would be remembering him most on his birthday. He scribbled a hurried note to his mother, and another to Guitemie. The first was a reply to a letter the messenger had brought him, written by Isabel in Minneapolis, in which she com¬ plained that she had no idea where he was nor what he was doing. She had been affectionate, but angry. He wrote her a few noncom¬ mittal lines to the effect that he was fine and that she shouldn’t fret about him. In his letter to Guitemie he was more frank.^ It’s been a while since I wrote. Letters are dangerous and it’s better not to send them except when absolutely necessary. I can imagine how upset you must be without firsthand news; but my faith in your morale has stopped me from worrying too much. The work here is going fairly well, despite a few human failings which are natural enough. It’s a question of method and patience. The important thing is to maintain an unshakeable faith in the final outcome. I don’t yet consider myself a really qualified worker, but at least I’m adapted to the group and to the conditions of life. I want you to write me a long letter about yourself, about dif¬ ferent people’s reactions, and about plans for the future.

He still believed she might join him later when things were going better—after the ambush perhaps. I hope the process picks up so that we can clarify your situation. Le Maitre is still with us, enlightening us. . . .

He would have liked to write more, but there was no time. The letter-carrier was leaving. Every man in the camp was busy polishing his weapon and making sure his cartridges were dry. The only heavy artillery they had were Fabio’s Madsen and three first-class rifles. Most of the men had to make do with pistols and carbines, and Joaquin, the young man with thick glasses, possessed an old-fashioned shotgun which he had to reload with a rod after each discharge. Nevertheless they were con¬ fident of success. The soldiers, though better armed, would be trapped on a narrow path and taken by surprise. The guerrilleros would have done their worst damage before the soldiers had time to fire a shot. The operation was planned down to the last detail. The first guer-

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rillero to spot the soldiers would be Juanito, who once, in Bucaramanga, had asked Camilo if he could kill a man. Juanito was at the head of what they called the contention squad, which was made up of Delio, his nephew Silverio, and a tall dark peasant known as Abel, who had served a term in the Army. These four men carried the heaviest guns and were to hold off enemy fire in case of trouble from the soldiers who brought up the rear of the patrol. Delio was espe¬ cially proud of his rifle, an army M-l that they had captured in the attack on Simacota. The rest of the men would be strung along the edge of the track as at Devil’s Curve, well hidden in their trenches and armed with what¬ ever weapons they had. Fabio would be stationed with his Madsen at the end of the line farthest from the containment squad. For safety’s sake Camilo again was to stay beside him. When Fabio began shoot¬ ing it would be the signal for every man to open fire on the soldiers. On Friday, February 11, they camped beside the Rio Sucio across from a place known as Patio Cemento. They were not in a hurry. Ac¬ cording to the report of a peasant informer the army patrol had got lost in the mountains and was no longer in radio contact with El Centenario. This meant that the soldiers were delayed and would not arrive at Patio Cemento until the next day, Saturday, or maybe even later. The guerrilleros had time to bathe in the river and eat a meal of rice and fried bananas. They slept for a few hours and were up before dawn on the Saturday morning. They stored their knapsacks in a safe place and while it was still dark waded across the fast shallow stream and began digging trenches in the hillside above the track. When the sun came up the thirty-one guerrilleros were hidden amongst the shadows. Mottled sunlight glinted on the leaves and stalks and the trunks of trees around them, but the men were invisible. Early in the morning a donkey trotted down the track, followed by a peasant whacking its rump with a stick and whistling. He ambled past the spot where Camilo sat with Fabio, and seemed to be looking right at them. Camilo caught his breath. But the man obviously saw nothing unusual. He wandered on. Their camouflage was perfect. After the man was out of sight Fabio beckoned to the boyguerrillero, Camilito. He came up and Fabio gave him orders to keep watch at a point some hundred yards farther along the track.

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Once he had received word that the army patrol was approaching, Camilito was to waylay any peasant who might pass by and prevent him from entering the line of fire. Everything was now ready for the ambush. All they had to do was wait. Fabio warned Camilo that the waiting might be long; their in¬ formation on the whereabouts of the troops was not very exact. Fabio had the same system of signals as before, a long twine which con¬ nected him to Juanito, the leader of the contention squad. Juanito would let him know as soon as the soldiers appeared on the track. But that might not be until tomorrow, or the day after. The sun climbed up behind them. Camilo felt its heat burning on the back of his neck. At long intervals he drank from a flask Fabio handed him. He made an effort not to look at his watch, waited, tried to relax, kept up a whispered conversation with Fabio about any¬ thing, nothing; he felt the sun directly above them, watched it all after¬ noon lower down through the trees along the river and disappear behind the cerro. The river turned red, then violet, dark blue, finally black. Fabio gave the men orders to stand up and stretch their legs, but not to abandon their posts. They spent the night in their trenches. One of the men crept along on all fours from one to another handing out pieces of bread and brown blocks of sugar. From time to time the moon shone through the trees and Camilo could make out the faces of the men nearest to him—Ramiro with his big straw hat pulled well down, the Bull wip¬ ing a pistol on the tail of his shirt. Farther up the fine he spotted Pele, the shoemaker from San Vicente. Pele had joined them in November, and was the only other pipe-smoker. They made signs to one another how they longed for a smoke. But they could not strike a match at night; it would shine like a lighthouse. The rest of the men were lost in the darkness. He knew that Hernando and Victor were somewhere in the centre of the group. So was Joaquin with his old blunderbuss. But all he could see was the dark outline of the bushes. Leaves rustled. A man’s sudden move¬ ment? Or the night breeze? It was impossible to tell. The duration of the waiting finally took the edge off Camilo’s suspense and he went to sleep. All the next day they watched and waited under the scorching sun

the ambush

329

or in the shade of the tall guarumos. Ants climbed up Camilo’s trouser leg; red centipedes inched across his hand; grasshoppers, wasps, butterflies flew around his head. He smacked at the mosquitos and the pitus, and above all at the pringadores, which were the most prolific biters in that forest. By nightfall he was itchy all over. An informer arrived with news of the troops. They were still a long way off, he said, and would probably not reach Patio Cemento until the day after next. Fabio ordered the men to leave their posts and cross the river. The night was cloudy, moonless. They moved stealthily across the stream to their campsite and prepared a meal. “Come over here, all of you,” said Camilo scratching himself, “and let some of these damned pringadores hop onto you. I seem to have copped the whole bloody lot!” Everyone laughed, and some pretended to pluck pringadores out of Camilo’s shirt. They were hilarious after the strain of their two days’ wait. They rested up that Sunday night with orders to man their ambush posts before dawn. Around midnight the sentry spied flashing torch signals and knew that some guerrilla aide was approaching the camp. Two figures emerged from the darkness: one was a guide and the other a new recruit, Camilo’s friend Julio Cortes. Someone woke up Camilo to come welcome him, and Hernando also roused himself and went to meet Julio, who had been with him in medical school at the National. Julio brought them letters and news of United Front members in the city; Camilo and Hernando told him of things in the guerrilla army. They were brief; in a few hours they had to be up and moving. The next morning Fabio instructed Julio to stay with young Camilito where he was keeping a lookout for peasants who might wander inadvertently into the ambush. The rest of the men reassumed their allocated positions and waited. What followed was another long fruitless day spent doubled-up stiff in trenches with everyone’s nerves on edge. Towards evening they got news. Their informer ran up excitedly and told Fabio that the regular army platoon was encamped alongside the Parada family’s farmhouse just an hour’s walk away. Patio Cemento, where the guerrilleros were, lay mid-way between the Parada’s place and the bar-

330

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racks at El Centenario. The troops would reach them, therefore, without the slightest doubt, some time next morning. The morning was overcast. Around eight-thirty came a break in the sky, a burst of sunshine. At the same moment the guerrilla’s informant arrived and passed them the word that the column of soldiers planned to leave Parada’s at nine. He had overheard the officer talking to the troops. What he had not overheard, however, was the ofljcer’s conversa¬ tion with Belarmino Rojas, a peasant who happened to go past Parada’s looking for a donkey. Rojas was not a collaborator of the guerrilleros; he had nothing to do with them. But his obsequious way of asking for permission to go by aroused the lieutenant’s suspicions. The guerrilleros were ignorant of this, and had no idea that, as a pre¬ caution, the troops would come marching in three separate squads. On the contrary they presumed the soldiers would come in closed ranks to ward off possible attack. For Camilo the hour that followed was as long as the three pre¬ ceding days. He cleaned his revolver again and made sure it was loaded and the safety-catch released. He grinned at Fabio; Fabio grinned back. There was no talking, not even a whisper. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand and wriggled into a more comfortable position. He was afraid of cramp; he wanted to be able to spring at a moment’s notice. He felt the sting of a cut under the bandage on his right leg where he had dashed it against a tree on Sunday night in the dark. He bent down and tightened the bandage and straightened up again. Fabio was absolutely motionless. Camilo stole a look at his watch. It was almost nine-thirty. Half an hour later, above high scrub, Juanito spotted the heads of two soldiers moving towards him. He tugged on the twine. Seconds later the first soldier had drawn alongside him, and he tugged the twine again. Fabio immediately knew the soldier’s exact position and got his Madsen ready. Juanito noticed that a considerable distance separated the first soldier from the one following him. He looked along the line. Only two more soldiers had come into view; the others were well behind. Juanito went cold. He counted the seconds between each soldier.

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Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The fourth man took even longer to come up. Seventeen seconds. Juanito made a hasty calculation. At this rate only a third of the platoon would be inside the ambush at the moment Fabio opened fire. Fabio did not know this. At the second tug on the twine he stood up, hidden from the soldiers by a thick tree trunk. Camilo crouched beside him. The heads' of the first two soldiers came into sight. Then a third. This was the commander of the platoon; they could tell by the uniform. He stopped all at once and seemed to scrutinize the bushes. It was incredible that he could not see them. A soldier came up and spoke to him. The officer seemed to give an order, then resumed his steady walk towards Fabio’s tree trunk. Fabio sprang forward, stood astride the track with his Madsen at hip-level in full view of the troops, and emptied it with all its dreadful din into their faces. The other guerrilleros began firing. Camilo held up his revolver, steadied it and fired all its six shots in the direction of the soldiers. Suddenly Fabio was beside him again, pulling him down. For a minute there was total silence. The forest seemed empty. Camilo peered through the bushes. A soldier was lying right in front of him, dead. Only a few feet away, thrown aside, was the dead man’s rifle. Camilo did not hesitate. This was his trophy. He stood up and took three quick paces through the scrub to pick it up. A bullet cracked. Camilo felt a hot stinging in his left shoulder, clutched at it, toppled over face-down. “Argemiro! Are you all right?” It was Fabio. “Yes. It’s nothing.” “Then get back in here!” Camilo struggled to his knees and began shuffling back towards the bushes. He felt dizzy. In front of him there were shadows down to¬ wards the river. A figure loomed up. A soldier. Pointing a gun at him. It fired. A terrible burning seared his body. He fell forwards, heard shouts, shooting. He tried to move, but couldn’t. The heat was in¬ vading his mind. He seemed to be groping, but could hardly move a muscle. “Argemiro! Argemiro!”

332

CAMILO TORRES

Someone was calling him. It was the last thing he heard. Little Camilito ran up to Fabio. “What’s the matter?” “It’s Argemiro.” The boy looked out and saw Camilo’s body. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled out to rescue him. Fabio had realized where the shooting was coming from; some soldier was hidden near the river. “Look out!” he yelled at Camilito. “There’s one ok them dug in down there!” Camilito took no notice. He was stooped over Camilo’s body, in¬ tent on dragging it into the bushes. Fabio heard another burst of fire, saw smoke rising from the dark river side and saw Camilito topple. He aimed his Madsen towards the smoking spot, pulled the trigger— but nothing happened. The gun was jammed. Ramiro, near to Fabio, had seen Camilito fall on top of Camilo. He rushed forward to help them. Invisible bullets flew into his face; he stumbled and fell. Fabio tossed a hand-grenade to the Bull and shouted at him to throw it at the spot where the smoke was rising. “Throw the damn thing!” roared Fabio desperately. “For Chris’sake throw it now!” Forty yards up the track Joaquin had emptied the contents of his blunderbuss into an on-coming soldier. He did not stop to reload it with the rod. Unaware of what had happened to Camilo, he jumped out and began to strip the soldier of his equipment. “Hand me a knife,” he shouted to Libardo, the guerrillero nearest to him. Libardo passed him down a machete, and Joaquin, still wearing his thick horn-rimmed spectacles, straddled the apparently dead soldier and began to cut the laces of one of his boots. Suddenly Libardo heard a shot and saw Joaquin’s glasses flying in the air and blood spurting out of his face and head. The containment squad was meeting the onslaught of the troops who had kept back outside the initial fire. The soldiers clambered up through the bushes towards Juanito and the others. Delio discharged his M-l. The soldiers had the same heavy weapons and were firing

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madly. A bullet got Delio in the chest and burst it wide open. Juanito began to retreat. He stumbled on Abel, with blood gushing out of his side. Juanito and Silverio began to drag him towards safety. Abel groaned and went limp. They left him, lifeless, and made for cover. All the surviving guerrilleros were running from the fierce guns. Some made their way up the embankment. Others dashed across the river towards their hidden campsite. The woods went suddenly silent again. At one end of the ambush Abel and Delio lay amongst the bushes. Joaquin was stretched with his head split open in the middle of the track, Ramiro’s body was spread-eagled on the ground, and beside him, in a heap of blood and bone, Camilito was contorted on his side. Camilo lay face-down under him. His life was oozing out like Joaquin’s brains. In a matter of min¬ utes he would be dead.

Chapter 13

THE AFTERMATH

The first person to identify Camilo’s body was Colonel Valencia Tovar. He was sitting behind his desk at the Fifth Brigade headquarters in Bucaramanga when, just after lunch, news of the ambush was radioed from Barranca. The colonel was told that there were several guerrilleros dead, and that one of them was different from the rest—bigger, and “whiter.” He gave orders for a helicopter to transport him at once to a base near El Centenario, but was informed that weather conditions did not permit a landing; the sky was overcast and the mountain area full of cloud. So he instructed his adjutant to keep ringing Barranca, and spent the afternoon waiting restlessly in his office for further details. At six o’clock he got a call from a military outpost in the village of El Carmen. Sergeant Castro was on the line. The sergeant explained that he had taken control of the operation after the platoon’s com¬ manding officer, Lieutenant Gonzalez, had been put out of action, and that he had brought the dead and wounded into El Carmen; maybe a helicopter could land there the next day in an open field and lift them out. The colonel inquired about the dead guerrillero, the one said to be different from the others. The sergeant described him. “What signs of identification are there? Any papers?” “Yes, sir. There are some papers, but they’re mostly in a foreign language.”

THE AFTERMATH

335

The colonel knew that Camilo was fluent in French, German and English. “What else is there?” “Nothing much, sir. Only a pipe.” The colonel conjured up a picture of the young priest-dean as he had last seen him in his office at the Public Administration School. He remembered Camilo with the bowl of a pipe cradled in his big palm, and a detail, for some reason, stuck in his mind. “Is there a silver band,” he asked, “a wide silver band at the joint of the stem?” “Let me see, sir. . . .Yes, there is a silver band, sir. And you might say it is a pretty thick one.” “Have those things sent to me,” snapped the colonel. “At once.” A few hours later he was holding the pipe in his small freckled hand. It seemed familiar. He put it down and spread the papers taken from the dead man’s pocket over the glass top of his desk. There was Isabel’s letter from Minneapolis, with a post-script from Camilo’s brother, Fernando. A second letter, in English, was from someone with Time-Life asking for an interview with the guerrilla-priest. There was also a creased, sodden page, typewritten on both sides, half in Spanish, half in French. It was unsigned, but the colonel saw at a glance that it was from Guitemie. After combing the country for her, Military Intelligence had reached the conclusion that she had joined the guerrilla army. The colonel read her letter carefully for clues. When he had finished, he rang the Minister of War in Bogota and informed him that they had apparently shot Camilo Torres. He would confirm this, he said, as early as possible. The next morning he flew to El Carmen, and was shown to a patio behind the barracks where detectives bent over five dead bodies laid out on the cement floor, taking fingerprints. A doctor was doing autopsies. They all stood back for the colonel. He was nauseated at the sight of the bruised day-old corpses, one with brains spilling out of its head, and another, the one he was looking for, with arms out¬ spread and a bearded face lolling on one side. Without delay he returned to Bucaramanga and phoned the Minister of War to say that there was no doubt whatever about the dead guerrillero’s identity. The minister instructed him to allow no

336

CAMILO TORRES

press men into the area and to keep the whereabouts of the dead man’s remains a strict military secret. No announcement was yet to be made, he said, but the colonel should prepare an official communique which would be published at the appropriate moment. Fabio Vasquez was also thinking about the communique he had to write. Within twenty-four hours of the ambush, he and the other sur¬ vivors assembled at a prearranged spot, and Fabio urged his men not to lose heart. But it was not easy. A heavy, accusing silence hung over the group; and Fabio, overwhelmed by the tragedy, would be hard pressed to find words when the time came to make a public statement. But that was for later. Right now he had to think of their immediate safety. They would evacuate the area, to avoid a possible encounter with army patrols, and were to meet again, a few days later, at a point farther along the Opon Valley. At that second meeting each man gave an account of his actions at Patio Cemento. Juanito told of the containment squad and Delio’s heroic defence, and of how he and Abel had been shot. As he spoke some of the men wept unashamedly; until that moment, many of them had no idea which of their comrades had fallen. Each man’s report helped supply some missing detail, and for the benefit of those who had not been close to Camilo and were still uncertain as to how he had been killed, Fabio described his leap forward to pick up the gun, Camilito’s attempt to save him, and then Ramiro’s. He told of how his Madsen had jammed, and of how he had tossed the grenade to the Bull who, for some unknown reason, had not used it. No one was ever to know why the Bull hadn’t thrown the grenade, for the man never appeared again; he had obviously deserted. After they had all related their separate versions, Fabio helped them to make a constructive criticism. He pointed out that Patio Cemento was their first defeat; Simacota, Papayal, Cruz de Mayo, Los Aljibes—every action, prior to this one, had been a success. As a re¬ sult they had grown overconfident, and had prepared the ambush with faulty and insufficient information. They had made a mistake, too, in taking up positions above the enemy; in jungle conditions a man hidden in the shadows had proved to have the advantage over those above him, who were picked out by rays of sunlight. These were les-

THE AFTERMATH

337

sons they were learning, at a very great cost. They would carry on the fight, he said, for Camilo’s sake, and for that of all their fallen com¬ rades. And for the thousands of people around Colombia who had believed in Camilo, they would make a statement to show that the ELN was anything but beaten. Colonel Valencia Tovar’s bulletin was published only two days after the ambush, for despite attempts to hush up the news of Camilo’s death, it was leaking out. One reporter who rushed to El Carmen and took pictures was arrested and his roll of film confiscated. But even so, persistent rumours of Patio Cemento began to reach Bogota. Early on the afternoon of Thursday, February 17, after some ambiguous statements from the Diocesan Press Office, a nosey re¬ porter got into the chancery and interviewed not the cardinal, who was naturally unavailable, but his spokesman, the auxiliary bishop. “Excellency, regarding the news that the ex-priest Camilo Torres has been killed, is this true?” The bishop hedged. “I myself have been hearing the same news item since eleven o’clock this morning.” The newsman got annoyed. “Excellency, is it true that you have had a conversation with the War Minister?” “Yes, that is true.” “And that he informed you of the death of Camilo Torres?” “Yes.” “Is it or is it not true, therefore, that Camilo Torres is dead?” “Exactly.” That same Thursday afternoon the colonel’s official communique was released to the press. It gave a brief account of the ambush, and stated that “amongst the arms recovered by the troops who took part in the action was the rifle (model M-l, calibre 30) which had been carried by one of the soldiers who perished at the hands of the bandits in their assault on Simacota on January 7, 1965. The abovementioned rifle (No. 5.088.554) was found in the hands of the person later identified as Camilo Torres Restrepo, with signs technically proving that it had been fired seconds before being recaptured.”

338

CAMILO TORRES

This was the colonel’s own invention. He felt it made the report sound more plausible, since many people would find the news of Camilo’s death outrageous. The colonel was an amateur novelist; fiction, for him, was often more convincing than fact. This careful description of a rifle in the priest’s hands would add a touch of re¬ alism, he thought, to an otherwise dry narrative. In any case it would have been ludicrous to picture the revolutionary priest taking on an army patrol with a little Colt, calibre .38, which was the weapon Sergeant Castro had found beside his body. , The two Bogota evening papers carried the report on their front pages under red headlines eight inches deep. Hushed groups stood on street comers reading and re-reading it; and two extra editions of one paper were sold out in an hour. Sporadic riots broke out that night in various cities, and a few stu¬ dents ignited cars and painted “We will revenge you, Camilo” on the white cement walls of the National University. Military police quickly caught the offenders and locked them up. President Valencia made a statement to the press. “What has occurred,” he said, “seems to me perfectly normal; Camilo Torres pre¬ ferred to die killing people, rather than live at the service of his fellowcitizens.” A prominent prelate had his say. “We can reasonably presume that due to so many problems that the late Mr. Torres experienced both in his family as well as in his social life, he must have suffered a cer¬ tain degree of mental unbalance which led to his downfall. Let us hope, however, that Our Lord in His infinite goodness, may pardon the poor man’s faults and, in His mercy, save his immortal soul.” People listening to the radio or reading the papers felt anger, despair almost. Those who had known Camilo personally, or been near him on some occasion, or had heard him speak, shed tears as they might have done for a member of the family. Many simply refused to believe it had happened. As if for the doubters, a Friday newspaper carried a full-page photo of his corpse. It was the only picture released. He lay face-upturned on a make-shift stretcher, the eyes still open, his drill shirt rolled up to the neck to reveal a pale, naked torso; and piercing his left side was the small mortal bullet hole.

THE AFTERMATH

339

The ELN’s statement was published a few weeks later in the guerrilla army’s little clandestine bulletin, Insurrection. The death of our comrade Camilo Torres was received by the Colombian people with deep and sincere sorrow. The peasantguerrilleros wept for his irreparable loss, and have sworn to revenge, by their continuing struggle, the death of their comrade-in-arms. The workers, too, have sent up their protest, mute and silent perhaps, but confirmed by their faith in the outcome of the fight in which Camilo has fallen. Students, not only in Colombia, but in many other coun¬ tries of the American continent, have publicly expressed their agree¬ ment with the opinions and actions of the man who was at once their counsellor and unforgettable companion. . . . The path of the revolution does not follow a single straight line. On the contrary, it is a tortuous, winding road, full of sudden, treacherous bends and obstacles which have to be overcome day by day. Every true revolution has undergone reverses, crises and mo¬ ments of defeat, but each one has gone on later to win one victory after another, until attaining the final goal: power for the people. The death of those leaders who, by their example, point out to the masses the road they should follow is undoubtedly a set-back, and often a very serious one. Nonetheless, the very fact that they have fallen while fighting in the vanguard of the guerrilla army indicates that victory is possible, for despite their death, the guerrilleros carry on, and more and more people are incorporated into the ranks of armed insurgence. Those who think that armed insurgence has come to an inglorious end, or who believe that the Army of National Liberation has been wiped out, will one day suffer a rude awakening. The facts will show that the death of leaders like Camilo does not put an end to the people’s faith in their liberation, but rather nourishes that faith and fills it with further hope of victory. . . .

And the facts have shown it. Eight years later, in 1973, long after most of Camilo’s one-time supporters had faded from the scene, Fabio Vasquez and the men of the ELN were still waging the war of libera¬ tion. Many had fallen in battle; individual members had deserted, some even gone over to the enemy camp; and the onslaughts of the regular army had repeatedly decimated their ranks. But they survived;

340

CAMILO TORRES

and more than that, they increased and multiplied. By 1972 they controlled large rural areas not only in Santander but also across the Magdalena River, in the province of Antioquia. The terrible of¬ fensive which the Fourth and Fifth brigades launched against them from September to November of 1973—a military operation compara¬ ble only to the bombing of Marquetalia in 1964—left the ELN greatly depleted. But the peasant-guerrilleros carried on. “Camilo’s death,” they said when he died, “only encourages us to continue fighting for Colombia’s freedom, for which he(gave his life.”

Index of Sources

The source material used here is of three kinds: published documents, unpublished manuscripts and personal interviews. Of these the last are, of course, the least reliable, for they depend on the fallible memory of people recounting events several years after they occurred. Since the author could not discount this type of data, each person’s recollection of an incident was counter-checked, whenever possible, against the independent testimony of a second or third wit¬ ness. In the reconstruction of interior thoughts and reactions (whether those of Camilo or others) the author’s apparent omniscience is founded on a witness’s account or on reasonable conjecture; more often than not, on a mixture of both. The sources, both written and oral, are set forth below. Of the pub¬ lished works available, most of which are in Spanish, the author has relied very heavily on Cristianismo y Revolution by Camilo Torres (Mexico: ERA, 1970), an authoritative collection of Camilo’s writ¬ ings and speeches. The book was compiled by Oscar Maldonado and Guitemie Olivieri and contains some thirty pages of detailed biograph¬ ical data. It is referred to throughout this index by the abbreviation CyR. The index is arranged in the following way: for chapters 2-6, in which Colombian history and Camilo’s life follow largely parallel

INDEX OF SOURCES

342

paths, the index of each chapter is divided under two general head¬ ings: Camilo Torres and Historical Context; from Chapter 7 onwards the headings in the index simply follow the chronological order of the events recorded.

CHAPTER 1 Reconstructed from the eye-witness reports in Proceso No. 3529 of the Fifth Brigade, in Cuaderno (notebook) No. 15, especially folio 16, report of Captain Gabriel Angarita Buitrago made in El Carmen on February 20, 1966, before the Juez 53 de Instruccion Penal Militar; folios 26-27, report of Sergeant Jose del Carmen Castro Rueda, made in Bucaramanga on February 26, 1966, in the office of the Juzgado 53 de Instruccion Penal Militar; folios 73-75, report of Lieutenant Jorge Humberto Gonzalez Alarcon; folios 71-72, report of Private Marco Antonio Higuera, given in the Mili¬ tary Hospital, Bogota, on March 1,1966; folios 32-33, report of Rev. Fr. Marcos Arcila; folios 29-30, report of Private Jose Torres Barrios; folios 24-25, report of Private Pedro Ariza; folio 2, report of Private Osma Villalobos Palomino, given in El Carmen on February 21, 1966; folios 22-23, report of Private Santiago Celis Mesa; also conversations with General Alvaro Valencia Tovar in the Escuela Militar de Cadetes, Bogota, 1970 and 1971; also a visit to the site of the ambush, Patio Cemento, Corregimiento El Carmen, Muncipio San Vicente de Chucuri, Santander, in June 1973.

CHAPTER 2

Camilo Torres

Documents: personal letters from Calixto Torres Umana and from Isabel Restrepo de Torres to their son. These date from 1954-56 (the Louvain years) and were shown to the author by Camilo’s mother, who had them in her possession in 1970. Also a long letter from

INDEX OF SOURCES

343

Camilo to his father (ms.) dated Louvain, November 4, 1954, quoted here (and in Chapter 4). Interviews: with Isabel Restrepo de Torres in Bogota (1970) and in Havana (1972); with Gerda Westendorp de Nunez (Bogota, 1971) who showed the author a page in her diary written in German on February 3, 1929, which contains a description of the events sur¬ rounding Camilo’s birth as well as a plan of the house drawn by the then thirteen-year-old girl; with Elvira Restrepo de Gaviria (Camilo’s aunt), Eduardo Umana Luna (his cousin) and Father Fernando Umana (another cousin, later Camilo’s contemporary in the semi¬ nary).

Historical Context

General:

Mariategui, Jose Carlos. Works. Lima, Peru: Biblioteca Amauta. Masur, G. Simon Bolivar. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1960. Ramos, Jorge Abelardo. La Historia de la Nacion Latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: PenaLillo, 1968. Colombian:

Arrubla, Mario. Estudios sobre el Subdesarrolio Colombiano. Medellin, Colombia: La Oveja Negra, 1969. Caballero, Enrique. Historia Economica de Colombia. Bogota: Banco de Bogota, 1971. Cordovez Moure, Jose Maria. Reminiscencias de Santa y Bogotd. Bogota: Ier Festival del Libro Colombiano, 1961. Fals Borda, Orlando. Subversion and Social Change in Colombia. Transl. Jacqueline D. Skiles. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Cien Anos de Soledad (novel). Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969. Gilhodes, Pierre. Essay in Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America. New York: Anchor Books, 1973. Gonzalez, Fernando. Mi Simon Bolivar. Bogota, 1930 (3rd edition, Bedout, 1969). -. Santander. Bogota, 1940. Editorial ABC. Henao y Arrubla. Historia de Colombia (7th edition). Bogota: Voluntad, 1952. Jaramillo Uribe, Jaime. Ensayos sobre historia social colombiana. Bogota: Universidad National de Colombia, 1968.

344

INDEX OF SOURCES

Lebret, J. L. Estudio sobre las condiciones del desarrollo de Colombia. Bogota: Aedita, 1958. Lievano Aguirre, Indalecio. Los grandes conflictos sociales y economicos de nuestrahistoria. Bogota: TercerMundo, 1966. Lopez Michelsen, Afronso. Cuestiones colombianas. Mexico: Impresiones Modernas, 1955. Mesa, Dario. “Treinte anos de historia colombiana (1925-1955)” in Colombia: Estructura Politica y Agraria. Bogota: Estrategia, 1971. Molina, Gerardo. Las Ideas liber ales en Colombia. Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1970. Montana Cuellar, Diego. Colombia: peas formal y pais real. Buenos Aires: Platina, 1963. Nieto Arteta, Luis Eduardo. Economia y cultura en la historia de Colom¬ bia. Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1962.

Partido Comunista de Colombia. 30 anos del partido comunista de Co¬ lombia. Bogota: Paz y Socialismo, 1969. Pena, Eduardo. Origen y desarrollo de la burguesia Colombiana. Bogota,

1971. Posada, Francisco. Colombia: violencia y subdesarrollo. Bogota: UniversidadNacional de Colombia, 1969. -. El movimiento revolucionario de los comuneros. Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1971. Rippy, Fred. El capital norteamericano y la penetracion imperialista en Colombia. Medellin, Colombia: La Oveja Negra, 1970.

Samper, Jose Maria. Ensayo sobre las revoluciones Politicos. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1969. Santa, Eduardo. Rafael Uribe Uribe. Medellin, Colombia: Bedout, 1968. Suarez, Julio Roberto. Genocidio en America Latina. Bogota, 1970. Tirado Mejia, Alvaro. Introduccion a la historia econdmica de Colombia. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia, 1971. Torres Giraldo, Ignacio. Los inconformes, historia de la rebeldia de las masas en Colombia. Vols. I, II, III. Bogota: Margen Izquierdo, 1972. Zuleta, Estanislao. Historia econdmica de Colombia. Tolima: Universidad de Tolima, 1970.

INDEX OF SOURCES

345

CHAPTER 3

Camilo Torres

General biographical data: CyR, pp. 25,26. Boyhood: interviews with Dr. Luis Villar Borda and Antonio Manuel Cuellar, contemporaries of C.T., Colegio Cervantes. Letter to C.T. from Ricardo Gil, Miami, September 1954. University page: extracts from La Razon, daily paper edited by Juan Lozano y Lozano, cf. June 24, July 1, 22, 1947. Also extract from El Liberal, Pagina Universitaria, June 9, 1947, article by Antonio J. Munoz (archives Bibioteca Nacional, Bogota). Dominican priests: conversations (Santiago de Chile, 1972) with Luis Alberto Alfonso, one-time Dominican priest, personal friend of C.T. and disciple of Fathers Nielly and Blanchet; also conversations (Bo¬ gota, 1971-72) with Dr. Hernan Vergara Delgado, Bernardo Londono, Carlos Didacio Alvarez, members of movement of Catholic intellectuals whose organ was Testimonio, edited in Bogota in the second half of the 1940s. “A total answer”: recorded by German Guzman Campos in Camilo, El Cura Guerrillero, Bogota, 1967, p. 9. Enrique Martinez: interview with his sister Ines Martinez, Bogota, 1971. Railway station scene: cf. Isabel Restrepo de Torres in Vispera, quarterly review of the MIEC, Montevideo, Ano 1, no. 1, May 1967, p. 56. Seminary: author’s observations, plus interview with Rev. Enrique Acosta Rincon (Bogota, 1971). Fr. Acosta was the priest who showed Calixto Torres round the seminary.

Historical Context

As in previous chapter. Also: Fluharty, Veron Lee. The Dance of the Millions. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1957. Maldonado Perez, Oscar. “La iglesia colombiana en estado de congreso eucaristico.” Mexico: El Dia, August 27, 29, 1968. Conversations with Oscar Maldonado P. and Rev. Alfonso Pinilla (Pam¬ plona, Colombia, 1970) on Colombian ecclesiastical history. Also interview with Luis Cardinal Concha (Bogota, September 1971).

INDEX OF SOURCES

346

CHAPTER 4

Camilo Torres

C y R, p. 26. Conversations (Bogota, 1970-73) with Gustavo Perez Ramirez, Miguel Triana Uribe, Bernardo and Fernando Rueda Williamson, Noel Olaya, Jaime Hoyos, Jaime Diaz, Fernando Umana, Jesus Maria Marulanda, Ernesto Solano, Jose Restrepo Posada, priests of the archdiocese of Bogota. Quotations from the Acta de Ordenes and references to C.T.’s exam re¬ sults from archives of Seminario Conciliar de Bogota, thanks to col¬ laboration of the rector, Rev. Rodrigo Arango, 1971. Texts studied by C.T. (courtesy G. Perez): Rutten, O. P. La Doctrine Sociale de VEglise. Louvain, 1952. Botero, Juan. Manual del Trabajo. Bogota, 1945. Cf. esp. p. 243. Basset, Andres. Justicia Conmutativa y Contratos. Bogota, 1947. Andrade Valderrama, Vicente, S.J. Doctrina social catolica. Bogota, 1957 (2ndedition). Ed. “Justicia.” Autobiography of Saint Therese of Lisieux. L’Histoire d’une Ame. Autographed by C.T. as a present to a niece (amongst private papers). Quotations from Isabel, Calixto and Camilo taken from personal letters (cf. Chapter 2). Letters of C.T. to Fernando Rueda Williamson, Louvain, October 24, 1954, and May 15, 1955 (microfilm, Cuer¬ navaca, Mexico: CIDOC). Ordination: Four pages, typed, by C.T. on eve of ordination, August 1954 (courtesy Rev. Fernando Umana). Quotation from “family friend” from dedicatory note to La Vie de Jesus by Francois Mauriac (private papers) dated Bogota, August 1954, and signed Edmundo Rico.

Historical Context

Alzate, Manuel. Libertad Religiosa en Colombia. Cali, Colombia, 1969. Betancur, Belisario. Colombia earn a cara. Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1959. Builes, Miguel Angel, Mons. Colombia en el caos por la masonena y el comunismo. Santa Rosa de Osos (April 1965) quotes earlier pas¬ toral letter of April 1948, pp. 41-42.

INDEX OF SOURCES

347

Caballero Calderon, Eduardo. El Cristo de espaldas (novel). Bogota: Ier Festival del Libro Colombiano, 1961. CELAM (Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano). Archives on Fomeque and Mons Augustin Gutierrez. Conferencias episcopates de Colombia, Tome 1, 1908-53. Bogota: El

Catolicismo, 1965. Collective pastoral letter, May 6, 1948, p. 464. Eguren, Juan A., SJ. El derecho condordatario colombiano. Bogota: Universidad Javeriana, 1960. Franco Isaza, Eduardo. Las Guerrillas del llano. Bogota, 1959. (Also Pro¬ logue by Juan Lozana y Lozano, esp. p. iv.) Fluharty, VeronLee. op. cit. esp. pp. 43-142. Gaitan, Jorge Elicier. Gaitdn. Bogota: Suramerica Ltda. Esp. p. 415. Gomez, Laureano. Desde el exilio. Bogota, 1956. Herrera, Ernesto Leon. Lo que el cielo no perdona. Bogota, 1954. Pages 80-81 attribute the passage quoted to Joan de J. Franco in his mem¬ orandum to the military governor of Antioquia, July 1,1953. Lopez Michelsen, Alfonso. Los Elegidos (historical novel on Bogota in era of World War II). Bogota: Antares (4th edition), 1967. Montana Cuellar, Diego, op. cit. esp. pp. 185-86, p. 194. Rubio de Laverde, Lucila. Perfiles de Colombia. Bogota: Ed. Guadalupe, Ltda., 1965. Esp. p. 195 on the concordat. Santa, Eduardo. Nos duele Colombia. Bogota: Tercer Mundo, 1962. Torres Restrepo, Camilo and Corredor Rodriguez, Bertha. Las escuelas radiofdncasde sutatenza. Bogota: Feres, 1961. Esp. pp. 11-15. In English: Dix, Robert H. Colombia: The Political Dimensions of Change. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Martz, John D. Colombia, A Contemporary Political Survey. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1962. Maullin, Richard L. The Fall of Dumar Aljure, A Colombian Guerrilla and Bandit. Santa Monica, California: The Rand Corporation. P&yne, James L. Patterns of Conflict in Colombia. New Haven: Yale Uni¬ versity Press, 1968. For description of events week by week: Semana, illustrated review pub¬ lished in Bogota, 1945-61.

INDEX OF SOURCES

348

CHAPTER 5

Camilo Torres

Louvain: Author’s personal recollections of Louvain during two visits, 1957 and 1966; reminiscences of Isabel Restrepo, Gustavo Perez, Frangois Houtart

(tape-recorded interview,

1971), Luis Patino,

O.F.M., Gustavo Gutierrez, Beatriz Munos de Trujillo; letters from Isabel, New York, October and November 1954; Bogota, 1955 and 1956. Letter from C.T. to Fernando Rueda W. (CIDOC); letter from Mons. Arturo Franco to C.T., Bogota, November

1954;

“Camilo Torres en tant que pretre” by Frangois Houtart in Cercle des Etudiants Colombiens a Louvain, 1966; Padre Arturo Calle in El Correo, Medellin, November 4, 1970, p. 3; reference to El Cristianismo es un humanismo integral by C.T., cf. C y R, p. 94. Journeys to Paris, Berlin, Chartres, etc.: testimony of Guitemie Olivieri (Mexico, 1970; Havana, 1972), Luis Villar Borda, Jaime Vidal Perdomo, Miguel Triana Uribe, Rita Restrepo de Agudelo Villa. Let¬ ter (ms.) to C.T. from Guitemie, undated (private papers). Bogota, 1956: testimony Rev. Fernando Hurtado, Curia Bogota, 1971; Conversaciones con un sacerdote colombiana by Rafael Maldonado Piedrahita, Bogota: Antares, 1957. Pp. 28, 29, 31, 43, 54, 55, and footnote, p. 55. The ECISE: testimony Dr. Jaime Quijano Caballero (Bogota, 1972). Cf. also Guzman Campos, op. cit. (pp. 65 and ff.). Boletin informativo del ECEP (original name of ECISE), No. 2, November 2, 1956; C.T.inCyR, pp. 61 ff. The memoire: Approche statistique de la realite socio-economique de la ville de Bogota, Memoire de Licence. Camilo Torres. Louvain: Universite Catholique de Louvain, 1958. Cf. esp. pp. 1, 60, 73, 76, 83 and 84. Professors: cf. Jacques Leclerq. La libertad de opinidn y los catolicos. (1st edition in Spanish). Barcelona: Estela, 1964; three volumes by Charles Moeller on contemporary literature; Gustavo Thils. Teologia y realidad social. San Sebastian: Dinor, 1955. Esp. p. 9; quotes from Cardinal Suhard, Essor ou Declin de VEglise; Jacques Maritain. Humanisme Integral. Aubier, 1936. Esp. p. 192. Priest-workers: cf. l’Abbe Godin. France, Pays de Mission?; Henri Perrin. Priest Worker in Germany. Sheed and Ward; the works of l’Abbe

INDEX OF SOURCES

349

Michonneau; Albert Gelin. Les Pauvres de Yahve. (Private papers: pp. 16 and 17 underlined by C.T.) Minneapolis: cf. Theodore Caplow. The Sociology of Work. (Spanish edition, Madrid, 1958) esp. pp. 21, 22-23, 250, 333; letter from C.T. to Gustavo Perez R., Minneapolis, November 6, 1958; cre¬ dential stating that C.T. was Honorary Fellow of University of Min¬ nesota from October 13, 1958, to January 15, 1959 (private papers).

Historical Context

Fall of Rojas: cf. Martz, John D., op. cit., pp. 292-313; Semana, esp. years 1956-57; El Libro Rojo de Rojas. Bogota, 1970; Mesa, Dario, op. cit.; Vision. Santiago, September 2,1955, p. 13. Alberto Lleras: cf. Fals Borda, op. cit., p. 122; Vasquez Cobo Carrizosa. El frente nacional, Su origen y desarrollo. Cali. Esp. pp. 163-165; also Prologue by Alberto Lleras.

CHAPTER 6 Camilo Torres

Student activities: interviews with Rev. Enrique Acosta Rincon, Gloria Triana, Jorge Ucros, Alvaro Tomas Mosquera, Heman Zambrano, Marta Rodriguez, Octavio Belalcazar, Maria Arango, Guido Gomez, Guillermo Puyana, Fabio and Nestor Gutierrez and others. Apostolate: cf. Gustavo Perez. “Quelques aspects de l’universite en Colombie” in Revue de I’AUCAM, Louvain, 1957, p. 38 (“principal author of this article was C.T.,” says G. Perez): also “Los problemas sociales en la universidad actual,” by C.T., September 1956, in C y R, p. 90 ff.; statutes of La comunidad, 3 pages, typed (courtesy Fabio Gutierrez); archives of the chaplaincy, esp. Memorandum de la Capellania de la Universidad Nacional signed Enrique Acosta Rincon, Capellan

General,

Rafael

Gomez,

Capellan

Auxiliar

(courtesy

E. Acosta). Debut at the National: reconstructed from Camilo Torres, “La univer¬ sidad y la accion comunal” (Bogota: Conference at the Seminar on Community Development, May 1963), mimeographed, 7 pages. Death of Calixto: testimony Isabel Restrepo, Guillermo Correal (pupil of Dr. Calixto Torres), Fernando Umana (who recalled nostalgia

350

INDEX OF SOURCES

of C.T. on a visit to Duitama); Semana, No. 471, November 14, 1955, cites work of Calixto Torres. Visit to Caracas: testimony Dr. Jose Agustin Silva Michelena (Caracas, July 1971); and Gustavo Perez (for incident at airport). Sutatenza: Torres, Camilo with Corredor, Bertha, op. cit., printed in C y R, p. 171; cf. also El Campesino, weekly newspaper, and Mensaje de la direccion a los colaboradores de la institucion (Bogota: Annual Report Accion Cultural Popular, 1970). Salcedo, Jose Joaquin: documents of the polemics published in full in C y R, pp. 187-95.