“When someone has worked hard, searched intensely for something, and faced countless setbacks, and suddenly the possibility of some achievement or success arises, one feels a great sense of satisfaction, as if to say, ‘All that effort, all that searching, all that struggle—finally, it feels like they’ve been answered…’”
Father Javier Giraldo’s words come with a long sigh after six decades of silence. In 2019, the Jesuit Catholic priest, human rights defender, and researcher requested that the Unit for the Search for Missing Persons (UBPD) locate the body of Father Camilo Torres Restrepo, who died in Operation “Dardo” during a battle between the ELN and the Army in the Santander region 60 years ago.
Torres was one of the many whose absence underscores the magnitude of the missing persons crisis in Colombia: at least 135,000 people were registered as missing as of 2016. For years, the whereabouts of the body of the man who was labeled the “guerrilla priest” remained a “buried question,” an echo suspended in history.
On February 15, 1966, at 10:30 a.m., he fell in Patio Cemento, San Vicente de Chucurí. He died in combat… struck by two bullets; he was 37 years old and, according to historians, had been in the ranks of the insurgents for no more than two months. For six decades, his absence was a body without a grave. In Santander, the land that saw him die, he lay in plain sight at the Municipal Cemetery, on the congested Calle 45 in the Campohermoso neighborhood of Bucaramanga.
His grave remained unmarked in a dilapidated military barracks for more than 50 years. It was located in the first ossuary of the block on the right, from where his remains were exhumed by the UBPD on June 19, 2024. The first remains to be interred in that Fifth Brigade cemetery were those of Camilo Torres.
“Our records indicate that no one could have imagined where Father Camilo Torres would be. The facts reconstructed by the humanitarian and extrajudicial investigation led by the Unit establish that he died on February 15, and approximately four days later, around February 19, a postmortem report was prepared for him and the other bodies found with him.
“That post-mortem report details the injuries that caused his death, including the condition of the body at the time of the events. And following this examination, he was buried in a clandestine grave in the Patio Cemento area, the location of which was known only to the Army,” recounts Carlos Ariza Castillo, an anthropologist with the Search Unit for Missing Persons.
He says it matter-of-factly, as if he were speaking of scientific evidence. But behind that statement lies a clear message: a man who was heavily sought after was out in the open, camouflaged in everyday life, where no one would have suspected him—as if Mao Zedong’s famous saying had come true: that the only way to hide is to be within the enemy’s ranks… In this case, Camilo Torres, even though he was labeled a guerrilla, spent more than 50 years in a military cemetery. Who would have imagined it?
After his death, he remained underground for three years, wrapped in four polyethylene bags, in a clandestine grave known only to the Army, next to the Cascajales River, at a location 85 degrees north-south with a ceiba tree as a landmark. He was then transferred to Barrancabermeja, where he was temporarily held, and finally to Bucaramanga, to the military cemetery, in a mahogany-colored urn purchased by the man who had been his great friend: General Álvaro Valencia Tovar himself, then commander of the Army’s Fifth Brigade in Bucaramanga and the man in charge of Operation Dardo… Paradoxically, they were childhood friends and enemies in war.
It was Valencia Tovar himself, in one of his final interviews with Semana magazine in 2007, who first hinted at the urn’s characteristics and the location of Camilo’s remains. “It’s not just any urn,” Ariza says. “It’s an impressive urn. I’d never been to a place where a coffin was preserved in such good condition.”
That detail was a line of evidence: the color, the quality, the description provided in 2007 by General Valencia Tovar. Everything was written down, everything had been said, but no one had managed to read it all… Until the UBPD decided to do so.
The investigation that made it possible to piece together the fate of Camilo Torres’s body was not a sudden revelation. It was a puzzle assembled from forgotten archives, scattered testimonies, and documents that for years had gone unread as clues.
“In the search for Father Camilo, for example, the triangulation of documentary sources stands out,” explains Manuel Criales, coordinator of the Search Unit’s Santander Territorial Team.
“Sometimes there are a number of documents, such as autopsy reports or old court records, that remain there and have not been made available for the humanitarian search outside the judicial system,” he notes. Archives of memory and victim testimonies also proved crucial in this reconstruction.
“The oral archives of victims, such as those of Amovi at the Industrial University of Santander, are a great source of information that allows us to get closer to that past and find clues about what happened to many missing persons,” adds Criales.
In Colombia, there were at least 135,000 registered missing persons as of 2016, and in Santander, as of 2024, the figure stood at 4,490. The search for Camilo Torres was not a privilege; it was a method—the same one applied to all cases. A ray of hope for those who are still waiting.
“It was almost an impossible possibility,” explains Ariza. Sixty years later, with eroded bones, minimal DNA, and parents who had died decades ago, identification seemed like an act of faith. But faith, in this case, was science.
On June 19, 2024, the UBPD team opened the vault, “the first one on the right,” as General Valencia Tovar had indicated. The concern: 55 years in an ossuary usually mean rotten wood, moisture, and irrecoverable fragments. However, the vault was dry, the urn almost intact.
When they opened it, they found mixed bone structures, arranged haphazardly: a large scapula, skull fragments, long, sturdy bones… A key point: those who knew Camilo knew he was over 1.80 meters tall.
And something else. “We found three right parietal bones,” says Ariza. “And a human being only has one.” They were not dealing with a single body; it was a mixed context, remains that likely shared a mass grave in Patio Cemento—comrades in arms, stories intertwined in death. Separating them was an act of surgical patience.
The right tibia was most likely to contain DNA—a small amount, yes, but the largest amount among the few. It was subjected to technology that uses light beams to measure the genetic material still present in the bone. On January 19, 2026, even after 18 bone fragments had been sent to a laboratory in the United States, the results arrived.
The genetic match with his father, Calixto Torres: 1.23 billion times more likely that he was his son. There is no such thing as 100% certainty in genetics, but sometimes the probability is so overwhelming that it becomes a moral certainty. Camilo Torres had been found.
His mother, Isabel Restrepo, died in 1973 while searching for him; she moved heaven and earth, wrote to the pope, to presidents, to anyone whose influence might lead her to find Camilo. She was, as Ariza says, “the first searching mother in this country”; she died without knowing where her son was… As is often the case for thousands of mothers in Colombia.
That drive to search, which defined Isabel Restrepo’s life, lives on today in other women who, too, refuse to accept their loved ones’ absence. One of them is Imelda Oliva Martínez Reyes, a “searching mother” in Santander, who began her own ordeal in 2004 when her daughter Astrid Angélica disappeared in Floridablanca… apparently at the hands of paramilitaries.
“It began on November 2, 2004, with the disappearance of my daughter Astrid Angélica… she was already 16 years old. From that point on, I became a mother searching for her child,” she says. Since then, the search has not stopped. Two and a half years later, a new pain struck: her son Ervin Hernando also disappeared.
“It has been a relentless, agonizing search, during which I’ve had to endure so much—threats, persecution—but that hasn’t stopped me from giving up,” she says. Her voice breaks; she is strong and, despite her pain, she holds back the tears that threaten to roll down her cheeks, already scarred by more than 22 years of crying. She carries the weight of that cross every day: “This is very difficult, every single day. There are few hours of sleep one can manage. Sometimes I dream about them, I talk to them, but I can’t remember what I said.”
There is something deeply symbolic about Camilo Torres’ discovery: the fact that his genetic profile—extracted years ago from his parents and relatives at the Central Cemetery in Bogotá and the Cristóbal Colón Cemetery in Cuba—proved crucial in bringing him back. It is as if the search for a mother and a father had spanned time.
What is most striking is not just that he was there, in Campohermoso, in an area traversed by generations. What is most striking is that the discovery is not a historical anecdote: it is a precedent. The technology used to identify a body with so little DNA available will now be applied to hundreds of recovered remains facing the same challenge.
“It will contribute to the identification of hundreds of bodies we have already recovered,” says Ariza. “And that face the same challenges as Father Camilo’s body”—that is the true discovery. It was not just a name recovered, but a refined method, an open door, a replicable hope.
But what does it mean to find someone 60 years later? “For us, it’s very satisfying to know that, even though he had been missing for 60 years, his family can now find peace of mind; they can finally go and lay a flower on his grave,” says Imelda Martínez. In the case of Father Camilo, his “social family”—since his parents and siblings died while waiting for him—has also found closure.
“The search is always the same: to know where they are and how they are… and that they had the privilege of finding Camilo Torres is a source of hopeful satisfaction, because we believe that we, too, will be able to find our relatives, (…) I buried my fear the day I lost my children, and that is what keeps me going,” adds Imelda.
For the leadership of the Search Unit for Missing Persons, the discovery also has broader significance. “It has taken two years of significant efforts to gather information and cross-reference documentary sources, which now allow us to formulate very credible hypotheses regarding his location and identity,” explains Luz Janeth Forero, director of the unit.
For Ariza, this discovery “brings hope to thousands of families who have likely been waiting for decades and are losing hope of ever finding their loved one… even if it’s just a single bone.”
“A single bone”—that phrase encapsulates the entire country, because the conflict not only killed, but also hid, obscured, and buried people without names. And every body that returns is a stitch in the torn social fabric.
“I am convinced that the only way to heal the wounds left by the conflict is to bring the disappeared home,” says the anthropologist. “That helps to mend the social fabric.”
He doesn’t speak like a politician; he speaks like a scientist, like someone who has held bones in his hands and seen how science can become a form of healing. Camilo Torres would be 97 years old today. For six decades, he was a legend, an ideological icon, a controversial figure. Today, he is once again a body with a name. And that changes everything.
Because when a country manages to find one of its most iconic disappeared persons, it proves that it can find the others. That even that “possible impossible” can become tangible if there is will, method, and memory.
Luz Janeth Forero, director of the UBPD, is emphatic that “every time a person is found, it offers the chance to overcome fear, to overcome anxiety, and to overcome the difficulties that have likely prevented them until now from coming forward, breaking the silence, and speaking about their missing loved ones.”
On Calle 45, where thousands walked without knowing it, there was for years a silent truth waiting to be properly understood. It wasn’t lost; it was misinterpreted, like so many stories in Colombia.
Today, that empty vault is not an absence; it is proof, it is a precedent, it is a message. Father Camilo is no longer a buried mystery; he is a returned body; he is a mother who, late but finally, from eternity, stopped searching alone. He is a right tibia that held the memory of a country. And, above all, he is proof that the search is not in vain, that even after decades, it is still possible to find those who are still being waited for.
What does this mean for history?
Andrés Correa, historian, archivist, and holder of a master’s degree in history from the UIS
Camilo Torres is a representative figure, more than just an enlightening one, because the figure of Father Camilo Torres had become a symbol of the insurgent resistance, especially for the ELN, so first and foremost, this is an act of restitution, of honoring and acknowledging the memory of the more than 135,000 disappeared in the country.
Although this is an event taking place 60 years later, it brings to light a reality we face in our country—an uncomfortable reality—namely that more than 135,000 people have met that tragic end of disappearance. And the tragedy is not solely for the disappeared; the tragedy—or let’s call it the daily burden—borne by the living is one of the issues I find very important, and bringing that to light is crucial. There are still many families searching, living in constant disappointment as day turns to night and they still know nothing of the people they are waiting for—or whom they somehow know will never return— but they want to know where their body is.
