ELN Ejercito de Liberación Nacional

On January 7, 1965 the second most important guerrilla movement in the history of Colombia emerged with the takeover of Simacota. The Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) was very influenced and supported by the Cuban Revolution. In fact, seven of the original founders of the ELN had received military training in Cuba in 1962; among them were the Vásques brothers, Fabio, who would become the undisputed leader of the group, and Manuel, Victor Medina Morón a former student at the Universidad Industrial de Santander (UIS) and a good friend of his Ricardo Lara Parada, also a former student at the UIS.33 Their experiences in Cuba led  to believe that the way to carry out a revolution like the successful Cuban one was to follow Che’s theory of the foco. The ELN conformed to a common Latin American model of left-wing guerrilla activity and thus drew its combatants, for the most part, from disaffected middle-class college students.
    The ELN reached its acme of this period in May of 1965 when Father Camilo Torres Restrepo joined its ranks. Camilo, or El cura Torres  as he was known, was a well-liked political figure in Colombia, educated in Europe, he was the chaplain at the National University and had a cadre of student followers, many of which later joined the ELN following his example. Torres had formed his own political movement, Frente Unido del Pueblo, but soon came to the conclusion that peaceful protest was ineffective against the entrenched oligarchy and the traditional parties. When Torres joined the ELN, he gave them a kind of legitimacy in the eyes of the people for if the man who had won their hearts thought that joining the armed struggle was the only way to achieve any kind of change then it must be true. Tragically, El cura Torres died soon after joining the ELN during a poorly prepared ambush of a small army patrol in 1966.