Three Paths to Martyrdom: Ambrose Bierce, Camilo Torres, and Héctor Gallego

Martyr, n. One who moves along the line of least reluctance to a desired death.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Todo cuanto constituya un obstáculo para la lucha revolucionaria—nuestros estudios, nuestro trabajo, nuestro bienestar, aun nuestra propia familia—es necesario abandonarlo para entregarnos de lleno a la lucha por la toma de poder hasta la muerte.
Camilo Torres

Si desaparezco, no pierdan el tiempo buscándome—sigan en la obra.
Héctor Gallego

It is the cause, not the death, which makes the martyr.
Napoleon Bonaparte



In 1913, at the age of 71, Ambrose Bierce, the notoriously cynical American writer and journalist, left the United States, crossing the border into Mexico to join Pancho Villa and his rebels. In a letter to his niece, Bierce wrote: "Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags, please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia."

Bierce’s last correspondence was dated December 26, 1913. The envelope bore a postmark from Chihuahua. In that letter, Bierce stated that the next day he was leaving for Ojinaga to join Villa’s forces as they prepared to attack the city’s long besieged fortress.

That was the last anyone ever heard from him. One can only hope that in Ojinaga, Ambrose Bierce met the “desired death” he mentions in his definition of martyr, which appears in his best known work, The Devil's Dictionary.

Over half-a-century later, on February 15, 1966, Camilo Torres, one of the first to join Colombia’s Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), was killed during a blotched guerilla ambush in the mountains of his native country. It was the first and last time he would see combat.

The death of this charismatic former Catholic priest was amply covered in the world press. Instantly, Camilo Torres became an international icon—a revolutionary cleric who sacrificed his life to bring about a just world. Torres’s martyrdom had a particularly big impact in Latin America. His prestige reached such heights that another renowned martyr, Victor Jara of Chile, composed one of his most memorable songs in his honor. And for a couple of decades Camilo Torres’s name would be mentioned in the same breath as Che Guevara’s—this before the world tired of Colombia’s seemingly never-ending armed conflict.

Only a few years after Torres’s death, on the night of June 9, 1971, Héctor Gallego, another Colombian priest, was kidnapped by members of Panama’s security forces. For three years he had served the people of Santa Fe as their parish priest. He was never seen or heard from again.

In life, as well as in death, Héctor Gallego has often been compared to Camilo Torres.

Indeed, the men had much in common. Both were Colombians and, as priests, they were greatly concerned about the plight of the poor. Moreover, they believed that the Catholic Church should be proactive with regard to social issues, particularly in helping to build a world in which wealth is more fairly distributed.

Still, in spite of these similarities, their differences are striking.

Camilo Torres came from a prominent family. He grew up among Bogotá’s upper class and had the privilege of a first-rate education. Immediately after being ordained, Torres left Colombia to attend the Catholic University of Louvain, in Belgium, where he earned a masters’ degree in sociology. Once back in his homeland, in addition to his ministry, he taught at the Universidad Nacional. Torres also served as a high-ranking member of several organizations that promoted land reform to benefit the rural poor.

But the Colombian priest quickly became exasperated by the ruling class’ ability to block or stall proposals of significance. An ardent admirer of Cuba’s swift social and economic transformation during the early years of La Revolución, he wished the same for his country. Stirred by the urgency with which he wanted to achieve this, his viewpoints grew increasingly radical.

Torres was close friends with Gustavo Gutiérrez—the Peruvian priest whose enormously influential book, La teología de la liberación, gave rise to the theory and practice of liberation theology in our hemisphere. But even Father Gutiérrez—whose notion’s about the Church’s role in alleviating the suffering of the poor were long ago declared to be in conflict with Catholic doctrine—found Camilo’s ideas too provocative, and he cautioned his colleague to adopt a more moderate stance.

But in spite of Gutiérrez’s counsel, Torres began to write articles and make public statements that, in essence, called upon the urban working class and the rural poor to rise up in arms. These pronouncements set him on a collision course with his superior, Cardinal Luis Concha Córdoba.

The priests went public with their dispute, engaging in a written debate on religious and social matters that appeared in Colombia’s leading newspapers. Through this exposure, Father Torres became the darling of his nation’s left. But the Cardinal soon tired of arguing with Torres and, in reprisal, gave him a socially irrelevant assignment. Saddened by what he perceived as the Church’s indifference to social justice, Camilo resigned from the priesthood.

Once freed of the restrictions imposed by the cloth, however, Torres started his own political party. He became a major figure in the Colombian presidential campaign of 1965, urging his compatriots to abstain from voting to show their dissatisfaction with the political system. But yet again, as had been the case throughout Torres’s entire life, impatience got the better of him, and he suddenly vanished, without a trace, from public view.

When he resurfaced, several months later, it was as a full-fledged member of the ELN—Colombia’s oldest guerrilla group. And not long after that, when Camilo died in combat, he immediately joined the pantheon of Latin America’s most noteworthy revolutionaries.

Unlike Camilo Torres, Héctor Gallego was of humble origins—an agriculturalist family from rural Antioquia. He was a simple man who immediately after his ordination left his loved ones and his country to become the first parish priest in the four-hundred year history of Santa Fe, a small town in the mountains of Veraguas, Panamá. As recently as the early 1970s, the trip from Santiago, the province’s capital city, to Santa Fe, took nine hours. Today one can make the journey in a little over an hour. Partly because of the lack of access roads, when Gallego arrived to his first assignment, the poor of Santa Fe lived in a feudal state, with the local caciques controlling many aspects of people's lives.

Although Héctor Gallego had come to tend to the spiritual needs of his parishioners, when he witnessed the exploitation the campesinos were subjected to, he realized that his first task would be to help set them free. It is here where the most important difference between the Colombians emerges: Gallego was a pacifist. Early in his ministry, in a monthly parish bulletin, Gallego wrote that his role models for transforming society were Jesus, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.

With the support of the leadership of his diocese, Gallego urged the poor to pool their resources to form a cooperative—an institution that still survives, and very successfully, to this day. And the young priest worked tirelessly, with missionary zeal—walking countless miles along the mountain and jungle paths of Veraguas to tend to the physical, educational, and spiritual needs of the poor, the ignorant, and the sick.

Tragically, the success of his efforts placed him in grave personal danger—as in only a short time it had altered the social order of Veraguas’ mountain ranges to the detriment of the local caciques. In the end, although Gallego helped to liberate the poor from living as virtual slaves—by teaching the campesinos that there is strength in unity—the role he played in leading them to freedom cost him his life.

Because of the quiet, serene diligence of his ministry, Héctor Gallego’s death did not resound internationally, as did Camilo Torres’s. But today, in Santa Fe, many people believe that he was a prophet, and that he is a saint.

All three men—Bierce, Torres, and Gallego—took different paths to martyrdom. Ambrose Bierce, in an entirely selfish act, checked out of this world in a blaze of glory because he considered such a death far more respectable than succumbing to old age or disease. The mystery surrounding his end has become fodder for fiction, most notably for the Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes, who, in his novel Gringo Viejo, allows Bierce to meet his “desired death” before a Mexican firing squad.

Inspired by the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Torres attempted to change the face of Colombia. To do so, the former priest chose the path of armed insurrection, and in a statement divulged from his mountain hideout, he called upon others to follow his example. In a heartrending metaphor for the desired revolution that would remain forever beyond Torres’s grasp, he was killed while reaching out to strip a fallen soldier of his rifle.

Héctor Gallego died empty-handed, without so much as a rosary to give him comfort. In his final sermon, he reminded his parishioners that love always reigns over hate, peace over violence. What’s more, sensing the imminence of his death, he told the people of Santa Fe that if he disappeared, they should not waste their time looking for him; he believed it more important that they continue strengthening the community he had helped them build.

Unquestionably, the noblest martyrdom is that of Héctor Gallego. His sacrifice was never about becoming a myth or about altering the destiny of a nation: it was simply about bettering the lives of the impoverished men, women, and children of El Pueblo de Santa Fe.