Passport photo of Campo Elias Delgado |
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| Background information | |
|---|---|
| Birth name | Campo Elías Delgado Morales |
| Occupation | English teacher |
| Born | 14 May 1934 Chinácota, Colombia |
| Died | 4 December 1986 Bogotá, Colombia |
| Cause of death | Shot by police |
| Killings | |
| Date | 4 December 1986 |
| Location(s) | Bogotá, Colombia |
| Killed | 30 |
| Injured | 15 |
| Weapon(s) | Hunting knife Revolver (.32 calibre) |
Campo Elías Delgado (14 May 1934 – 4 December 1986) was a Colombian Vietnam War veteran who killed 30 people, and wounded 15 more, most of them at a luxurious Bogotá restaurant called Pozzetto, before apparently being shot dead by police. Since he only had a revolver and a knife and many of the dead were killed by an Uzi, it is alleged that the police were responsible for some of the deaths.[1]
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Delgado was born 14 May 1934, in Chinácota, Colombia and he studied medicine. In 1970 he reportedly served in the U. S. military in the Vietnam War, even though he was a decade too old to be drafted. Friends reported that his experience in Vietnam had made him antisocial and bitter. A refugee in the streets of New York, after a fight with a thief he returned to Bogotá. Delgado then lived by teaching private English lessons and was taking graduate studies at the Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá. He was no longer able to develop friendships, for which he blamed his mother, Rita Elisa Morales de Delgado, and his father had committed suicide when Delgado was married in Argentina. As the years went by, he grew more and more resentful of his mother. The capstone of this story of loneliness was the murder of his mother on 4 December 1986, after which he embarked on a horrific killing spree.
The murders started in the afternoon of 4 December 1986 in the apartment of one of Delgado’s English students. There he stabbed to death his 15 year old pupil Claudia Rincón and her mother, Nora Becerra de Rincón.
He then returned to the apartment he shared with his mother. Delgado packed his briefcase full of ammunition and loaded his pistol. He walked up behind his mother and killed her with a single stab to the back of the neck. He wrapped her corpse in newspapers and set them on fire and ran through the apartment complex screaming "¡Fuego! ¡Fuego!" (Fire! Fire!) luring people into the main hallway, where he killed them one by one. He killed one man with the knife, then took the firearm from the briefcase and opened fire on others, killing five more people.
He then left for the Italian restaurant in the Chapinero district. He carried a .32 calibre revolver, five boxes of ammunition hidden in a briefcase, and a hunting knife, which he discarded while walking to the restaurant.
Delgado arrived at the restaurant at around 19:30 EST and ordered an expensive meal (spaghetti alla bolognese according to accounts of survivors and Mendoza's book), red wine, and eight vodka tonics. About one hour into the dinner, he opened fire on the diners. A woman quickly called police who arrived ten minutes later. Delgado had shot twenty-one people to death, mostly women, by the time police arrived. His method was to corner his victim and shoot them at point-blank range in the forehead and then move on to the next victim. A further fifteen were wounded. Delgado promised himself not to kill any children, but he accidentally killed a six-year-old girl sitting at an adjacent table when his pistol misfired. When police arrived Delgado turned his attention to them, holding them off for one minute. He was apparently killed with a shot to the temple by a police officer. There is also a belief that Delgado committed suicide. After some time, police discovered with a comparison of the bullets that Delgado was shot by a police officer, when he was reloading.
Those killed by Delgado were:[2]
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Among the wounded were: Victor Mauricio Pérez Serrano, Maribel Arce de Pérez, Juliet Robledo, Jose Darío Martínez, Miriam Ortiz de Parrado, Alfonso Cubillos, Yolanda Garzón de Cubillos, Jhon Cubillos Garzón and Pedro Jose Sarmiento
In 2002, Colombian writer Mario Mendoza Zambrano published “Satanás” (Satan), a novel that analyzes the case of Delgado. The book was very successful and received several international awards. Mendoza Zambrano met Delgado at the university in Bogotá when he was a literature student, and he actually talked to Delgado just a couple of days before the massacre.
In 2006, Colombian film makers Rodrigo Guerrero (Producer) and Andi Baíz (Director), adapted "Satanás" into a film (with the same title). The story is framed in a context of urban solitude in the modern world and sheds some light on the motivations and anxieties of Campo Elias Delgado but avoiding explicit or manichean conclusions.