On December 4, 1986, Bogotá was the scene of one of the most tragic episodes in its history when Campo Elías Delgado, a former Colombian soldier fighting in the fields of Vietnam, murdered 29 people in a bloody journey that began in his own home and during which he murdered and burned his mother.
Since, The so-called Pozzetto Massacre left an indelible mark on the capital and is still remembered almost four decades later Both because of its brutality and because of the still-unanswered questions about the perpetrator’s motives and the fate of those who were close to him, such as the writer Mario Mendoza.
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Mendoza, in an interview with Caracol News Livetold how he met Delgado when both were in their last semester at university and were writing their respective theses.
The author specified that shortly before the crime they had common topics of study: Delgado was preparing a thesis on the character of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, while Mendoza worked on medieval circles inspired by the novel aura by Carlos Fuentes.
“I had a graduate student who used to be my school teacher, Eduardo Jaramillo. He was in the United States, he was already a professor in the United States and he sent me a bibliography that was not available in Colombia. So since we didn’t have the Internet and computers at that time, we had to rely on book traffic. And that’s how I know Campo Elías,” he said in the interview.
And he added: “One day as I was leaving class he came up to me and said: “You are Mendoza, you have a bibliography that I need”“, the author recalled.
The lack of resources at the time led Mendoza to refuse to loan their materials, even though they agreed to make photocopies to share information. Since then, both began a purely academic dialogue.
The author described Delgado as a brilliant person with sharp and controversial views, who was fluent in several languages and refused to read translations. “His opinions in class were always surprising… I liked that he was a little challenging and that his opinions always led to conflict“Mendoza commented in the interview.
According to the author, on the day of the massacre, Delgado went to the literature department to look for Mendoza, but did not find him. “He asked for me and couldn’t find me, he collapsed, became very bad-tempered and they basically took him out… the secretary called security and they took him out of the university,” the author said.
After leaving the campus at 7th Street and 40th Street, Delgado went to his residence at 7th Street and 53rd Street, where he murdered his mother, set her on fire, and then went looking for six other people in the building to kill them as well.
Delgado had previously murdered a student and her mother in an apartment on 116th Street with a military knife brought back from Vietnam. The author explained that according to criminal psychopathology, the brutality of these acts can be understood through the concept of the “moment of ecstasy.” in which the subject enters an altered state of consciousness and performs the actions in the midst of a frenzy.
After these first crimes, Delgado acted more calculatedly: he exchanged his weapon for a .38 caliber revolver and went to the Italian restaurant Pozzetto in Chapinero, where after a peaceful dinner he murdered more than twenty people. The images taken after the event reflected the extent of the violence unleashed: pools of blood, broken dishes and the petrified gestures of the victims.
The massacre was later recounted by Mario Mendoza in his book Satan, a work that originated from notes from his memories of Delgado.
“(…) I start immediately, the next day, December 5, 1986, taking notes for a story. I don’t know if it’s a story, a novel, but I start and say: ‘I can’t forget a lot of things’ and I start in a notebook and make notes of everything,” he remembers in the interview.
Years later the episode was also reconstructed Fugue State 1986, Production, on which Mendoza served as executive producer, and It appears on the platform as one of the most watched series in Colombia Netflix.
Over the years, Mendoza always wonders whether Delgado, when he looked for him that day, intended to have a final conversation or whether it was his fate to also be among the victims, a doubt that can never be resolved.
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