Daniel Camargo Barbosa

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Daniel Camargo Barbosa : biography

January 22, 1930 – November 13, 1994

Interview

In June 1986 Francisco Febres Cordero, a journalist for the newspaper Hoy (Today), managed to arrange an interview with Camargo. It was difficult to get the interview due to the police blocking all access to Camargo, and the fact that Camargo himself demanded a large fee before he would let himself be interviewed. The journalist pretended to be part of a group of psychologists that were allowed access to the prisoner, allowing him to ask Camargo questions without arousing his suspicion.

Afterward Febres Cordero described him as highly intelligent, "He had an answer for everything and was able to speak of God and the Devil equally". Well-read, he cited Hesse, Vargas Llosa, García Márquez, Guimarães Rosa, Nietzsche, Stendhal and Freud, all knowledge that he acquired from a literary education during his time in prison on the Isle of Gorgona.

Death

It was reported that in November 1994, he was murdered in prison by Luis Masache Narvaez, the cousin of one of his victims.

Arrest

Camargo was arrested by two policemen in Quito on 26 February 1986 only a few minutes after he had murdered a 9-year-old girl named Elizabeth. The policemen were on patrol and approached him at the height of the avenue Los Granados, thinking that he was acting suspiciously. They were surprised to find that he was carrying with him a bag containing the bloody clothes of his latest victim, and a copy of Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. He was taken into custody and later moved to Guayaquil for identification. When he was arrested he gave a false name, Manuel Bulgarin Solis, but he was later identified by one of his rape victims who escaped.

Daniel Camargo very calmly confessed to killing 71 girls in Ecuador since escaping from the Colombian prison. He led authorities to the dumping grounds of those victims whose bodies had not yet been recovered. The bodies had been dismembered. While he told the Ecuadorean authorities of the locations of the bodies and how the sadistic crimes were committed, he showed no feelings of remorse. After raping his victims, he had hacked, slashed and crushed the girls with a machete. He gave a cynical explanation for choosing children. He wanted virgins "because they cried"; this apparently gave him greater satisfaction. According to Camargo, he killed because he wanted revenge on woman’s unfaithfulness. He hated them for not being what he believed women were supposed to be. His victims were all virgins.

Modus operandi

Camargo selected helpless, young, lower-class girls in search of work and approached them, pretending to be a foreigner who needed to find a Protestant pastor in a church on the outskirts of town. He explained that he had to deliver a large sum of money, which he showed them as proof, and he offered them a reward if they would accompany him to show him the way. He pretended that he was a stranger to the area, and hinted at the possibility of the girls getting a job at the factory. No one was suspicious of an older man accompanying a girl or young woman who could be his granddaughter. Carmago would then enter into the woods, claiming to be looking for a shortcut in order to avoid arousing suspicion in his victims. If the girls grew suspicious and drew back, he did not prevent them from leaving. Camargo raped his victims before strangling them, sometimes stabbing them when they resisted. After his victims were dead, he left their bodies in the forest to be picked clean by scavengers.