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Daniel Camargo Barbosa: Colombia's Forgotten Monster

Jun 5
3 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Daniel Camargo Barbosa is one of the most prolific — and most overlooked — serial killers in modern history. Linked to the rape and murder of at least seventy-two girls, and suspected in well over a hundred more, he terrorised Colombia and Ecuador across the 1970s and 1980s. His case is notable not only for its scale but for an extraordinary prison escape that allowed him to kill again, and for the way poverty rendered his young victims almost invisible. Out of respect for those victims, this account avoids graphic detail.

Daniel Camargo Barbosa: Colombia's Forgotten Monster

His name remains far less known than that of many killers with smaller tolls, and that obscurity is itself part of the tragedy.

A damaged childhood

Camargo was born on 22 January 1930 in Anolaima, in Colombia's Cundinamarca region. His mother died when he was an infant, and accounts describe a distant father and an abusive stepmother who reportedly humiliated him, at times dressing him in girls' clothing and sending him to school that way, exposing him to ridicule. Despite the turmoil, he was remembered as an intelligent student. As with all such histories, a difficult upbringing may form part of the background to later violence, but it explains nothing and excuses nothing.

The roots of an obsession

As an adult, Camargo's life took a darker turn through a fixation on virginity. After a relationship soured over the issue, he developed an obsession that, according to investigators, drove his earliest sexual crimes against children. By the early 1970s this had escalated into predatory violence, setting the pattern that would define the rest of his life and lead to his first conviction.

First murder and imprisonment

In 1974, while living as a street vendor, Camargo abducted and murdered a young girl, reportedly killing her to prevent her from reporting him. He was arrested soon afterwards and, in time, sentenced to a long prison term, sent to Gorgona Island — an isolated penal colony off Colombia's Pacific coast often described as the country's Alcatraz. For most offenders, that would have been the end of the story; for Camargo, it was only an interruption.

The escape

In November 1984, Camargo escaped from Gorgona in a small, makeshift boat, having reportedly studied the ocean currents. Authorities assumed he had drowned or been killed at sea, and the press even reported that sharks had ended him. In reality, he had reached the mainland and made his way into Ecuador — free, unknown to local police, and more dangerous than ever, with a clean slate in a country that had no idea who he was.

A new killing spree in Ecuador

Between 1984 and 1986, Camargo committed a series of at least fifty-four rapes and murders in and around the Ecuadorian port city of Guayaquil. He typically targeted poor young girls, luring them by posing as a harmless stranger or a foreigner needing help with directions, then leading them to isolated areas. Because the victims were often from impoverished families, and because investigators initially believed a gang must be responsible, the true scale of the killings went unrecognised for a chilling stretch of time.

Capture, and death behind bars

Camargo was re-arrested in February 1986 near Quito after police, struck by his nervous behaviour, stopped to question him. A search turned up clothing stained with the blood of his most recent victim and, strikingly, a copy of Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'. He gave a false name at first, but a surviving victim helped confirm his identity, and he then confessed, calmly, to dozens of murders. Because Ecuador had no death penalty and capped prison terms, he received a sentence of only sixteen years — and he never served the full term, being stabbed to death in prison in November 1994 by a relative of one of his victims.

Estimates of Camargo's victims range from the seventy-two he was most directly connected to up to a hundred and fifty or more, placing him among the deadliest killers ever recorded. His case underscores a recurring, painful theme in the region's history: that when victims are poor and marginalised, their disappearances are slow to be noticed and quick to be forgotten. Remembering those girls, and the failures that allowed the killing to continue, is the more important half of the story.