Directed by Carlos Moreno and Claudia Pedraza, Fugue State 1986 derives its inspiration from the real-life Pozzetto Massacre that the people of Colombia still remember as one of the darkest days in their history. On 4th December 1986, a man named Campo Elias Delgado (renamed Jeremias Salgado in the Netflix series) walked into a restaurant (Pozzetto) in the Chapinero district of Bogota, Colombia, after killing his own mother and a few neighbors. At the restaurant, the man killed around 19 people and then later was shot dead (or, as a few witness testimonies suggested, took his own life) by the police. So let’s find out, of all the events shown in the series, what happened in real life and where the makers took certain creative liberties.
Is Camilo based on a real-life person?
In Fugue State (1986), we saw that Jeremias Salgado, the character who, as stated before, is inspired by the real-life killer Campo Elias Delgado, goes to a local university in Bogota, Colombia. He befriends a troubled man named Camilo Leon, with the sole intention of profiling the man and brainwashing him. Well, the character of Camilo Leon is fictional, and the makers, through him, wanted to delve deep into the psyche of Campo Delgado and understand him better. Leon was suffering from dissociative amnesia, where he lost his memories and had a hard time remembering the details of certain traumatic events that had happened in his past. It could be said that Leon was a witness to how Delgado planned the massacre, what he felt at a specific point in time, what kind of man he was, and what fueled him to kill so many innocent people who had done nothing to harm him. It is to be noted that Delgado did attend a local university called Universidad Javeriana, but there are no reports to suggest he made friends there or tried to brainwash somebody and transform him into a hardened killer.
Did Delgado kill his mother in real life?
Delgado’s father had taken his own life, after apparently suffering a nervous breakdown. Delgado has a strained relationship with his mother, Rita Delgado (renamed Carmenza in the series), and according to some reports, the sociopath blamed her for the death of his father. The poor woman had done no wrong, but after his father’s death, Delgado tortured her to the extent that she constantly lived under the fear that one day he would just turn up and murder her. Rita’s fears were not baseless, as she had seen how violent her son could get. There were times when the neighbors heard Rita crying, and it was not hard for them to decipher that Delgado physically abused her. It is true that Delgado didn’t like it when she interacted with the neighbors or even her friends. Rita was trapped in her own house, and she didn’t know how she would escape her fate.
On 4th December 1986, Delgado entered his apartment, which was located in Chapinero, Bogota. He had a heated argument with his mother, and then he stabbed her to death. He covered her body with newspapers and then burnt it in an attempt to destroy all the evidence. On his way out, he killed the other people living in the apartment too. Gordi Galat, Nelsy Cortes, and Gloria Agudelo Leon were killed because they tried to ask for help and tell the authorities about the fire. There was no particular motive behind him murdering those ladies. He barely knew them, and obviously he didn’t have anything against them. I believe the lack of motive behind these murders made certain experts conclude that Delgado could have been a misogynist who had some inherent hatred towards women. But this speculation wasn’t backed by proper evidence, and so one couldn’t say for sure that that was the reason behind him killing them. Maybe he was just a sociopath who killed everybody who came his way once he decided to go on a rampage.
Why did Delgado murder his student and her mother?
Just like it was shown in Fugue State 1986, the real-life killer, Campo Delgado, killed his student, Claudia Rincon, and her mother, Nora Becerra Rincon. In the Netflix series, it is shown that Delgado had gotten to know that his mother, Rita, had called Nora (renamed Nidia in the series) and asked for help. His mother had sensed that her life was in danger and that things were going to get out of hand. She tried to escape from the house before her son killed her, but she failed. In real life, it couldn’t be ascertained why exactly he killed Nora and her daughter. Though Nora knew Rita from before, since they’d lived in the same building in the past, there was no evidence to prove that Rita had asked for her help and that Delgado had overheard that conversation. The man had stabbed Claudia, his student, 22 times, and I can’t even begin to imagine how petrified his victims would have felt in those last moments.
Why did Delgado kill people in the Pozzetto restaurant?
A day before the Pozzetto Massacre, Delgado went to his local bank and withdrew all the money from his account. Then he bought a gun and enough bullets to wreak havoc on the entire town. On the 4th of December 1986, the man went to Pozzetto restaurant, a place he visited quite often. He didn’t sit at his usual table that day, and instead chose to sit somewhere he would get a clear view of other customers. Since he was a regular customer, the waiter and other staff knew him. Alfonso Guareme, the waiter who usually took his order, told the media that, that day, Delgado ordered alcohol, something that he didn’t usually do. He gave a large top to Alfonso, went to the washroom, and then unleashed hell on the people sitting there. He killed 19 people, while 12-13 were gravely injured. The police surrounded the restaurant from all sides, and there was a shootout in which many customers became collateral damage.
Some reports suggested that the man took his own life, as he knew that he wouldn’t be able to make it out of there alive. The question that came to my mind was why did Delgado kill so many innocent people? The most logical deduction is that he was suffering from severe PTSD and other mental health issues. The man had been enlisted in the Colombian Navy and had also served in the US Army. A few of his colleagues later said that though he called himself a war veteran, he hadn’t served in the Vietnam War. They said that he was honorably discharged a couple of months before the war began. I believe it could have been a possibility, and apart from many other things he has imagined, he would have made himself believe that he went to Vietnam and fought in the war. After he came back to Bogota, he started mistreating his mother. He kept an eye on her movements and often physically abused her. Probably a part of him saw women as abominations, though on the contrary, he was quite cordial and friendly with a few of them. In the series it was shown that the man quoted some lines from the film, Taxi Driver, before shooting at the customers sitting in the restaurant but there was no evidence to suggest that he actually did that. It was just a conspiracy theory that the man was inspired by the character of Travis Bickle, probably because of the hatred he had for Colombian society in general.
