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Colombian Inmate Serving Time for Two Femicides Is Charged With Killing His Partner During a Prison Visit

Merly Andrea Rengifo Cuadros, 33, came to El Barne prison in Cómbita for a Mother's Day conjugal visit. Efraín Sarmiento Cuero walked out and told guards he had killed her.

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Illustration: a walled prison in green Andean highlands under cloud

Visiting day at El Barne, the maximum-security prison outside Cómbita in Colombia's Boyacá department, fell on Mother's Day in 2023. Merly Andrea Rengifo Cuadros, 33, from the Valle del Cauca, came in at about 11 o'clock on the morning of Sunday, May 14, for a conjugal visit with her partner, an inmate named Efraín Sarmiento Cuero. She did not leave alive.

The Fiscalía, Colombia's national prosecutor's office, gave its account in a statement two days later. As guards were getting ready to call time on the conjugal visits, it said, Sarmiento Cuero walked out and told them he had just killed his woman. Prison staff went in and found her dead. According to the Fiscalía, the two had argued for a few minutes before he attacked her, and she died almost at once.

Sarmiento Cuero was already serving 34 years and eight months for killing two other women he had been involved with. The first, Cristiana Mendoza Maya, died in Cali in 2017. The second, Jacqueline Muñoz Ojeda, was killed in a motel in the department of Nariño, where, Infobae reported, staff discovered what had happened and the forensic service found signs of sexual and physical violence on her body. Infobae described the two cases as following the same pattern.

In that statement, published on Tuesday, May 16, the Fiscalía announced that it had brought him before a judge of guarantees and charged him with femicide in Rengifo Cuadros's death. The Fiscalía said its evidence showed she had been threatened by him, apparently out of jealousy. Judicial police found that he left marks on her body, allegedly to keep her from interacting with other men, and that he made her send photographs of where she was and take video calls so he could keep watch on her. The Fiscalía also said he was under a preliminary investigation for a violent sexual assault alleged to have taken place in 2019.

The killing raised a question the prison system had to answer: how an inmate in a maximum-security cell came to have a blade. Spokespeople for INPEC, the national prison service, told El Tiempo the cuts were made with a razor blade, and said the case was a warning to control such items inside the prison. A mobile crime lab from the police came to the prison to recover the body and collect evidence. As of the day after the killing, El Tiempo reported, her body was still at the forensic institute in Tunja and had not been claimed.

Accounts of the earlier killings differ. Infobae dates Muñoz Ojeda's death to June 3, 2020, in Pasto; El Tiempo, citing the case file, puts it on November 3, 2018, in a hotel in Policarpa. Both outlets give his combined sentence for the two killings as 34 years and eight months. Accounts of how Rengifo Cuadros died also differ: the Fiscalía described an attack with a bladed weapon, while preliminary versions reported by El Tiempo the day after said she was strangled and then cut at the neck. A femicide charge in Colombia is a formal accusation; no sentence in her death is reported here.

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