Richard Choque Flores was serving a sentence of 30 years without the right to a pardon, the longest term in Bolivian law, when a judge in La Paz granted him 18 months of house arrest on December 24, 2019. He had been convicted in 2015 of the kidnapping and murder of Blanca Rubí Limachi, a 20-year-old university student, in 2013. The release rested on a medical report describing incurable illnesses. The conditions it listed were gastritis, an ulcer and diabetes, among others, and Bolivia's justice minister later said none of them put his life at risk.
While he was out, two teenage girls disappeared in El Alto, the city next to La Paz. Lucy, 17, went missing in May 2021, and Iris Maylin, 15, on August 27, 2021. Police arrested Choque again in January 2022, after an investigation into a fake social media profile he had used to contact women. He confessed to killing the two girls, and their remains were found in El Alto. In the weeks that followed, investigators also found that his cousin, Fidel Lecón Choque, missing since 2011, had been killed.
Choque was convicted of the femicide of Lucy in March 2022, of the femicide of Iris in September 2022 and, in 2022, of the murder of his cousin, each with a 30-year sentence. In March 2023 he received a fifth sentence, of 15 years, for human trafficking and other charges involving the two girls. The judge who released him, Rafael Alcón, was arrested within days and charged with prevaricato, the Bolivian offense of a judge knowingly ruling against the law. The case brought women into the streets across Bolivia and led the government to review the releases of men convicted of rape and femicide.
Little is publicly known about Choque's early life. Bolivian outlets gave his age as 32 in January and February 2022 and as 34 in March 2023, and his full date of birth has not been published. He lived in El Alto with his mother and another relative, Los Tiempos reported in January 2022.
His cousin, Fidel Lecón Choque, had been missing since May 19, 2011, according to Opinión of Cochabamba. A Los Tiempos profile in February 2022 placed the killing in 2009 and said Fidel was reported missing in 2011. Either way, the young man's family had no answer for more than a decade. The crime came to light on February 2, 2022, Opinión reported, 11 years after his disappearance, when the search that followed Choque's second arrest found his remains.
Blanca Rubí Limachi was 20 years old and a university student when she was killed in 2013, according to Voz de América and Opinión. Los Tiempos reported in February 2022 that Choque had contacted her through Facebook before she disappeared. Reports on her case say little else about her life, her studies or her family.
Choque was arrested in 2013 and sent to prison. The justice minister, Iván Lima, said in January 2022 that a Tribunal Primero de Sentencia (a first-instance trial court) had sentenced him in 2015 to 30 years without pardon, through an abbreviated procedure, the Bolivian form of a plea agreement. Los Tiempos, citing the newspaper Oxígeno and agencies, dated the sentence February 12, 2015, and described the offenses as kidnapping and murder. Opinión dated a first conviction to November 2015 without saying which case it covered.
In January 2022 the justice minister warned that an accomplice in the 2013 femicide was free because the court file had gone missing. The government minister, Eduardo del Castillo, announced on January 31, 2022, the arrest of a 32-year-old man, identified by Los Tiempos only as José Luis C. M., whom he described as Choque's accomplice. Télam reported that the accomplice, who had also been granted house arrest, was recaptured a few days after Choque.
Choque served about six years of his sentence, Opinión reported. In 2019 he was moved to San Pedro prison in La Paz, Los Tiempos said.
On December 24, 2019, during the courts' end-of-year recess, Choque's request for house arrest reached Rafael Alcón Aliaga, the judge of the First Criminal Enforcement Court of La Paz, who was the judge on duty. Lima said Alcón granted it within three days, in a process that normally takes more than a month. Correo del Sur reported the order as resolution 890/2019 of December 24; Lima cited a decision issued on December 27. The order gave Choque 18 months of house arrest.
Alcón relied on Law 2298, Bolivia's sentence enforcement law, which lets prisoners with incurable, terminal illnesses serve the rest of a sentence at home. The medical assessment Choque submitted listed liver disease, chronic gastritis, a peptic ulcer, diabetes and bronchial asthma, according to the La Paz prosecutor's office. It was prepared by a doctor who had previously worked for the prosecution service. Los Tiempos reported that Alcón cited a report saying Choque had incurable conditions and acknowledged that it did not show they were terminal. After his recapture Choque himself said, from Chonchocoro prison, that no doctor had ever examined him and that the document used to free him had been falsified, Los Tiempos reported. The doctor who was said to have treated him was arrested.
Prosecutors said the release should never have been possible. The La Paz departmental prosecutor, William Alave, said the judge "no consideró la sentencia ejecutoriada de 30 años de prisión sin derecho indulto" (did not take into account the final sentence of 30 years without pardon), which barred Choque from any benefit under Law 2298. Lima put it more bluntly: "Este juez en tres días otorga libertad a un feminicida que no tenía derecho a salir ni un solo día de la cárcel" (in three days this judge freed a femicide who had no right to leave prison for a single day).
The supervision ordered with the release did not happen, according to Lima. The quarterly checks by a social worker were not carried out, and the file was never sent on to the enforcement court in El Alto that had jurisdiction over Choque's home. The president of Bolivia's Supreme Court of Justice, Ricardo Torres, told Correo del Sur that Choque had stopped signing the prosecution's control book by late 2020 and that he stayed free after the 18 months ran out. Torres said Alcón and two other enforcement judges should have revoked the benefit.
When the case broke in January 2022, the investigation file itself could not be located. Alave said prosecutors had searched the enforcement courts of both El Alto and La Paz without finding it. Lima said his ministry's review had identified further illegal acts, including the file's disappearance. Members of a women's collective in Potosí, speaking at a protest, accused Choque of buying his freedom; no court ruling on that allegation was reported.
After his release, Choque created a Facebook profile under a woman's name, Haide Mitzi Flores Alarcón, Opinión reported. Through it he contacted 77 women and girls, among them Lucy and Iris. Police and prosecutors described a scheme in which he offered young women money or work through fake profiles, then arranged meetings. Officials said he arrived dressed as an officer of the Fuerza Especial de Lucha Contra el Crimen (Felcc), Bolivia's criminal investigation police, with packets made to look like drugs placed in advance, and threatened the women with arrest unless they gave in to his demands. Police called him a "narcoextorsionador," a drug extortionist.
Investigators said in January 2022 that they had identified at least five victims of the scheme from different parts of Bolivia. Authorities estimated the number of women abused or extorted at about 77.
Lucy was 17 and was reported missing in May 2021. The reports on her case give her name with initials, Lucy M. R. Z., and say little else about her life.
Iris Maylin was 15. She had come to La Paz from Guanay to study, and lived with a relative in El Alto, where she went to school, according to the news agency ANF. She disappeared on August 27, 2021, and her family reported her missing that month. "Tenía la esperanza de encontrar con vida a mi hija, no esperaba enterrarla," her mother said at the burial (I had hoped to find my daughter alive; I did not expect to bury her).
Police found Choque through online patrols, Voz de América reported. The trafficking prosecutor, Sheila Rodríguez, said the case came to light on January 20, 2022, when he was arrested at a lodging in La Paz, where another victim of trafficking was with him. Télam gave the date of the arrest as January 24.
Choque confessed to killing the two girls, Télam reported, and the remains of two young women missing since the middle of 2021 were recovered in El Alto. In late January 2022 Iris was buried at the Cementerio General of La Paz, in a plot donated to her family. Neighbors chanted "Justicia para Iris" at her wake. The burial was provisional, ANF reported, because prosecutors might still order an autopsy.
Investigators searched the property with the help of trained dogs and luminol tests, said Boris Gutiérrez, head of the trafficking division of the La Paz police. They collected five cell phones, a computer and phone cards. Among the items found were school uniforms, graduation rings and diplomas that might have belonged to other victims, and relatives of missing people came to look at them.
Anger in the neighborhood ran high. Within days of the arrest, neighbors set fire to the house and demanded that Choque's family leave. Prosecutors postponed a planned partial demolition of the building, and the El Alto mayor, Eva Copa, joined the police in criticizing the prosecutors for pulling back from the operation. Choque's mother and sister were arrested as possible accomplices. "Tenemos los indicios, hemos hecho triangulación de llamadas," said the prosecutor Sarina Guardia (We have the evidence; we have triangulated calls), adding that the events could not have happened without the two women knowing. The outcome of the case against them has not been reported.
Choque was sent in pretrial detention to Chonchocoro, a maximum-security prison, Voz de América reported.
The release became a national scandal within days. In a social media post reported by Los Tiempos on January 28, 2022, President Luis Arce wrote that his government repudiated and condemned "la decisión del juez que liberó al feminicida" and demanded "una sanción ejemplar con todo el peso de la ley" (an exemplary punishment with the full weight of the law). Arce said a judicial officer who frees someone with such a record "atenta contra el derecho de las mujeres a una vida libre de violencia" (violates women's right to a life free of violence). The Supreme Court of Justice announced a criminal complaint against Alcón and two other judges the same day.
Alcón was arrested in late January 2022, on the day Iris was buried, when he went to the Felcc in La Paz to give a statement, and his court was taken over by investigators. He defended his decision to local reporters, saying Choque "cumplía con determinados requisitos" (met certain requirements) and that the measure was only for 18 months. Shortly afterward a La Paz anti-corruption court ordered him held in pretrial detention for six months, and he was sent to San Pedro prison. Del Castillo called him "la cara más vil de la justicia boliviana" (the vilest face of Bolivian justice).
Lima said a criminal organization inside the judiciary had protected the judge. He said complaints and disciplinary cases against Alcón had never gone anywhere and linked that to the fact that the judge's brother had presided over the Consejo de la Magistratura, the body that oversees judges. "Esto no es gratis, es resultado de la corrupción y es intolerable," Lima said (This is not free; it is the result of corruption and it is intolerable). The government asked the Consejo to remove Alcón from the bench.
Others connected to the release were investigated. Prosecutors said they would summon the doctor who signed the medical assessment, the two guarantors Choque presented to obtain house arrest and the social worker responsible for checking on him. A former secretary of Alcón's court and a social worker were arrested on charges that included breach of duty, Los Tiempos reported.
On March 2, 2022, the Third Anti-Corruption and Violence Against Women Court of El Alto found Choque guilty of the femicide of Lucy in an abbreviated proceeding and sentenced him to 30 years in prison without pardon, to be served at Chonchocoro, Correo del Sur reported. It was his second sentence after the 2015 conviction.
He was also convicted of the murder of his cousin, Fidel Lecón Choque. Los Tiempos and Opinión listed that conviction among his sentences in 2022 and 2023, with a 30-year term; the date and court of that judgment have not been reported.
On September 30, 2022, Choque received what Los Tiempos and the radio network Erbol called his fourth 30-year sentence, for the femicide of Iris. Los Tiempos named the court in March 2023 as the Third Sentencing Court for Anti-Corruption and Violence Against Women in El Alto. "Choque debe estar encarcelado hasta septiembre de 2052 en el penal de Chonchocoro de La Paz," the prosecutor, Edwin Sarmiento, said (Choque must remain in prison until September 2052 at Chonchocoro prison in La Paz).
The fifth sentence came on March 16, 2023. The Fourth Sentencing Court of La Paz, in an abbreviated proceeding, sentenced Choque, then 34, to 15 years at Chonchocoro for human trafficking, with other charges, with Iris and Lucy as the victims, ANF reported. Prosecutors presented a police action report, material evidence seized from him, the girls' missing-person poster, photographs from the search and the autopsy reports. Alave said the court had imposed "la máxima sentencia por los delitos investigados" (the maximum sentence for the offenses investigated).
The five sentences do not add up to a longer term. Bolivian law has no provision for cumulative sentences, Opinión noted, and the maximum penalty in Bolivia is 30 years without pardon, Voz de América reported.
On January 31, 2022, women marched in La Paz, El Alto, Santa Cruz, Potosí, Oruro, Tarija, Cochabamba and Sucre. In La Paz the feminist collective Mujeres Creando led a march that started at Choque's house in El Alto and went down to the Departmental Court of Justice, where marchers hung dolls on the gates, and then to the Ministry of Government. Demonstrators painted graffiti and threw red paint to stand for the victims. "Cuántas más tenemos que morir," they chanted (How many more of us have to die).
María Galindo of Mujeres Creando held up a list of judges, prosecutors and men convicted of rape or femicide who had been let out, which she said she would make public, and called for a high-level commission to review the cases within 180 days. "Es un fenómeno estructural," she said (It is a structural phenomenon). Lima called the protests "absolutamente justificado" and said: "Lo que nos queda es pedir disculpas por la indolencia y la grave retardación de la justicia" (What remains for us is to apologize for the indifference and grave delays of justice). He announced an evaluation of more than 1,000 judges and called the problem "un iceberg de corrupción." The ombudsman, Nadia Cruz, said it was infuriating that people accused of such crimes could then walk the streets freely.
The government created a Commission for the Review of Cases of Rape and Femicide on February 1, 2022, with members from the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and gave it 120 days to review sentences dating back to 2013, Télam reported. Within weeks, six convicted people released by three judges had been recaptured, and the Consejo de la Magistratura had ordered the intervention of 18 criminal courts. Prosecutors dismissed officials implicated in corruption and ordered inspections of every office handling rape, femicide and infanticide cases.
The debate went further. Héctor Arce Rodríguez, a deputy of the governing Movimiento al Socialismo, told Radio Splendid that "Richard Choque no debería vivir más" (Richard Choque should not live any longer) and proposed the death penalty for such cases, which Bolivia abolished in peacetime in 1997 and in all circumstances in 2013, El Litoral reported. The opposition senator Erick Morón reintroduced a bill for life imprisonment and chemical castration for murder, rape and related crimes. In February 2022 Bolivia's Catholic bishops cited the case as they called for "a suitable and impartial judicial system that restores confidence and hope," Crux reported.
OCCRP reported on July 12, 2022, that President Arce had signed a Law for the Protection of Victims of Femicide, the product of the review commission's work. It set prison terms of up to 20 years for judges and prosecutors who favor defendants in femicide, infanticide or rape cases, up from five to 10 years for the offense of prevaricato, and barred house arrest for such defendants. "No more impunity, no more prevaricating judges," Arce said.
In January 2023 prosecutors filed a formal indictment against Alcón for consorcio (collusion) and prevaricato and asked for 10 years in prison, his lawyer, Manolo Rojas, told Erbol. The prosecution dropped a separate charge of suppressing and destroying documents. Rojas said the defense would oppose the sentence and that "no es posible que una autoridad judicial sea enjuiciada por la aplicación de la ley" (a judicial authority cannot be put on trial for applying the law); he said his client would not admit prevaricato.
In December 2024 Alcón left San Pedro prison for house arrest, after almost three years in custody, Erbol reported in February 2025, citing a source connected to the case. He was described as elderly and in poor health. He still faced charges of prevaricato, collusion and breach of duty and had not been tried.
In a Los Tiempos feature in February 2022, the forensic psychologist Lorena Cox said Choque's conduct suggested antisocial personality disorder, marked by a lack of guilt, remorse and empathy, manipulation and a charming manner. She said such disorders "no son susceptibles de curar ni con tratamiento" (cannot be cured, even with treatment) and warned that therapy could help such a person feign remorse. The psychologist Albanella Chávez said such people usually show warning signs in childhood and adolescence.
The number of victims. Police and prosecutors spoke of about 77 women abused or extorted. Crux reported in February 2022 that he had confessed to killing three women and abusing at least 70 during his house arrest. El Litoral wrote that he was believed to have killed at least three women and one man. His convictions cover four killings: Blanca Rubí Limachi, his cousin, Lucy and Iris.
Further killings. Searches of the property in January and February 2022 were carried out to find any further remains, and items that might have belonged to other missing people were collected. No charge for any further killing has been reported.
The date of his cousin's death. Opinión gave May 19, 2011, as the date Fidel Lecón Choque went missing; a Los Tiempos feature placed the killing in 2009.
The date of the January 2022 arrest. The trafficking prosecutor gave January 20; Télam gave January 24.
The date and nature of the 2015 conviction. Los Tiempos dated the sentence February 12, 2015; Opinión referred to a first conviction in November 2015.
The judge's arrest. Reports from the time put the arrest in the last days of January 2022; a 2025 Erbol report dated it to February 2022.
Bribery. A protest group accused Choque of buying his release. No court finding on that point was reported.
May 19, 2011: Fidel Lecón Choque, Choque's cousin, is reported missing (date as given by Opinión).
2013: Blanca Rubí Limachi, 20, a university student, is killed; Choque is arrested and sent to prison.
2015: Sentenced to 30 years without pardon for her kidnapping and murder (dated February 12, 2015, by Los Tiempos).
2019: Moved to San Pedro prison, La Paz.
December 24, 2019: Requests house arrest; Judge Rafael Alcón grants 18 months within three days on grounds of incurable illness.
Late 2020: Stops signing the prosecution's control book, according to the Supreme Court president.
May 2021: Lucy, 17, is reported missing in El Alto.
August 27, 2021: Iris Maylin, 15, disappears in El Alto.
January 20 to 24, 2022: Arrested in La Paz; confesses to killing the two girls, whose remains are recovered in El Alto. Neighbors set fire to the family's house.
Late January 2022: Iris is buried in La Paz; Alcón is arrested and ordered held in pretrial detention; President Arce demands exemplary punishment.
January 31, 2022: Women march in cities across Bolivia.
February 1, 2022: The government creates a commission to review rape and femicide cases.
February 2, 2022: The killing of his cousin comes to light (Opinión).
March 2, 2022: Sentenced to 30 years without pardon for the femicide of Lucy.
2022: Sentenced to 30 years for the murder of his cousin.
July 2022: The Law for the Protection of Victims of Femicide is reported signed (OCCRP, July 12).
September 30, 2022: Sentenced to 30 years for the femicide of Iris.
January 2023: Prosecutors indict Alcón and ask for 10 years.
March 16, 2023: Sentenced to 15 years for human trafficking and other charges involving the two girls.
December 2024: Alcón leaves prison for house arrest, still awaiting trial.