Richard Choque Flores was born in Bolivia on November 9, 1988. The first person he is known to have killed was his own cousin. Fidel Lecon Choque, eighteen, disappeared on May 19, 2011, after Choque promised to get him into the Army sergeants' school in Cochabamba in return for five thousand dollars. After killing him, Choque let the boy's mother, his aunt, believe he was still alive and asked her for more money to help his military career. She came to suspect the truth and reported him, and the complaint was dismissed.
Blanca Rubi Limachi disappeared on November 20, 2013. Choque had contacted her on Facebook under the name Mauricio Teran and promised to help her into the military college; instead he abducted, tortured, raped and killed her. The next day he called her mother from Blanca's phone, demanded twenty thousand dollars and told her not to go to the police. The mother, who did not have the money, went to the Special Force to Combat Crime. As part of the operation she left the money in a flower bed, and officers followed the man who picked it up and arrested him with an accomplice. Blanca's body was found buried at a property of the Choque family eight days after she disappeared. In 2015 Choque and the accomplice, Jose Luis Casilla Machaca, were sentenced to thirty years without right of pardon, the maximum Bolivian law allows; some reports date the sentence to 2013.
He served about seven years of it in the San Pedro prison in La Paz. There, it later emerged, he had been made a prisoners' delegate, a post his crime should have barred him from, and used it to extort other inmates; he also worked as a messenger in the prison's legal office and could leave without supervision. On December 24, 2019, Judge Rafael Alcon of the First Criminal Enforcement Court in La Paz granted him eighteen months of house arrest through an expedited procedure, on the basis that he was terminally ill, although he had a thirty-year sentence and more than seventeen complaints against him. He was not ill. It was reported that he paid a bribe of 3,500 dollars for his release after turning down a lawyer who wanted ten thousand.
Out of prison, he opened a Facebook account in a woman's name, Haide Mitzi Flores Alarcon, and wrote to seventy-seven women offering good daily earnings in their free time. Most of them were short of money or in family trouble. He asked them for sex work or for courier jobs, took them to lodging houses, drugged them, and then, presenting himself as a police officer, planted drugs, made them record videos confessing to possession, and threatened them with arrest unless they gave him money or sex. Many were raped.
Lucy Maya Ramirez Zambrana, seventeen, disappeared on May 17, 2021. Choque demanded seventy thousand bolivianos from her family and sent her mother photographs of dismembered bodies with a message: "I leave you some photos of people who broke our rules. If you go to the police with this message, we will take other measures. Keep to what was agreed to have your loved one back." Iris Maylin Villca Choque, fifteen, disappeared on August 27, 2021. He asked her family for fifty thousand bolivianos and, they said, sent them pictures of her alive and tied to a bed.
One of the women he had trapped through Facebook reported him, and he was arrested on January 26, 2022. On his phone police found messages about the two missing girls. He confessed and said where they were. One was buried in a disused room of the house in the Ballivian district of El Alto where he lived with his mother and sister; Lucy had died of a head injury. On February 2 the remains of the second were found at another family property, the same one where Blanca had been found in 2013. An empty grave dug at his house was believed to have been meant for another victim. Fidel's remains were found that February as well. Accounts of his death differ: Choque's own account had him burning the body, and the forensic finding was that he had been poisoned and his head severed.
Police did not rule out more victims, since he traveled to Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. When angry neighbors broke into his house, the daughter of a missing chef, Jose Luis Mamani Garcia, found her father's cap and apron there; police said the two men had been in a relationship and that the chef's last phone call had been made from Choque's house, but no link to his disappearance has been proved. Estimates of the women he raped run from sixty to more than seventy, and the trafficking investigation identified more than seventy victims. The head of the Bolivian police, Jhonny Aguilera, said he had an antisocial personality disorder with the core traits of a psychopath. In 2024 a lawyer was accused of having taken part in his crimes and covered for him.
The sentences came in sequence. Thirty years without pardon for the femicide of Lucy, at an abbreviated hearing before the Third Anti-Corruption and Violence Against Women Court in El Alto on March 2, 2022, counted from his detention on January 26, 2022, to January 26, 2052. Thirty years in September 2022 for the murder of his cousin. A further sentence for the femicide of Iris. A fifth in March 2023 for trafficking, procuring and pornography. Five sentences, four of them of thirty years, and no more than thirty years to serve, because Bolivian law has no provision for consecutive terms or life imprisonment.
The release changed more than the killings did. Judge Alcon was arrested and sent to San Pedro on remand for prevarication. On January 31, 2022, women marched in cities across Bolivia against male violence and corrupt justice; in La Paz the march set out from Choque's house to the departmental court, where effigies of femicides, rapists and corrupt judges were hung at the doors. "If they had not let him out, this would never have happened," said Lucy's aunt, Marina Mamani. By February 18 it was known that at least 135 men convicted of rape or femicide were not serving their sentences. The government formed a commission that spent a hundred and twenty days reviewing femicide cases in which convicted men had been let out irregularly, and six freed rapists and femicides were recaptured. The governor of San Pedro was removed. Legislators called for chemical castration and, although the constitution forbids it, the death penalty. Neighbors tried to burn down Choque's house, and because the police had not sealed it, people carried away clothing and jewelry that might have been evidence.
Two of the four killings covered by his convictions happened after the state had already convicted him of the first and then let him out. Bolivian press put his age at thirty-two in January 2022 and thirty-four in March 2023. As of January 2026 he remained in the Chonchocoro prison.