Richard Choque Flores was first convicted for the kidnapping, rape and femicide of Blanca Rubi, a woman in her twenties, and sentenced to thirty years without right of pardon, the maximum Bolivian law allows. Reporting dates that sentence to 2013 in some accounts and to November 2015 in others.
He served about seven years of it. In December 2019 Judge Rafael Alcon of the First Criminal Enforcement Court in La Paz granted him house arrest through an expedited procedure, on the basis that he was terminally ill. He was not.
Out of prison, he used Facebook. He offered women money for sex work or for courier jobs, took them to hotels, drugged them, and then, presenting himself as a police officer, threatened them with arrest unless they submitted to him. One of those women reported him, which led to his arrest in January 2022. Police examined his phone and found messages relating to two missing girls. He confessed to killing them and said where they were: Iris, fifteen, and Lucy Maya Ramirez Zambrana, seventeen, both buried in a disused room of his house in the Ballivian district of El Alto. Lucy had been reported missing in mid-May 2021, and her family said he had demanded seventy thousand US dollars for her life and threatened to return her in pieces.
He admitted raping more than seventy women, and the trafficking investigation against him identified more than seventy victims. When police looked for others buried elsewhere, he confessed to a further killing from about eleven years earlier: his cousin Fidel, whose body he had burned and buried at another of his properties, and whose remains were found in February 2022.
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, to run until 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.
The part of this case that changed anything was the release. Judge Alcon was arrested and sent to San Pedro prison on remand for prevarication. 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. A complaint alleged that the court where Alcon worked had released more than a dozen killers of women and other dangerous prisoners. Neighbours of Choque tried to burn down his house.
Four deaths are covered by convictions here. Two of them happened after the state had already convicted him of the first and then let him out.