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La Paz (AFP) - Hundreds of women marched Monday from the city of El Alto to La Paz against gender violence and demanded justice for victims of sexual crimes in Bolivia.
"From 29 November 2020, when I was raped, to date, I haven't found justice, it's already been two years," said Karen Mendoza, a 29-year-old social communicator.
"They kill us, they kill us as if we were animals! (...) Every day more women die and we are naturalising this", said Beerseba Sarzuri, 27, a university student and sister of a victim of sexual violence, in tears.
The trigger for the protest was the capture of Richard Choque Flores, a femicide who had been sentenced in 2013 to 30 years in prison without pardon, but released in 2019.
Last week two bodies of missing teenage girls were found buried in their home.
The protesters gathered outside the offender's house in El Alto and marched from there to the gates of the La Paz Court of Justice, some 6 kilometres away.
Shouting slogans against the police, judges and prosecutors, whom they branded as "corrupt", those present covered the steps of the building with banners and graffiti in homage to victims of gender violence.
They also hung a rag doll with red spots on the court's trellis in reference to the victims and threw balloons with paint on the façade.
Amid heavy rain, relatives and friends of murdered women, including Choque's victims, continued to march to the Ministry of Justice, but were prevented from approaching by a police roadblock.
According to figures from the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC), Bolivia is the country with the highest femicide rate in South America, with 2 out of every 100,000 women victims of this crime in 2020. It is followed by Brazil, with 1.6.
In 2021, Bolivia reported 108 femicides, just below the 113 recorded the previous year.
According to the latest available data from the 2016 Violence Prevalence Survey, 74.7 per cent of Bolivian women who are married or in union have suffered some type of violence. The figure rises to 82.5 per cent in rural areas.
The controversy over the apparently irregular release of the femicide, to whom police attribute two other murders and at least 77 rapes, led to the remand of the judge who made the decision for six months.
The event occurred at the end of 2019, when the magistrate released Choque for allegedly suffering from an incurable disease and for his good conduct.
According to Justice Minister Iván Lima, the judge took "only three days" to accept the request for release received on 24 December. The minister added that the case file disappeared and that other judicial officials will be investigated for possible negligence.
The magistrate will be charged with prevarication, i.e. having taken an arbitrary decision knowing that it was contrary to the law.
The president, the leftist Luis Arce, also intervened in the matter and "demanded" via his Twitter account "an exemplary sanction with the full weight of the law".
On Sunday, an accomplice of Choque in the femicide for which both were sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2013 was arrested. The second offender had also been released early, in 2015, and the authorities announced that the judges who granted him his freedom will be investigated.
The Bolivian government declared 2022 as the Year of the Cultural Revolution for Depatriarchalisation with the aim of promoting activities against gender-based violence and, in particular, femicides.
© 2022 AFP