Tag Archives: Discrimination

Corruption: Fuel for Femicide’s Fire

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On January 31, 2022, hundreds of protesters took to the streets of La Paz, Bolivia, regarding new revelations about Richard Choque Flores, who had raped upwards of 70 women and committed at least two femicides. (The term “femicide” refers to the intentional murder of women for gender-motivated reasons.) The La Paz protesters were not simply expressing their horror at Choque Flores’ heinous crimes. They were also denouncing the judicial and prosecutorial corruption that had enabled his continued predation. In fact, Choque Flores had already been arrested in 2015 and sentenced to 30 years in prison. His sentence was then reduced to a house arrest in 2019, whereupon he was able to murder two women from the comfort of his own home. How did Richard Choque Flores manage to get his sentence reduced in the first place? With a bribe of US$3,500 and a bottle of whisky.

Sadly, this story is not unique. In Bolivia as well as other Latin American countries (such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico), femicides not only occur at appallingly high rates, but they rarely ever get resolved. While femicide is certainly rooted in patriarchy, its rampant scope in Latin America cannot merely be explained by the misogyny of individual perpetrators. In 2021 alone, there were at least 108 known femicide cases in Bolivia, of which only 36% were solved. In Mexico, around 10 women are reportedly murdered per day (though the actual number is likely much higher). The femicide epidemic is by no means “accidental, ‘involuntary,’ or the result of ‘mere institutional incapacity.’” Rather, it is the product of profound and systematic corruption, which allows perpetrators to violate women with impunity, while imposing prohibitive barriers to justice for victims and their families.

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Bribe to Survive: Sextortion and LGBTQ Discrimination

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In February 2019, a gay man from Krasnodar, Russia named Stanislav arranged to go on a date with a young man he had met on a dating app. When he arrived at their agreed-upon location, however, the young man was nowhere to be seen. Instead, Stanislav was greeted by police officers, who later beat him and threatened him with criminal prosecution unless he paid a bribe. Just a year earlier, another man, Fedor, similarly found himself on a “fake date” with a man he had met on the same dating app, which ended with him being forced to pay police a US$2,500 bribe after also being beaten and threatened with prison. In both cases, Russian prosecutors refused to carry out any investigations of extortion or police misconduct.

It isn’t just in Russia that police have begun turning to online dating sites and other forms of technology to entrap their victims. By arbitrarily seizing cell phones or creating profiles to set up “fake dates,” law enforcement officers around the world (including in Lebanon, Azerbaijan, Egypt, and Moldova, just to name a few places) have been able to obtain screenshots and photographs to blackmail LGBTQ people into paying them bribes. Not only are victims coerced into paying these bribes to end their torture and humiliation, but they also do it in response to threats of having their arrests publicized on national television, or revealed to their family and employers. In this way, laws criminalizing homosexual activity are imposed not only, or even primarily, to enforce moral ideologies, but rather to expand opportunities for the corrupt extraction of money from vulnerable communities.

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Corruption’s Queer History: Stonewall’s Seedy Underside

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A little after midnight on June 28, 1969, New York City police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a seedy bar in Greenwich Village known for catering to a mostly LGBTQ crowd. Such raids were not uncommon—in fact, the Stonewall Inn had already been raided just four days prior to that now historic evening. But for some reason, that particular raid on that particular night had touched off violent clashes between police and Stonewall’s patrons, becoming a watershed moment for the LGBTQ civil rights movement in the United States. Indeed, the Stonewall Inn is now a national monument, and the anniversary of Stonewall is commemorated every year with Pride parades around the world.

In the days following the riots, however, the Stonewall Inn was in utter disarray: graffiti sprawled on its boarded-up windows read: “GAY PROHIBITION CORRUPT$ COP$ / FEED$ MAFIA.” That brief and blunt statement captures an important truth about Stonewall, one that is important for understanding both the historical context of the Stonewall uprising, as well as the intersection between anti-LGBTQ discrimination and corruption that persists today: The riots weren’t only about police discrimination—organized crime and corruption also played a fundamental role.

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