6 Sep 2015 Río Gallegos, Santa Cruz (Argentina) Murdered
TDoR list ref: tgeu/6-Sep-2015/Marcela Estefanya Chocobar
Marcela disappeared after leaving a bar in the downtown area of Río Gallegos and climbing into a red Renault 9. Several days later her skull, along with some clothes and a wig, were found in a field in the San Benito neighborhood.
The rest of her body has never been found.
In the freezing morning of September 6, 2015, while Saturday night was quiet in the bars and bowling alleys of the city of Rio Gallegos, Marcela Estefanía Chocobar , a 26-year-old trans-girl from Salta, had decided to stand alone at the door from the bar "Russia", where she had been dancing until a while ago with friends, in the most classic ritual of street prostitution: waiting for customers. That was the last time they saw her alive.
A security camera recorded her and witnesses at the bowling door saw her climbing into a red Renault 9 with two subjects.
After she went missing her sisters Karina, Judtih, Gabriela and Laura began a desperate and lonely search that lasted for days (and for them it seemeds eternal) with the ever weakening hope that she was alive. "In the courthouse they gave us three hypotheses: that a trafficking network had taken her, that she was involved in a drug issue or that she had left with someone, a boyfriend," recalls Laura.
A few days later, a neighbor from the San Benito neighborhood - on the outskirts of the capital of Santa Cruz - found a skull without soft tissue, without any trace of skin, and, seven blocks from that place, a chain, a dress and a black jacket, a white buccaneer and a blonde wig that confirmed the worst: Marcela was murdered and dismembered. The rest of her body has never been found.
In April 2019 Ángel Azzolini and Oscar Biott went to trial on charges of homicide, and the following month the prosecution requested that the charge be raised to transfemicide. In June Biott was sentenced to life in prison and Azzolini to 6 years.
On September 6, 2015, Marcela Chocobar was brutally murdered. From her, a trans woman in the splendor of her transformation, they found only her perfectly cut skull between the second and third vertebrae. In April a judge put three men accused of the homicide in prison, but she refused to treat the crime as femicide. But the Chocobar family does not believe that the horror can be explained that easily: they are convinced that the guys who raised Marcela that night were only instruments of something worse, of an evil whose existence would be explained only if it comes from power.
In October 2020 the Supreme Court ordered that the convictions be reviewed.
In the last few hours a new chapter was added to the case of Marcela Chocobar, the young trans woman who was murdered in the early morning of September 6, 2015 and whose body has still not been found, when the Superior Court of Justice (TSJ) ordered a review of the convictions for the transfemicide.