Floridalma Roque traveled from NY a Guatemala city to undergo a surgical procedure for facial rejuvenation and liposuction of the arms. On June 13, she went with a relative to the well-to-do area 14 of the capital, where the ‘Perfectima Body’ cosmetic surgery clinic is located, run by Kevin Malouf, nephew of Antonio Malouf, former minister of Economy from this Central American country between January 2020 and March 2022. The next day, the relative who had accompanied her arrived at the clinic at ten in the morning to pick her up, although the doctor informed her that, at seven, Floridalma would she had gone voluntarily and had been picked up by a vehicle she had ordered through a phone app.
Since then, the family of the woman, born in Honduras and with US citizenship, has not heard from her, so her children filed a complaint with the Public ministry. After carrying out six raids this Friday night, the Police arrested the clinic on the instructions of the police. Femicide Prosecutor’s Office, a Malouf and two other workers, including the anesthesiologist. They also went to the home of a nurse to arrest her. The four people (two men and two women) will go to court next Monday accused of the crimes of plagiarism or kidnapping and hindering criminal proceedings. At the moment, a judge on duty has already informed them of the reason for their arrest, for which they will spend the next two nights in the Torre de Tribunales prisons.
One of the main pieces of evidence that the Prosecutor’s Office has is the recording of one of the cameras in which it is seen from a great distance how a woman leaves the clinic in a wheelchair on June 14 at seven in the morning, accompanied by of a male nurse, although his face cannot be made out. Minutes later, she gets into a vehicle alone and, from that moment on, she loses track of her. However, one of Floridalma’s sons, Jorge Roque, He assures that the woman who leaves the clinic is not his mother because she is shorter and walks differently than the person who is in a wheelchair and who gets into a car.
In addition, he recalls that Floridalma, 59, has never lived in Guatemala, but only traveled to the country from time to time to visit his family on behalf of his mother. “She never went out on the street alone, not by bus, not by van, not by Úber and she didn’t even know how to use this application, because I asked her for Úber,” her son emphasizes that she traveled from USA to the Central American country to look for his mother, who worked as a nurse in a nursing home in New York.
Jorge Roque points out in an interview in Free Press that, minutes before undergoing cosmetic surgery, his mother sent a message to another of her children in which she informed him that she was going to enter the operating room at seven in the morning on June 13. “See you in a few days,” her son replied, and later, “the phone turns off or they turn it off and I don’t know what happened in the end,” she says.