Remembering Bolivia's Febrero Negro

It was exactly five years ago today that Ana Colque, a 24-year-old nurse and single mother, was murdered by Bolivian soldiers as she climbed to the rooftop of a building in La Paz. Arriving in an ambulance, she went to the roof to come to the aid of a handyman who lay dying, also from an army sniper attack.

It was five years ago this month that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded that Bolivia take a new massive dose of its economic medicine, setting up a chain of events that not only produced Colque's murder but a shooting war between the Army and the National Police on the steps of the Presidential palace. Over the course of two days 34 people – mothers, fathers, children – were left dead.

It is time to remember, once again, Bolivia's Febrero Negro.

The bloody events in La Paz those two days in February 2003 remain, not only one of the nation's ugliest political scars, but a powerful lesson about the global system and how its darker side effects the lives of real people. Not long afterwards, The Democracy Center undertook a serious and in-depth investigation of Febrero Negro, including the events that led up to it and the violence that spiraled into the streets. We interviewed Bolivia's then-Vice President, Carlos Mesa, senior government economic officials, the IMF, the leader of the rebelling police, Ana Colque's mother, and many, many others to get a full perspective. Our report, Deadly Consequences, can be read here.

Five years in retrospect, there are some new developments and some new lessons in the Febrero Negro story.

One lesson is about criminal impunity in Bolivia. To this day, despite ample evidence about who fired the shots that killed Ana Colque, no one has ever been convicted for the murder that sent bullets through her chest.

Other lessons are about economics.

The day Colque was killed, IMF officials fled Bolivia. On the wau to the airport they passed the building where her murder took place. They left, convinced as always, that deep deficit reduction was a required formula for Bolivia, even if their prescription aimed at "economic stability" turned into tax increases on the poor and produced 34 coffins. Three years later, at the start of 2006, Bolivia became one of a parade of Latin American nations that divorced itself from the IMF, declining further loans from the Washington-based institution and freeing itself from the IMF economic doctrines that have proven so damaging across the region.

Five years ago, as the government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada struggled internally to craft a plan to respond to the IMF's deficit reduction demands, the President's economic advisors urged him to close the fiscal gap with new taxes on foreign oil companies. It was his gas and oil privatization schemes years before that had helped drain the national treasury and contributed to the country's large deficits, so it made sense, they argued, to close the budget gap by recouping some of that lost revenue. Sánchez de Lozada overruled his advisors and sought to keep the IMF happy, instead, with a new income tax that reached all the way down to the working poor – police, nurses, teachers and others that earned as little as $100 per month.

Later, after Sánchez de Lozada was toppled by his own people and fled himself to exile in suburban Maryland, Bolivia's leaders (starting well-before the Presidency of Evo Morales) embarked down the road that Sánchez de Lozada would not, raising the taxes paid by foreign oil firms by more than $1 billion. The result was not the mass departure of the firms that the IMF and Sánchez de Lozada predicted, but a new round of long-term contracts and Bolivia's first budget surplus in many years.

The economic lesson of Febrero Negro and its aftermath is this: Not only did the IMF/ Sánchez de Lozada approach send the nation into bloody, needless conflict. It was also economic stupidity.

On this day in which 34 Bolivian families, including Colque's will mourn losses deeply remembered, we hope our readers will also remember those events and their importance. Again, you can read our report in full here.