A Murder on a Rooftop – Two Years Later

La Paz, Bolivia

It was two years ago this weekend that a 24 year old student nurse, Anna Colque, was murdered in cold blood by military sharpshooters on a rooftop here. She was killed while coming to the aid of another shooting victim, a repairman who was fixing the roof.

All this happened during what Bolivians call ¨Febrero Negro¨ (Black February), when the country erupted in protest over a tax hike on the poor instigated by the International Monetary Fund. From the wide windows of the IMF´s office here you can see down to the rooftop where Ann Colque was killed.

The debate over IMF and World Bank economic policies in poor countries is full of rhetoric on all sides. Yesterday I spent time with two people more affected by these policies than anyone else ever could be, Anna’s mother and the baby son Luis, now three, which she left behind.

¨She went out to help the people wounded, ¨ Anna’s mother told me. Her family asked her not to go but she did. That is who she was.

For months The Democracy Center has been preparing a report on the events of Bolivia’s Black February, which we will release in April in Washington when the IMF and World Bank have their annual joint meetings. We have interviewed everyone from the President of the nation, to the IMF, to people in the streets. We have reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, all aimed at uncovering the truth.

The IMF, sitting a hemisphere away in Washington, did not pull the trigger on that sad day two years ago this weekend. Evidence is clear however that, through the economic coercion it applied here, the IMF knowingly loaded the gun.

To borrow a piece of prose coined long ago, ¨We write so that death will not have the last word.¨ The death of Anna Colque, dressed in her white nurse’s uniform on a La Paz rooftop, must not be forgotten. We remember it with our readers today and we will do everything in our power to expose the policies, the thinking, the actions, and the people who set her death in motion.