We may never know what killed Alejandra Monocuco.
It might have been COVID-19. That’s what her housemate feared when she called the emergency hotline. She said Monocuco was struggling so hard to breathe that it seemed like she was choking, or maybe suffocating.
It might also have been something else. After the paramedics who arrived to treat Monocuco learned that she was living with HIV, her housemate Leidy Tatiana Daza Alarcón said they told her it looked like an overdose. Daza said the paramedics told her not to give Monocuco any food or water since she was in respiratory distress, and to calm down, saying, “Take it easy...nothing will happen to her.”
When a second ambulance arrived a few hours later, Monocuco was dead.
For Daza and many others, though, the real reason that Monocuco died is clear: The paramedics didn’t provide appropriate care because Monocuco was a Black trans sex worker living with HIV.
Monocuco — which is a nickname, her given last name is Ortega — was born in a small Colombian city called Magangué in 1981, around the time that a conflict between drug cartels and guerillas flared up, and the same year that homosexuality was decriminalized in Colombia. She told researchers in 2014 that she had faced violence and harassment throughout her life because of her identity.
As historic protests over racial injustice and the murders and mistreatment of trans people have ricocheted around the world, Monocuco’s death has provoked outrage in the Colombian capital of Bogotá, where she lived, and beyond.
The alleged negligence by medical personnel, in the middle of a pandemic, has galvanized local advocates who say her death is an “x-ray of the the situation of abandonment, discrimination, and exclusion” that trans sex workers in the city face.
As multiple investigations into the case have begun at the city and national level, those advocates now hope that Monocuco’s case will open the door to greater recognition of the rights of trans people and sex workers in Colombia. Read more via Buzzfeed News