She had grown up watching small businesses struggle with the costs of transporting goods between producers, ports, warehouses, and customers.
Efficient logistics could make an enormous difference.
But the benefits depended upon honest assumptions.
If financial projections exaggerated guaranteed demand, investors might commit money to infrastructure that wasn't economically sustainable.
If water requirements and environmental costs were understated, surrounding communities could pay for decisions they had no meaningful role in making.
And if contractual risks were transferred unfairly to smaller producers, the powerful companies announcing the project might profit while vulnerable partners absorbed the losses.
Elena's task was not to condemn international investment.
It was to determine whether claims made about a specific investment were supported by the available evidence.
That distinction mattered to her.
Her father had taught her.
His name was Milan Marković.
He was a Croatian engineer who met her mother, Celia Andrade, while working on a transport project in Colombia.
Celia was an Afro-Colombian teacher and community organizer with a deep love of languages, poetry, and public education.
Elena was born in Bogotá.
Spanish was the first language she spoke.
Her father taught her Croatian.
Her mother encouraged English.
And when the family moved to Europe during Elena's teenage years, French became another part of her daily life.
She learned languages not as a collection of impressive accomplishments but as a practical necessity.
One language belonged to her mother's childhood.
Another to her father's family.
A third to the school where she studied.
And another to the research she wanted to pursue.
By eighteen, Elena could move between Spanish, Croatian, French, and English without treating the transitions as performances.
But speaking several languages hadn't protected her from being underestimated.
As a teenager in Europe, she became accustomed to people assuming that her dark skin meant she couldn't possibly belong to the countries whose languages she spoke.
A teacher once complimented her French, then asked where she'd really learned it.
A man at a railway station congratulated her on her Spanish before explaining that he had assumed she'd speak only English.
During a university seminar, a visiting executive directed his technical questions toward the man sitting beside her, even though Elena had prepared the analysis being discussed.
She learned to recognize the pause.
The surprise.
The brief recalculation in people's faces when she answered a question they hadn't expected her to understand.
Her mother hated those moments.