Understandably unwilling to go to war with the Washington institutions that owned their debts, crisis-struck new democracies had little choice but to play by Washington’s rules. And then, in the early eighties, Washington’s rules got a great deal stricter. That’s because the debt shock coincided precisely, and not coincidentally, with a new era in North-South relations, one that would make military dictatorships largely unnecessary. It was the dawn of the era of “structural adjustment”—otherwise known as the dictatorship of debt.
Dictatorship of debt
