In his letter, Budhoo, who died in 2001, made it clear that his dispute was over more than the treatment of one country by a handful of officials. He characterized the IMF’s entire program of structural adjustment as a form of mass torture in which “‘screaming-in-pain’ governments and peoples [are] forced to bend on their knees before us, broken and terrified and disintegrating, and begging for a sliver of reasonableness and decency on our part. But we laugh cruelly in their face, and the torture goes on unabated.”
