Colombia and the IMF: who will pay for the adjustment?

According to Le Figaro, the new Colombian president faces rising inflation and a risk of extreme drought linked to El Niño. To avoid a budget crisis, the country would be forced to seek help from the International Monetary Fund, which could provide some $20 billion. The daily quotes a phrase: "Cette situation n'est pas soutenable" ("This situation is not sustainable").

What the dispatch does not say, however, is just as important. At this stage, we do not know the conditions the Fund would impose, the timetable, or the exact make-up of the arrangement. Everything that follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact.

First question, the only one that matters: who will pay? The history of IMF loans to countries of the Global South is one of aid that is rarely free. It comes with conditions: cutting the deficit, slashing public spending, sometimes privatisation. It is health, education and rural support budgets that serve as the variable of adjustment, not rents or large fortunes. If Bogotá accepts this bargain, it will be necessary to look closely at who is invited to tighten its belt, and who is not.

The Gazette's working papers on dependency recall that peripheral countries are not simply "behind": their economies were shaped to supply raw materials, cheap labour and outlets to the centre. Debt service and conditional loans lock in that position. Colombia, an exporter of resources and exposed to external shocks, illustrates this mechanism well enough: when the climate or prices go off the rails, it is towards Washington that it looks, not the other way round.

Second angle, the climate. El Niño is not a punishment falling from the sky on an improvident government. The rural populations who will suffer the drought are those who have contributed least to global warming. That they should then also pay for the loan that will cushion the shock amounts to a double penalty: minimal responsibility, maximal bill.

Third point of vigilance: adjustments love to disguise themselves as technical management. Sales of public assets, concessions, services privatised to reassure creditors: a reading inspired by accumulation by dispossession invites us to watch what the state will sell in order to obtain the credit line. Again, nothing is announced in the dispatch; the question nonetheless deserves to be asked before, not after.

A new president, a crisis foretold, a lender waiting: the scenario is classic, and that is precisely the problem. The real debate is not about whether $20 billion is worthwhile, but about the form the counterpart will take, and who, in the countryside as in the working-class neighbourhoods, will bear the weight. We will return to this as soon as the terms of the agreement are known.