The devastating impacts of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) are evident in country after country, people after people, nature and climate. Through planned misery and austericide, coups d’état, and the support of dictatorial and repressive governments, for more than 80 years they have been driving a true anti-development based on neocolonial and imperialist appropriation, extractivism, and indebtedness of our territories, bodies, and common goods.
With total impunity, they impose and ensure the repayment of suffocating and illegitimate financial debt, increasing their socio-ecological, climate, economic, political, cultural, and gender debts to peoples and ecological balance in general.
Behind a seemingly “technical” discourse riddled with good intentions, the IMF and the World Bank are fundamental pillars of an international financial architecture that serves the interests of big capital and corporate and financialized globalization. They promote the commodification and privatization of the processes of production and reproduction of life, and deepen dependence and inequality. At the same time, they contribute to the accumulation of ever more wealth in ever fewer hands, increasing the exploitation and impoverishment of the vast majority, especially in the global South.
The advance of the global ecological and climate crisis is not unrelated to the policies promoted and imposed by these international financial institutions (IFIs) and their regional counterparts, such as the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Pollution, loss of biodiversity, uncontrolled global warming—with its multiple consequences of floods, droughts, and other extreme weather events—the loss of lives and livelihoods of entire communities, forced displacement of populations, land grabbing, and the serious and systematic violation of human and nature rights are direct consequences of their programs, loans, and conditions.
However, instead of changing their policies, they are upping the ante. They continue to finance fossil fuel extraction and corporate control of the so-called “energy transition.” They promote carbon trading and other false solutions to the climate emergency, including the deceptive debt-for-conservation, climate, or nature swaps—as a mechanism for financialization and territorial control of the most biodiverse areas of forests, seas, and oceans. The IMF adds to its traditional set of conditions the pursuit of “resilience,” behind which the usual capitalist interests are painted green. They pretend to contribute to the urgent needs of adaptation and mitigation with more loans. And to top it all off, the World Bank takes charge of the fund supposedly created to compensate for the “damages and losses” caused by the very policies it promotes.
Isn’t it time to put an end to the actions of the IMF and the World Bank, shutting them down and demanding sanctions and the reparation of their crimes against peoples and nature?
From the Stop the IMF-WB! Reparation Now! Campaign, we call for the strengthening of popular resistance, the promotion of actions and denunciations, and the coordination of efforts in this regard in the region and around the world. We call to join forces to demand and build real alternatives for living well, based on popular participation and protagonism, the recognition and respect of the rights and needs of peoples and nature, and the exercise of our sovereignty and self-determination.
The IMF and the World Bank were created towards the end of World War II through the Bretton Woods Agreements to promote trade liberalization, monetary stabilization, and foreign investment, all linked to the strengthening of the US dollar as a medium of exchange and reserve currency. Along with the military expansion of the US, they played a central role in the consolidation of the “Pax Americana” and the subsequent rise of a speculative and financially driven global economy.
As we mark another anniversary of their creation, amid the increasing suffering, uncertainty, and violence being experienced as that order and power collapse, we need to strengthen efforts to put an end to such policies and practices and ensure the consolidation of other relationships and institutions.
We thus call to continue promoting collective initiatives in all local, regional, and global settings—including the Week of Action in October ahead of the IMF and World Bank meetings, the Jubilee 2025 campaign, the Ecosocialist Encounters, COP30, and the Peoples’ Summits in Belém and ahead of the G20 in Johannesburg—multiplying actions that contribute to:
- highlighting the impacts of the criminal actions of the IMF-WB and their beneficiaries, in relation to the climate crisis and water and energy rights in particular;
- exercising our right to judge and to sanction those responsible for the policies of austericide and dispossession, by holding sessions of the Peoples’ and Nature Tribunal against the IMF-WB;
- achieving the cancellation and non-payment of illegitimate and odious debts promoted and guaranteed by these IFIs, and the restitution and reparation of what has been unjustly taken;
- strengthening resistance to their loans and programs, including in particular those related to megaprojects, extractivism, and false climate solutions; and
- supporting efforts to shut down the IMF and the World Bank and build alternatives anchored in popular participation, sovereignty and self-determination, the rights of peoples and nature, and Good Living.
STOP the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank!
Cancel and refuse to pay illegitimate and odious debts!
Shut down the IMF-WB
Reparations NOW for the misery, devastation, and debts they have caused!
– July 22, 2025
STOP THE IMF-WB! REPARATION NOW! CAMPAIGN