The International Monetary Fund is in the public eye, and not solely because of Dominique Strauss-Kahn – the institution is also undergoing media scrutiny for having the type of office culture that, according to employees, seems to be tarnished with harassment. But for all the talk about the IMF and its former director, few people in the west seem to know much about how the IMF actually operates in the countries where it holds (or used to hold, until popular rebellions made the situation unsustainable) a very tight grip.

As an Argentinian, I cannot remember ever not knowing the intricacies of how the IMF operates in our region. We all know, or have been victims ourselves, of the policies it imposes to approve a new line of credit, accept delayed payments, or renegotiate interest rates for our national debts. The visit of an IMF delegate can be the subject of headlines for weeks, months even. After all, a negative rating can bring down governments.

The story of my life is entangled with its interventions. Take my father. On his deathbed, he was still worried about possible fluctuations in dollar exchange rates as a result of IMF demands that would further deplete whatever little we had left at that point.

My uncle. He declared bankruptcy and closed down his 30-year-old business because he could no longer compete with low-cost manufacturing countries due to the IMF's imposition of dollar parity and unrestricted import policies.

My mother. She was unable to obtain a widow's pension, after my father, who contributed to the system for more than 25 years, passed away – the IMF had demanded a reform of pension and retirement funds. With everything now privatised, there was no longer any safety net.

And my grandmother. She lived and died on the poverty line because of the reductions in her retirement payments, which were imposed to tackle the national deficit.

Back in 2000, the public hospital where I was admitted for emergency care could not provide more than a piece of stale bread for breakfast. When my condition was no longer life-threatening, I was asked to use a chair for the remainder of the night instead of taking a hospital bed. The public healthcare cuts demanded to, yet again, control the deficit, had made operating the hospital more a labour of love than one of management efficiency. For Christmas 2001, my mother was unable to buy food because there was a revolution in our streets: the population refused to accept further IMF "adjustments". I was on the other side of the world at the time, unable to do anything that would help her buy anything due to Argentina's collapsed banking system and the impossibility of issuing international money transfers. While the impact of the IMF's policies is often invisible to many in the west, we lived with them – endured them – on a daily basis.

Ever since I can remember, I've seen the IMF's work associated with metaphors of sexual assault. "The raped nation" – again and again, that is how South American media would metaphorically refer to the policies imposed by the IMF. Our media and, more specifically, tabloid media, whose target demographics have always been the working class and the poor (who also happen to be the most affected by these policies) have been drawing on rape comparisons for decades. Yes, our resources were depleted and our youth deprived of basic healthcare and education as a result of measures that benefited the international financial industry and were implemented with the complicit, necessary help of corrupt local government officials. But without fail, we would read headlines portraying our countries as women who have been assaulted, raped, stripped of their dignity. Such violent metaphors have become part of mainstream discourse, where they remain unchallenged.

And now we seem to have come full circle. It is no longer about our "defiled nations". The body of a woman, who also hails from a developing country, is now at the centre of an international scandal. A woman who might not have been an economic migrant if it wasn't for the policies that the IMF imposed on the global south. Suddenly, the gruesome tabloid metaphors of my childhood no longer refer to economic measures inflicted by an institution that responds to international, neocolonial financial interests. They acquire a more tangible, grave tone.

As I write this, I read about the heated debates regarding Strauss-Kahn's successor. Will it be another European? Will it be someone from an emerging nation? They say the job should be based on competence and résumé. They also say the south should finally have a leading voice in the IMF. I guess the most urgent skills to run such an institution are off the negotiation table because, if you ask me, what the IMF needs is a good dose of empathy and compassion, so that both its policies and the actions of the individuals that run it no longer need to define our southern lives.