Actually I think Ecuador is a small example of a different possible trend I see emerging in the IMF. After a decade or two of largely unchallenged power they are slipping from being a rather tight group of technocrats deeply committed to their ideological principles to becoming a group of power brokers directly dishing out the goodies based on rewards and punishments. Admittedly this is only a nuanced difference - but it may be a sign of advancing age and degeneration in the "Washington Consensus" crowd.
Ecuador was simply punished for bad timing and being easy to pick on. They really had agreed to more than 90% of what the IMF demanded and even started implementation. This normally would get a country an IMF agreement, especially since many of the problems were clearly external shocks (oil prices, El Nino, Brazil crisis).
In fact Ecuador begged the IMF for a deal (and for a visit by Camdesus, the head) but it was just after the Brazil deal where the IMF "compromised" their principles under pressure from the U.S. The IMF needed an example: to show that a precedent had not been set in Brazil. Ecuador just happened to be the next one in the bargaining line (and an easy target to bully being small, politically divided, and with a flaky President).
Then, just as the IMF's point had been made and the country brought to crisis, along came Colombia. The only country in L.A. that had never agreed to an IMF program. The Fund could not resist completing its collection and it gave another "easy" deal after a period of secret negotiations. (I am told there was not much external U.S. pressure this time - the other U.S. Departments don't get to influence Treasury much. The IMF simply wanted the prestige of a "full set".). And if that were not enough suddenly Peru got an easy deal - thanks to enormous pressure from Japan (who was given major IMF voting rights in its better days and who has no other big demands on the Latin America Dept.). NOW Ecuador really needed to be made into an example.
Wherever the Ecuador story goes, I think it is worth noting that this sort of cheap wheeling-and-dealing is actually rather alien to the IMF. It is not necessarily comforting to see them shift from Thatcher-ite purity to RealPolitik. But it is a shift worth noting and factoring into our assessments.