A long-standing research stream demonstrated with evidence at the national level that IMF programs are associated with more protests (Abouharb and Cingranelli 2009; Almeida and Pérez-Martin 2022; Haggard and Kaufman 1992; Ortiz and Béjar 2013) and human rights violations (Abouharb and Cingranelli 2007; Kentikelenis and Stubbs 2023). Recent work on the politics of implementation of IMF programs at the micro-level has demonstrated that governments allocate adjustment burdens strategically, using a logic of distributional politics, to protect their supporters while imposing adjustment costs upon opposition supporters, who then protest in response (Abouharb and Reinsberg 2023; Reinsberg and Abouharb 2024). A micro-level distributional politics approach can help us to understand who governments repress to maintain political control in the context of the protests associated with IMF programs. We argue that governments primarily target the political opposition—not their own partisan supporters—with repressive tactics. Our micro-level approach leads us to use large-N micro-level survey data from the Latinobarometro surveys, which asks people about their experience of IMF programs, political violence, and support for government and opposition parties. We find that opposition supporters are more likely to be the targets of government violence in the context of IMF reform programs than those who support the incumbent regime.