Published at: 07/08/2024 09:00 PM

(El Nacional, August 13, 1987)

• The Morgan Guaranty Trust, based in New York, revealed a report, based on an exhaustive investigation, that detected deposits of between 85 and 89 billion U$D by Venezuelans abroad. A third of which would serve to pay off Venezuela's suffocating foreign debt.
• This denationalization of capital, carried out by a denationalized class, contributed to aggravating the critical financial situation of the country with the greatest oil wealth in the South American region.
• 90 billion dollars were more than three times the amount of foreign debt, lost in secret foreign accounts.
• Morgan Guaranty Trust recommended that the government of Jaime Lusinchi resort to a “forced loan” to force the depositors of such fortunes to pay the debt. He also suggested paying off the debt with money from another debt, which would amount to condemning Venezuela to the vicious circle of an unpayable eternal debt.
• Seven years later, when the crisis hit rock bottom and unemployment wreaked havoc on the family economy of millions of households, businessman Pedro Miguel Pareles called for the repatriation of such capital, which would be enough to pay the debt, reactivate the productive system and generate sufficient sources of employment.

SOME HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

• The contemporary economic crisis in Venezuela began when Carlos Andrés Pérez decided to indebted the Republic with 37 billion U$D, at a time of oil boom (1974-1979), in which the price of a barrel of crude oil tripled overnight. This government had received an external debt of 6 billion U$D from the previous one, increasing it by 616%.
• As reported by El Nacional, the crisis was aggravated by the fact that the presidential environment, banks, economic groups, contractors and the upper bourgeoisie benefited from that unexpected jet of petrodollars and then bled out the national economy by stealing 89 billion dollars, which went to secret accounts in Switzerland, Europe and the United States. Mostly money that the government put in the hands of select mafias that became known as The Twelve Apostles.
• A similar serious situation faced the government of General Cipriano Castro in 1902, when our coasts were blocked and bombed as a result of a foreign debt irresponsibly contracted and backed by the oligarchy of money.
• On that occasion, Venezuelan bankers, led by Manuel Antonio Matos, also invoked foreign intervention against Venezuela and went to war with Gen. Castro.
• General Castro defeated them in the Battle of La Victoria II on November 22, 1902.
• However, the money oligarchy and its international agents continued to call for a foreign military intervention that occurred on December 2, 1902, to which the Castro responded with his famous proclamation that raised the entire country against the armies of Italy, England and Germany.
• The institutionalization of looting at the hands of international banks was imposed by Betancourt in 1959**, ** when he raised, in less than a year, foreign debt from 600 million US$ to 1.6 billion US$ to favor his partner Nelson Rockefeller, owner of Chase Manhattan Bank, who for a decade maintained a monopoly on oil production through the Creole Petroleum Corporation, the control of food distribution through the CADA auto market network, the production of concentrated feed for livestock (PROTINAL), poultry production and the ownership of several large estates in Venezuela.

Mazo News Team