Published at: 26/02/2025 08:00 PM

(El Nacional y Diario de Caracas, February 26, 1989)

• Like a useful fool in international banking or as a naive person who went to the slaughterhouse and threw Venezuela into the cliff of an unpayable debt, former president Jaime Lusinchi, when he expressed his unconfessable clumsiness to sign, in the most disadvantageous terms, the renegotiation of the interests of the foreign debt, which he bequeathed to us as a work of government.
• “No one can claim their own clumsiness,” the legal axiom says. Thus, one of the richest countries in the world, 30% of its inhabitants and 64% of its entire population were shackled to extreme poverty.
• This unacceptable statement was, without a doubt, a cause of general indignation and one of the causes of the popular discontent triggered by “El Caracazo”.
• Jaime Lusinchi, a servile instrument of the creditor bank's guidelines**, ** that day**** acknowledged that he blindly signed, without even reading, a renegotiation, for the consequences of which he should have paid prison for ineptitude in office and fraud against the public purse.
• However, he served time in New York, just as Rómulo Betancourt and Carlos Andrés Pérez paid for his crimes, in their luxurious residences in Manhattan.
• After this renegotiation, Venezuela had to pay, until Hugo Chávez came to power, 46% of its oil revenues to international banks.
• This heavy mortgage was condemned to millions of young people, children, workers, peasants, the elderly and women whose expectations of well-being were truncated and their precarious quality of life turned into greater poverty.
• “Tarde piaste pajarito” was the sharpest and sharpest reply fired at the inexcusable negligence of former president Lusinchi, coming from his predecessor Luis Herrera Campins.
• This financial trap, which was naively managed by Lusinchi, was just one dish of that government's long menu of scandals, such as the “Massacre of El Amparo”, the 100 jeeps of José Ángel Ciliberto and RECADI, among others.

Mazo News Team