Caracas, 04 Feb. AVN.- “Today, we are obliged to remember also the martyrs of 1989, El Caracazo (uprising), when people rebelled against the guidelines of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the Washington Consensus,” said Saturday the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chavez.

 At Los Proceres Avenue, where the Bolivarian National Armed Force and people commemorated the 20th anniversary of the military uprising on February 4th 1992, President Chavez reminded that poverty rated 60% in the nineties.

 “From here, they took all the oil they wanted to and we reached (the year) 1989 with 60% of poverty and then occurred El Caracazo,” Chavez said and he reaffirmed that new generations have to be explained about events occurred during rightist governments with neoliberal economic policies.

President Chavez also reminded that in 1989, there was 30% of abject poverty, “destitution, hunger, in a country flooded with wealth,” he said.

Those social conditions, joined to the increase in oil prices, inflation and increase on food prices during the second term of former president Carlos Andres Perez led to El Caracazo, popular uprising headed by protests against those neoliberal policies.

Inequality, exclusion and privatization policies made the population turn to the streets during February 27-28, 1989 to protest against economic measures, political and social plans implemented in that moment. 

Security forces used their firearms against the population, which resulted in several dead and injured people.