Eighties and nineties lost decades One of the most critical stages of Latin American debt was the decade of 1981 to 1990. In 1986, in his essay Colombian Agricultural Outlook at the end of the twentieth century, former President Alfonso Lopez Michelsen explained the scope of the external debt crisis and the severe impact that would for the following years: “For sighted governments and directives of the banks, because bone tantode one group as the others, went into debt during the boom of the seventies, debts that today (1986), for two terms, beyond the capacity of countries to pay. First , why not have the resources in local currency to cover principal and interest, and second, because exports are not enough, in most cases, to produce the dollars needed, in national currency.The International Monetary Fund has sought, in country after country, remedy this situation with a basic recipe that has failed everywhere, and which is covered with the pious “adjustment” to increase tax revenues, increasing contributions and eliminating subsidies and devalue the currency to encourage exports. It is a shock treatment, which retards economic development, exacerbating the recession, unemployment rises, and, sooner or later, entails serious social disruption, which eventually destabilize democratic governments are on track to consolidate in Latin America “In March 2000, the Bank revealed that the Republic of Colombia’s foreign debt came to 36,000 million, of which 24,490 are for the public sector.The total debt is equivalent to 41.3 of GDP, which, according to national and international analysts, “is troubling,” and explains the increased severity of adjustments in the economic and fiscal policy of government. Source: Banco de la Republica