In Venezuela, delinquency rates increased considerably between the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties. Parallel to this growth, the national institutions experienced serious fluctuationsin in their development, from constant growth to their entering into crisis and gradually losing legitimacy. The present research aims at evaluating the possibilty of a temporal relationship between these two situations positing the hypothesis that the variation of the legitimacy of the main institutions of the country is associated with the increase of the delinquency rates, taking Gary LaFree’s theoretical model of “institutional delegitimation”. Firstly, the institutional legitimacy in the country was examined and secondly, the tendency of five delinquency rates, both for a period of 45 years. In spite of being significantly related by means of Pearson’s correlation coefficient, they did not reflect this when a statistical method adequate to temporal series was applied, with the exception of theft, derived from certain economic and social variables, but not always in the expected direction according to LaFree’s model.