Our purpose in this article is to establish a correlation between Venezuela's political present and its historical background. There are, in fact, numerous institutions, practices, ideas, heroes and collective imaginaries that have travelled along history since the independence of the country until contemporary contexts. In this sense, important components of Hugo Chávez Frías'regime represent a prolongation (even, an intensification) of many political processes which have born during last two

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... enturies. In order to expose our arguments we structure the article in three main parts: the XIXth, the XXth and the XXIst centuries.