CRÓNICA CONSTITUCIONAL SOBRE EL MOMENTO CONSTITUYENTE PERDIDO DE 1998 (Que el liderazgo democrático no entendió ni supo asumir, y que Chávez le arrebató en 1999 para establecer un régimen autoritario)

This book by Professor Allan R. Brewer-Carías, is the Constitutional Chronicle about the lost constituent moment in Venezuela of 1998, which the democratic parties and their leaders of that time did not know how to interpret or assume democratically. They did not understand the magnitude of the terminal crisis that the democratic political system established as a result of the Punto Fijo Pact of 1958 was going through, after operating for forty years within the framework of the 1961 Constitution. Consequently, seven years after Hugo Chávez Frías had failed in his first attempt to seize power by means of a military coup in 1992, they allowed him to proceed, as soon as he was elected President in December of that year 1998, to freely impose on the entire country his proposal for a Constituent Assembly, formulated outside the Constitution of 1961. Thus, allowing him to misuse a democratic instrument, to also assault political power with his own troops in 1999. The result was the establishment of an authoritarian regime that has destroyed not only democracy, but all the institutions of the State and the whole basis of the country