Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200
| Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario - 200 | |
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| Abbreviation | MBR-200 |
|---|---|
| Successor | Fifth Republic Movement |
| Formation | 17 December 1982 |
| Extinction | July 1997 |
| Location |
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Key people
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Hugo Chávez, Francisco Arias Cárdenas, Felipe Acosta Carles, Jesús Urdaneta Hernández |
The Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (Movimiento Bolivariano Revolucionario 200 or MBR-200) was the political and social movement that former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez founded in 1982. It eventually planned and executed the February 4, 1992 attempted coup. The movement later evolved into the Movement for the Fifth Republic (MVR), set up in July 1997 to support Hugo Chávez's candidacy in the Venezuelan presidential election, 1998. The move to electoral politics took several years of intense internal debate, as many felt that the elections might be fixed to prevent an MBR-200 candidate winning. It took a nationwide survey conducted by the movement to show that it might gain enough electoral support to make victory hard to deny.
The movement's first members were Chávez and his fellow military officers Felipe Acosta Carles and Jesús Urdaneta Hernández. On 17 December 1982, as Chávez biographer Richard Gott reports, the three
revolutionary officers swore an oath underneath the great tree at Samán de Güere, near Maracay, repeating the words of the pledge that Simón Bolívar had made in Rome in 1805, when he swore to devote his life to the liberation of Venezuela from Spanish yoke: "I swear before you, and I swear before the God of my fathers, that I will not allow my arm to relax, nor my soul to rest, until I have broken the chains that oppress us..."
Gott further explains that the suffix "200" was added to the group's name the following year, in 1983, on the 200th anniversary of South American liberator Simon Bolívar's birth.
The movement began "more as a political study circle than as a subversive conspiracy," but soon its members "began thinking in terms of some kind of coup d'état." Chávez and his friends soon recruited more members, including Francisco Arias Cárdenas, in March 1985.
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