Winning The 1998 elections

South America in the late 1980s and early 1990s was just recovering from the Latin American debt crisis of the mid-1980s and many governments had adopted austerity and privatization policies to finance International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. It was in this context that Chávez and MBR-200 (as the Fifth Republic Movement) won the 1998 elections and initiated the constituent process that resulted in the Venezuelan Constitution of 1999.