Through most of its history, Venezuela remained a poor nation with a rigidly stratified, largely rural population. The political system in the long era of caudillismo was one in which shifting factions, loosely organized around competing caudillos, vied for dominance over disenfranchised masses. A minuscule upper class of wealthy hacendados, whose income derived from cocoa abd coffee plantations, controlled the economy. This group based their superior status on their light skin and on Hispanic cultural and social norms accomplished during the colonial time. contempt its power, prestige, and wealth, the upper stratum never formed the sort of cohesive, entrenched oligarchy so common throughout most of the rest of the continent. Venezuela's comparative poverty-its deficiency of gold or precious stones-limited the attention it received from Spain; fewer Spaniards ventured to Venezuela than to nearby Colombia or more distant Peru. The colonial time, therefore, did not produce an opulent upper class, either Spanish or native born.

Middle-class Venezuelans became a highly mobile people, moving regularly from place to place and job to job. orthodox values changed in ways that made the society more open and class boundaries more flexible. The ongoing process of value modification contributed to changes that accelerated in the 1970s and 1980s, as more women entered the universities and the labor force and more citizens participated in the liberalized political system. In the 1990s, a Venezuelan society still exhibited enormous differences between its upper and its lowest strata. But the social system had become more permeable, and the urban middle class had become likely the most effective group involved in the nation's vigorous partisan politics. Many Venezuelans therefore felt that the greatest challenge to their sociopolitical system lay not in further involvement of the middle class, but in responding to the concerns of the still large group at the base of the societal pyramid.