Based on the hypotheses of Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos to explain the Brazilian 1964 coup d'état, this article seeks to identify the leading conditions to the Venezuelan institutional rupture in 1999. Data about the legislative production and the distributions of parliamentary seats and ideological preferences between 1959 and 1999 point that Santos hypotheses have significant explaining capacity of the Venezuelan political crisis at the end of the 90's, specially the causes of the institutional rupture in 1999.
Democracy; Venezuela; institutional rupture; political regime
