He founded the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200

It is a fact that he founded the clandestine Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200. In 1977, he founded a revolutionary movement within the armed forces in the hope of one day establishing a leftist government in Venezuela: the Venezuelan People's Liberation Army (ELPV), which consisted of him and a handful of his fellow soldiers who had no immediate plans for direct action but knew they wanted a middle ground between the government's right-wing policies and the Red Flag's far-left position.

Five years after establishing the ELPV, Chávez established a new hidden military cell, the Bolivarian Revolutionary Army-200 (EBR-200), eventually renamed the Revolutionary Bolivarian Movement-200 (MBR-200). He was inspired by Ezequiel Zamora, Simón Bolvar, and Simón Rodrguez, who became known as the MBR-200's "three roots of the tree." He had always believed that the Bolivarian Movement would become a politically dominant party capable of accepting all kinds of ideas, from the right, from the left, from the conceptual rubble of that old capitalism and communist regimes. Indeed, Irish political analyst Barry Cannon observed that the MBR's early ideology "was a doctrine in construction, a heterogeneous amalgam of thoughts and ideologies, from universal thought, capitalism, Marxism, but rejecting the neoliberal models currently being imposed in Latin America and the discredited models of the old Soviet Bloc".