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Since 2002-2003, Hugo Chavez has made support for the most impoverished a spearhead of his policy by creating the Missions, social programs aiming to respond to the needs of the poorest segment of the population in the areas of health, education and nutrition. The Missions are characterized by their practice of systematically bypassing institutions as well as by an anarchic proliferation which renders their institutionalization particularly difficult. Do these programs really represent a fundamental break with earlier social policies, as the government claims? To respond to this question, the evolution of the Venezuelan social state and the record and development of the Missions - in particular, that of the Che Guevera Mission, a training program that prepares its beneficiaries for creating cooperatives - must be analyzed. It would appear that, despite the ideological and discursive break with the past proclaimed by President Chavez, there is strong continuity between the social policies of the 'Bolivarian Revolution' and those of earlier governments.