When Venezuela's dynamic new president, Mr Hugo Chavez, was elected to office by a landslide vote last December, he promised a "peaceful, democratic revolution" which would redefine the country's political, social and economic landscape.
The country's poor majority have elevated President Chavez to a messiah figure, the last hope in a country where 80 per cent of people live beneath the poverty line, despite the nation's multibillion dollar oil industry.
Every Sunday, Mr Chavez hosts a radio show, listening to the grievances of the nation. An old woman approached him outside the radio station last week, complaining that her house was crumbling due to heavy rainfall. A day later, he sent an engineer out to look at it, the first time anyone in authority had ever paid attention to her woes.
The president's instrument for more permanent radical change is a new constitution, introducing mechanisms for effective participatory democracy with an emphasis on social justice.
The National Constituent Assembly was elected in July last, with Mr Chavez's centre-left coalition winning 121 out of 131 seats, giving his party total control over the constitutional revision process.
The moderate Democratic Ac tion party (AD) and the Christian Democrats in the COPEI, who alternated power for the past 40 years, were virtually wiped off the electoral map, winning just 9 per cent of votes between them.
Since the beginning of August, the assembly has worked around the clock, its 21 commissions drawing up a blueprint with the guiding principle of "practising solidarity as a norm of life". Large landowners or latifundios are outlawed, free education is guaranteed while "the right to food" is declared more important than corporate profit.
The assembly has collected thousands of suggestions from anonymous citizens and invited hundreds of expert assessors to advise the different commissions, whose work will be finished by the end of this month. Citizens have the right to monitor and replace every elected official, from a voluntary neighbour hood organiser to the president himself, if they fail to fulfil campaign pledges.
The assembly has clashed with the nation's Supreme Court by declaring a judicial emergency, while the old congress, dominated by discredited politicians, is in recess, awaiting dissolution.
Mr Chavez has been criticised for taking soldiers out of the barracks for civic action programmes, while his unsuccessful 1992 coup attempt left lingering doubts about his commitment to democratic rules.
"I rebelled against a tyrannical state," he said, distinguishing himself from "genocidal" military coups in Argentina and Chile. The failed coup took place in the context of growing army dissent after troops were ordered to fire on civilian protesters in February 1989, killing hundreds of people.
"That was when the scales fell from my eyes," said retired Lieut Col Miguel Madriz, one of Chavez's co-conspirators, who served two years in prison after the coup. He presides over the Citizen Power commission, responsible for promoting citizen access to political power.
Did he feel worried about the size of the task ahead? I asked him at the weekend. "Look at me," he said, "three months ago I didn't have a single grey hair."
In 15 years of travel in Latin America, this was the first time I recall a military officer expressing concern about disappointing the dispossessed.
The assembly's Indigenous Rights Commission has drawn up radical proposals for autonomy and bilingual education, while genetic Medicine resources would be defined as collectively owned and proscribed from individual patenting processes.
The proposed new constitution marks a radical, and still unproven, departure in social and economic policy, in a region dominated by free-market regimes which have repealed labour and agrarian reform laws to facilitate export-led growth.