Marcos Falcone and Daniel Raisbeck
Since the capture and removal of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro by the United States on January 3, chavismo, the socialist movement launched by Hugo Chávez in 1999, has tried to cling to power under the leadership of Delcy Rodríguez, formerly vice president and a longtime senior official of the regime. But 27 years of “21st Century Socialism” have left behind a legacy of destruction that is impossible to ignore. The following charts help explain that record and why more than 65 percent of Venezuelan voters rejected chavismo in the 2024 election—the last one held in the country and one the regime rigged to stay in power.
Inflation
Hugo Chávez seized control of the Central Bank of Venezuela in 2007. After he died in 2013, his successor, Nicolás Maduro, inherited inflation levels of over 50 percent a year, following a sharp rise over the preceding decade.
After the hyperinflation that took place between 2017 and 2019—peaking at 130,000 percent in 2018—inflation declined only as the economy became informally dollarized. Even so, Venezuela remains the country with the highest inflation in the world.
Devaluation
Chávez constantly devalued the Venezuelan bolívar, as did Maduro once he took power. By 2017, the bolívar had lost 93 percent of its value against the dollar since 2000. In August 2018, Maduro devalued the currency by an additional 96 percent, but it kept depreciating even after that.
In 2018, the regime introduced the “sovereign bolívar,” dividing the face value of the previous currency by 100,000. At one point, Venezuelan street vendors were selling goods woven out of bolívar bills. Maduro had no choice but to loosen strict exchange controls. In 2021, the “digital bolívar” was introduced, dividing the face value of previous currency by 1,000,000, thus eliminating a total of eleven zeros in three years. By then, much of the Venezuelan economy was already de facto dollarized, though that has not stopped the bolívar from continuing to depreciate to this day.
Corruption
Relative to other countries, perceived corruption in Venezuela has deteriorated almost without interruption since Hugo Chávez came to power. Venezuela initially ranked among the 20 percent to 25 percent most corrupt countries in the world, but by 2006 researcher Gustavo Coronel could extensively document how corruption had “exploded to unprecedented levels.” The situation has only worsened since, placing Venezuela among the 1 percent of countries with the worst corruption in the world in recent years.
Public debt
When Chávez won his first election in 1998, Venezuela’s debt as a share of GDP stood at a moderate 31 percent. By 2013, the year Chávez died, debt had reached 85 percent of GDP. Since 2015, Venezuela’s debt-to-GDP ratio has remained well above 100 percent, reaching a record 337 percent in 2020. The subsequent decline reflects rising oil prices and the economy’s stabilization following de facto dollarization. However, continued GDP contraction and the recognition of previously hidden state-owned company liabilities have pushed debt levels back up.
Income and poverty
Between 2003 and 2012, high oil prices and Chávez’s deficit spending nearly quadrupled Venezuela’s per capita GDP. The boom was followed by a bust. The collapse of the chavista model and the oil bear market of the mid-2010s brought the country’s per capita GDP down in 2016 to roughly the same level as in 1984, despite an exodus of a large part of the population. That situation persists today despite the rebound in oil prices since the lows in 2020. In terms of income, chavismo set Venezuela back four decades.
Through extreme fiscal profligacy fueled by debt and petrodollar revenue during the oil boom of the 2000s, Chávez created the illusion of a nation defeating poverty. In the early 2010s, the poverty rate had fallen to around 30 percent of the population and extreme poverty to just under 10 percent. By 2019, 94 percent of Venezuelans lived in poverty and 68 percent in extreme poverty. In 2021, the Financial Times reported that “for the first time, the average Venezuelan is poorer than the average Haitian.”
Venezuela, once a wealthy nation, had become one of the poorest countries in Latin America. In recent years, only a series of measures—including informal dollarization, the elimination of some exchange controls, and limited trade liberalization—has kept poverty from rising further and has even brought it down somewhat, though it remains at historically high levels.
Oil production
Venezuela holds the world’s largest oil reserves. In the early 2000s, the country produced more than 3 million barrels of crude a day. Even after the 2002–2003 oil strike—which was an attempt to stop Chávez from seizing control of the state oil company, PDVSA—and the subsequent firing of 20,000 PDVSA employees (out of a total of 35,000), Venezuela was still producing more than 2.5 million barrels a day. But Chávez guaranteed the company’s decline by taking control of PDVSA, staffing it with loyalists, and diverting its resources toward his “revolutionary” goals, such as public housing construction.
The poorly run company was unable to cope with the oil bear market that began in 2014. Trump-era sanctions halted Venezuelan oil exports to the United States, but Venezuela’s exports to the rest of the world also fell sharply, as did domestic oil consumption. By 2019, Venezuela was producing well under a million barrels of crude a day, a figure that dropped below 500,000 barrels a day during the COVID-19 crisis.
According to chavista propaganda, the collapse of Venezuela’s oil industry is due solely to US sanctions. But history has offered a curious point of comparison: despite facing severe sanctions on its own oil exports since early 2022, Russia “has defied predictions of severe declines in its oil supply,” Reuters reported in late 2023. As of 2025, Russian supply remained relatively stable. In Venezuela’s case, it is clear that socialism, not sanctions, caused PDVSA’s precipitous decline.
Emigration
Venezuelans began leaving their country en masse in 2013. By 2025, more than 8 million Venezuelans were living abroad, many of them as refugees. According to R4V, a platform run by the UN Refugee Agency and the International Organization for Migration, 6.9 million of them were living in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025.
Colombia has taken in more Venezuelans than any other country over the past decade—an astonishing 2.8 million; Colombia’s total population in 2013, when emigration began to surge, stood at just over 46 million, according to the World Bank. Within Latin America, Colombia is followed by Peru (1.7 million), Brazil (732,000), Chile (670,000), and Ecuador (440,000). Beyond Latin America, the United States and Spain have taken in the largest numbers of Venezuelan migrants, with 987,600 and 603,000, respectively. Venezuela, whose population stood at 30 million in 2014, is estimated to have lost more than 25 percent of its people.
Political prisoners
As in Cuba, whose regime Chávez admired and emulated, political repression has been a hallmark of the chavista era. The number of political prisoners rose sharply since Maduro took power, climbing dramatically starting in 2017, when the regime brutally cracked down on mass protests over the opposition-led National Assembly’s “dissolution” and the arbitrary detention of opposition leaders. It peaked in 2024 after Maduro’s electoral fraud against Edmundo González Urrutia in that year’s presidential election, when there were 1,794 political prisoners. Although the regime has released a limited number of political prisoners since Maduro’s downfall on January 3, 2026, hundreds of persecuted individuals remain in detention.
Homicides
Chávez had little interest in defending Venezuelans’ freedom and property. Nor did he safeguard their right to life. Venezuela’s homicide rate rose sharply under his rule and Maduro’s, reaching a peak of 63 murders per 100,000 people in 2014, according to official figures whose accuracy has been questioned. The Venezuelan Violence Observatory, an independent research institute, has consistently published figures that are higher than those of the regime.
The institute put the 2013 murder rate, for example, at 79 per 100,000 people, compared with the 39 per 100,000 reported by the regime. As journalist Jeremy McDermott wrote in 2014, “Unfortunately, the government claims that homicides actually dropped 30 percent in 2013 are so unbelievable that they must be discounted.” With 79 homicides per 100,000 people, he added, Venezuela “is still far and away the most dangerous nation in South America and trails only Honduras (with a rate of 86) as the most dangerous nation on earth.”
But the homicide rate has fallen considerably since the mid-2010s, as the Observatory’s own figures show. In 2023, the institute reported 27 homicides per 100,000 people, the lowest rate since 2001. Several factors appear to have contributed to that decline, chief among them the economic collapse: according to sociologist Roberto Briceño-León, the lack of opportunities to commit crime has driven a broader decline in all types of crime across Venezuela.
Human freedom
The Human Freedom Index measures countries’ economic, civil, and personal freedoms. The index, which has tracked 165 countries since 2000, shows Venezuela’s slide into authoritarianism early on in Chávez’s government. In 2000, Venezuela ranked in the middle-to-lower range in the index, but its decline in human freedom has been steady ever since. In 2019, it fell to second-to-last place, and today it ranks 159th. Venezuela currently ranks last in the economic freedom index.
Venezuela’s relative decline
The chart above shows how Venezuela’s per capita income fell sharply between 2012 and 2020, going from one of the highest in Latin America to the lowest. That decline coincided with a considerable rise in the region’s average per capita income, as well as with the continuing takeoff of Chile’s economy.
The Economic Freedom of the World index, published by the Fraser Institute in Canada, has long documented the close relationship between economic freedom and prosperity, a relationship that holds for Venezuela as well. The chart above shows how, between 1970 and 2023, Venezuela went from being one of the freest economies in the world to one of the most repressed. At the same time, we see the remarkable rise in economic freedom that Chile experienced.
The last chart shows that in 1955, Venezuela’s average per capita income was equivalent to 60 percent of that of the United States, while by 2022 it amounted to just 9 percent of the average US income.
This article can be found in Spanish here. It updates and expands on a previous version from 2024.