US intervention ends a decade of statistical silence in Venezuela
Delcy Rodríguez’s government has begun releasing long‑hidden economic indicators through the Central Bank, exposing the scale of the country’s crisis
Data on the Venezuelan economy had been kept under wraps. But after roughly a decade of statistical silence — interrupted only occasionally by partial releases — the fog has begun to lift in recent weeks as the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) updates historical series on several key indicators. This measure is crucial amidst the economic recovery efforts undertaken by Delcy Rodríguez’s government since the U.S. military intervention. The newly published figures show that inflation reached 32% in January, 14.6% in February, and 13.1% in March. The year‑on‑year rate last month stood at 649.5%.
Under U.S. oversight, Venezuela has also begun opening up the economic data that the government kept under wraps for years. The Central Bank of Venezuela had stopped publishing official statistics as early as 2016, in the lead-up to hyperinflation and the country’s debt default. And although multilateral organizations collected indicators — and the government occasionally released partial figures — only now has the BCV started to catch up with its institutional reporting obligations. Despite the political discomfort of revealing inflation figures that remain among the highest in the world, the bank began releasing its historical series again in February.
The release of economic data has been followed by other shifts inside Venezuela’s institutions. A couple of weeks ago, after the United States lifted the sanctions it had imposed on the Central Bank of Venezuela in 2019, the bank’s leadership changed: Laura Guerra — a petroleum engineer and Nicolás Maduro’s former sister‑in‑law — resigned as president, and a board member took over on an interim basis.
On Monday, a joint statement announced that the U.S. and Venezuela had hired external auditors to ensure “everyone’s peace of mind and impartiality” regarding how the BCV manages the country’s financial resources. The oversight includes international reserves, monetary operations, and interventions in the foreign‑exchange market.
“Having Venezuela’s resources audited by external consultants gives us peace of mind,” said the acting president of the BCV, Luis Pérez González. “The country should have full confidence that the resources are going where they should go and reaching where they should reach.” She also asserted that the Venezuelan economy is heading toward “a new period of exchange rate stability and reduced inflation.”
The U.S. military intervention has also pushed Venezuela to reconnect with the international financial system, leading the government to reestablish relations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. This has forced Caracas to put its accounts in order, after years in which the lack of transparency was a constant point of friction. Venezuela stopped complying with Article IV of its IMF membership in 2004 — which requires regular data reporting — and in 2007, Hugo Chávez expelled IMF staff and shut down their local office, leaving the relationship in limbo.
Recently, the World Bank’s open‑data platform has also been updated. For most indicators, Venezuela had not provided information beyond 2011 — the year before the country’s economic collapse began. Now, at least two categories include more recent data. For example, the charts show that GDP per capita fell from $13,000 in 2012 to $4,300 in 2024.
Beyond the numbers, the analysis also allows us to question the central argument the Venezuelan government used to justify the crisis. Many years before the sanctions, the Venezuelan economy began to contract drastically. In fact, in 2012, Hugo Chávez’s last year in power, it went into freefall, according to the statistics. This occurred before the first individual sanctions against officials in 2014 and against the government as a whole in 2017.
“The problem with the policy of opacity is that it prevents a proper diagnosis of the economic situation. There is no benefit to be gained from hiding a figure,” explains Hermez Pérez, an economist and professor at the Metropolitan University. “Opacity generates all kinds of distortions, because it creates problems associated with establishing relative prices, complicates the planning of labor policies and wage increases for companies, among other things. Inflation, in itself, is an extremely serious phenomenon, and the fact that you don’t publish the data doesn’t solve the problem; rather, it reduces the credibility of the Central Bank of Venezuela.”
The issue is fundamental and will determine the outcome of Venezuela’s economic plans. “It’s a matter of the country’s institutions, because the Central Bank of Venezuela lacks independence and the principle that a central bank cannot lend money to cover the fiscal deficit is not respected,” Pérez points out. The first breach came under Hugo Chávez, who pushed the Central Bank of Venezuela to act as a lender to the government. Through political pressure and later legal changes, the BCV gradually lost its autonomy and effectively became a money‑printing machine — a driver of the country’s chronic inflation.
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