CARACAS, VENEZUELA — Venezuelan economist Miguel Ángel Santos estimates that capital flight during the strict currency control regime Chavismo imposed between 2003 and 2016 reached $161.3 billion — a figure he says is equivalent to fifteen years of food imports at Venezuela’s peak import year.
Santos, dean of Tecnológico de Monterrey’s School of Government and a Harvard Kennedy School affiliate, reached the number after reviewing recently published Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) data.
His conclusion is pointed: “It’s clear the currency control, lifted following oil sanctions, wasn’t created to stop capital flight, but to decide who got to flee with it and get rich.”
The currency control system became one of Chavismo’s most notorious corruption vectors, with senior officials eventually admitting billions of dollars were funneled through shell companies exploiting preferential dollar allocations for irregular business deals.
Nicolás Maduro himself dissolved the government office managing the system and acknowledged in 2013 that “there was fraud,” appointing a special commission — which included then-Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino López — to investigate the looted public funds.
That commission produced no concrete results.
Santos’s analysis also directly challenges Chavismo’s standard narrative blaming U.S. sanctions for Venezuela’s economic collapse. He found that starting in 2017, when Washington’s sanctions regime began, Venezuela actually saw an unprecedented net inflow of capital rather than accelerated flight — driven by real imports, unregistered private investment, and asset liquidation by Venezuelans abroad, some of it likely capital seeking to evade sanctions enforcement. But he notes the amount that flowed back between 2017 and 2025, roughly $12.3 billion, represents less than 10% of what originally fled the country, and is separate from remittances, which the BCV separately estimates at $3.1 to $3.7 billion since 2019.
Santos’s verdict: “Chavismo destroyed Venezuela’s economy, and did so deliberately to perpetuate itself in power. By the time the suspect the Rodríguez siblings want to use as a scapegoat arrived at the crime scene, the body was already cold.”
President Delcy Rodríguez and National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, howver, have continued to frame U.S. sanctions as the root cause of Venezuela’s economic crisis as improved relations between both countries evolve following Maduro’s capture by U.S. forces.
