NYRB: "One in four Venezuelans has left their country. Seven years ago the number of those who had left--migrated, fled, been forced out--was still one in ten. [...] In 2023 more people from Venezuela crossed the US-Mexico border than from any country other than Mexico or Guatemela. In 2024 the official tally was 261,000 Venezuelans, but that's just the people who were apprehended. One in ten is mass migration, One in four is an exodus."
"More people have been displaced from Venezuela than from countries where war and mass slaughter rage, such as Syria and Ukraine. Venezuela is at peace. But it is a peace with galloping inflation."
see William Neuman's Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse
and, more broadly, Terry Karl's The Paradox of Plenty, which shows the economic dangers for countries made rich by large reserves of oil (Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, Algeria, and Indonesia), which have a tendency to beocme destabilized plutocratic petrostates