As of 2026-02. The headline figure is the R4V inter-agency population estimate as of its February 2026 update and is revised every few months.
Since roughly 2015, and accelerating sharply from 2017 onward, an economic collapse marked by hyperinflation, shortages, and political repression under President Nicolás Maduro has driven one of the largest displacement crises in recent history. As of 2025-26, over 7.9 million Venezuelans, close to a quarter of the country's population, have left the country, with Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile and the United States hosting the largest numbers. The crisis has strained host-country services across Latin America and produced one of the world's largest cross-border displacement flows outside a formal war zone.
Economic collapse, hyperinflation, and political repression under the Chávez and Maduro governments drove sustained mass emigration from Venezuela, accelerating sharply after 2017
UN Population Division and World Bank estimates put Venezuela's population at roughly 30.1 million in 2015. Venezuela has held no census since 2011, and the emigration itself has since reduced the resident population, with estimates for the mid-2020s ranging from about 28 to 30 million depending on how emigrants are treated.
No significant death toll is attributable to the emigration itself; the harm is displacement and destitution, with UNHCR and the R4V inter-agency platform counting roughly 7.7-7.9 million refugees and migrants who have left Venezuela. Two adjacent tolls are sometimes conflated with it and should be kept separate: the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela recorded 5,094 killings by security forces in 2,552 incidents (2014-2019, not all necessarily unlawful) as part of the repression that drove emigration, and IOM's Missing Migrants Project documents deaths on the Darién Gap route, which are not disaggregated by nationality. The Maduro government rejects the Fact-Finding Mission's findings and disputes the migration figures as inflated by sanctions-focused advocacy.
These forms were documented by the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela (2020) in the state repression that drove the emigration — extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary detention and torture including sexual violence — not in the movement of people itself.
Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Bahamas