How many venuwaleans were criminals
Executive summary
There is no reliable source that counts "how many Venezuelans were criminals" as a single definitive number; official Venezuelan crime data have large gaps and independent measures report violent-crime rates rather than counts of people who are criminals, while migration studies show Venezuelans abroad do not commit crimes at higher rates than locals [1] [2] [3]. Any attempt to convert homicide or crime rates into a tally of "criminals" confuses victims, incidents, and perpetrators and would exceed what the available reporting supports [4] [5].
1. What the public statistics actually measure — incidents, rates, not individual criminals
Most widely cited figures for Venezuela are incident-based rates — for example macro-level crime or homicide rates per 100,000 people — not counts of unique individuals labeled “criminals,” and sources vary: Macrotrends reports crime-rate figures per 100,000 for years like 2019 [4], while World Bank/UNODC datasets publish intentional homicides per 100,000 [5]; these numbers reflect incidents or victimization rates, not how many distinct people committed crimes.
2. Data gaps and political interference make any headcount of offenders unreliable
Venezuelan authorities stopped publishing comprehensive national security statistics in 2015 and government transparency has been repeatedly criticized, meaning official tallies are incomplete and contested [2] [6]. Independent trackers such as the Venezuelan Violence Observatory and reporting by InSight Crime and other analysts fill some gaps but emphasize methodological limits, so deriving a firm number of people classified as criminals from the available datasets is not possible [2] [1].
3. What crime-rate figures imply — scale of violence, not number of criminals
Homicide and violent-death rates provide a sense of how pervasive lethal violence has been: multiple sources put Venezuela’s homicide rate in recent years in the tens of homicides per 100,000 people — figures cited include roughly 40 homicides per 100,000 in some years and lower estimates like 26.8 violent deaths per 100,000 reported by the Venezuelan Observatory of Violence for 2023 — but these are measures of deaths, not the count of offenders [7] [8].
4. Why converting rates to counts of “criminals” is misleading
Even if one used a homicide rate of ~40 per 100,000 to estimate the number of murders, that yields incidents not perpetrators; many crimes are committed by groups or repeat offenders, many crimes go unreported, and law-enforcement involvement and extrajudicial killings further cloud who is an accused or convicted criminal versus a victim or suspect — complications highlighted by scholars and investigative outlets [1] [9] [2].
5. What migration research adds — Venezuelans abroad are not overrepresented among criminals
Research on Venezuelan migrants in neighboring countries shows that, in practice, Venezuelan arrivals have generally committed fewer crimes than native-born populations in places like Colombia, Peru and Chile, undermining simplistic claims that large numbers of Venezuelans are criminals by virtue of migration [3]. This finding cautions against conflating nationality with criminality when answering the question.
6. Bottom line: the reporting cannot deliver a single numeric answer
The available, credible sources do not provide a defensible count of “how many Venezuelans were criminals”; instead they offer incident rates, contested homicide figures, and research showing migrants are not uniquely criminal [4] [2] [7] [3]. Any precise headcount would require transparent judicial records, standardized definitions of “criminal,” and comprehensive reporting that Venezuela and independent monitors do not currently supply [1] [6].