Venezuela’s Leader Admits Regime Caused Hyperinflation

Delcy Rodríguez’s admission that Venezuela’s own salary policy fueled hyperinflation marks the most significant rhetorical break with the Chavista economic playbook in over a decade — using vocabulary the regime had systematically avoided since the crisis began, El País, TalCual, and El Observador reported Wednesday.

Speaking on state television, Venezuela’s acting president did something neither Hugo Chávez nor Nicolás Maduro ever did: she used the words “hyperinflation” and “shortages” as government failures rather than external impositions. Rodríguez acknowledged that the salary policy of the past decade had been “mistaken” and produced massive monetary and fiscal distortions. She also recognized the emigration of approximately eight million Venezuelans — which she termed “induced” — and stated that the current GDP stands at just 36% of what it was in 2012, the year before Venezuela’s long economic collapse began.

The Scale of the Collapse

The numbers behind the admission are staggering. Venezuela’s GDP contracted roughly 80% between 2013 and 2025, falling from approximately $350 billion to around $83 billion — the worst peacetime collapse of any economy in modern history. Inflation reached six digits at its peak, exceeding 130,000% annually. The formal minimum wage has remained frozen at 130 bolívares since March 2022 — a figure that was worth approximately $30 at the time but has eroded to less than $0.50 today at the current exchange rate of over 470 bolívares per dollar.

The government long ago abandoned the formal salary as the basis of worker compensation, replacing it with a system of dollar-indexed bonuses — the Bono de Guerra Económica and Cestaticket Socialista — that do not count toward pensions, severance, or vacation pay. Rodríguez said this integrated income has risen from $30 in October 2021 to $190 as of March 2026, thanks partly to extraordinary fuel oil sales. But the basic food basket for a family of five costs approximately $570, meaning even the total compensation package covers only a third of subsistence needs.

What She Promised

Rodríguez announced a “responsible” salary increase effective May 1 but provided no amount, saying that no wage increase should lack a funding source. She also announced a Presidential Commission for Labor Dialogue aimed at creating a “new model” for labor relations — building on Maduro’s final initiative of a “union constituent process” before his capture by US forces on January 3. Additionally, she signed a Law for the Elimination and Improvement of Administrative Procedures to streamline the country’s notoriously dysfunctional bureaucracy, proposed a new tax model, and created a commission to evaluate which state assets are “strategically essential” — widely interpreted as a prelude to selective privatization, though Rodríguez explicitly excluded PDVSA and the hydrocarbon sector, rejecting opposition leader María Corina Machado’s proposal to privatize the state oil company.

Why the Shift

The speech comes three months into Rodríguez’s tenure as acting president and under mounting pressure from both the streets and the unions. The CTV labor confederation has proposed a minimum wage of $200–450, arguing that with projected government revenues of $37 billion in 2026 — up from $5.6 billion in 2024 — the state has the resources to restore dignified wages. March saw street protests demanding economic improvements that the post-Maduro political opening has so far failed to deliver.

Rodríguez’s willingness to use words the Chavista leadership banned from official discourse for over a decade — hyperinflation, shortages, mistaken policy — signals a calculated pivot. She is positioning herself as a reformist within the system rather than a continuist, even while maintaining the regime’s core narrative that the economic blockade caused the collapse. Whether the May 1 increase is meaningful — unions want $200, the government’s track record suggests far less — will determine whether the admission is a genuine turning point or rhetorical cover for a system that has destroyed the purchasing power of an entire nation.

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