In 1998, Canarias was home to 18,444 Venezuelans. The following year, Hugo Chávez would become Venezuela’s forty-seventh president. The year 1999 would thus enter history as Year I of what would later be known as chavismo. A quarter of a century later, the latest figures from the National Institute of Statistics show that the archipelago now hosts 73,775 Venezuelans. The number has quadrupled over the 25 years since chavismo began steering the Bolivarian Republic. And these are just the official numbers, which perfectly illustrate the diaspora suffered by the South American country, though they fall short—there are organizations that place the Venezuelan population in the Canaries above 100,000. The point is that among the various socio-economic indicators used to gauge the health of ties between the Islands and Caracas, the one that rises, and in a negative way, is precisely the tally of people born in Venezuela who seek a better future in the Archipelago.
The diaspora from the Bolivarian Republic has quadrupled the number of Venezuelans living in the Islands
Because everything else, almost everything else, has steadily declined as the chavista, madurista regime since 2013 has evolved toward the current crisis on the streets, the data reflect a similar trend for bilateral links. Whether you look at economic or commercial ties, the connection between the Canaries and what used to be its eighth island, when La Graciosa was merely a dot in the collective imagination, has not survived the regime’s pressures.
Bilateral trade
There is a need to look back to see how chavismo has affected commerce between the Bolivarian Republic and the Canary Islands. In that last pre Chávez year, 1998, Canarian imports of Venezuelan goods and merchandise reached 42.1 million euros. That figure was not insignificant and was not accidental. Just a year earlier, in 1997, the archipelago imported goods from South America worth 41 million euros, always according to the statistics of the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Tourism.
Venezuela stood among the top twenty suppliers to the Canaries in those years and was the main Latin American ally for trade, alongside Brazil. A quarter of a century later, little remains of that picture. Import volumes from Caracas did not merely fall; Canarias stopped buying from Venezuela. In the last four years (2020-2023), regional companies barely imported goods from the Bolivarian country, averaging 782,000 euros per year. In 2024 so far, the figure barely exceeds 110,000 euros.
At one time 139 Canarian firms traded with Venezuela; today only 20 remain
Not much better is seen in exports. The numbers are more modest because the Canaries are not a major goods exporter—except for fuel and merchandise to ships docking in its ports. Yet there was a sizeable flock of Canarian firms selling to Venezuelan clients. In 2012, there were still 139 Canarian companies exporting to Venezuela, eight of which earned at least 50,000 euros annually from those shipments. The turning point did not lie in Chávez’s early years but in 2013, with Nicolás Maduro’s ascent to the presidency. In the ten years Maduro has led the country, the vast majority of those 139 Canarian firms stopped exporting to Venezuela. Only about twenty continue on occasion, not annually, and none export as a stable, ongoing business. In strict terms of permanent export activity, only one Canarian company remains active in Venezuela. One only.
Expanding beyond pure trade, the picture becomes clearer: only six Canarian firms maintain any activity in Venezuela. Three consultancies, one online training provider—thus exporters of services—, one cheese producer, and a distributor of automobiles. That is six among more than 60,000 business entities on the archipelago. Countries with less historical connection to the Canaries, like Argentina with eleven Canarian firms, Colombia with eighteen, Chile with sixteen, or Ecuador with eight, have emerged as stronger markets for Canarian businesses. And, naturally, investment flows to and from Venezuela are effectively non-existent.