Between 2014 and 2026 Venezuela combined the deepest peacetime economic collapse in the modern history of the Western Hemisphere with one of its most intensive deployments of state coercion: income poverty reached 73.2% of households and informality approximately half of all employment (UCAB, 2025), while a United Nations fact-finding mission documented se- curity-force conduct amounting, in its assessment, to crimes against humanity — with the Boli- varian National Guard (GNB) responsible for the largest number of politically motivated deten- tions and for indiscriminate firing on protesters across the 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2024 protest cycles (UN Human Rights Council, 2020; OHCHR, 2025). The aim of this review article is to synthesize the fragmented scholarship on Venezuelan coercion, poverty, and informality into a single analytical account of the GNB's role. The research applies a structured review methodol- ogy: a corpus of 53 peer-reviewed studies published 2019–2026, assembled through systematic database searches and verified item by item, is coded by the state function each study documents, and triangulated against United Nations, survey, and observatory sources. The original contribu- tion of the article is the concept of coercive poverty governance and its operationalization as a three-function typology of GNB activity — protest suppression, regulation of the informal sur- vival economy, and enforcement of extractive rents — which reorganizes a literature convention- ally split between “repression” and “informality” studies into a single governance logic. Key find- ings: the reviewed literature's center of gravity shifts after 2019 from protest suppression toward economic and extractive coercion, tracking the regime's own reallocation of the GNB; repression functions not as a response to poverty's disorders but as the principal instrument by which an insolvent state manages a population it can no longer pay; and lethal escalation produced exit rather than voice — mass emigration of 7.9 million — consistent with cross-national repression theory (Congressional Research Service, 2025; Curtice & Behlendorf, 2021; Weitzman & Huss, 2024). The typology is transferable to other cases where security forces govern survival econo- mies under fiscal collapse.