the figure used on this page isn't the number of people who self identify as black it's the estimated number of people with some degree of african ancestry in latin america in general and venezuela in particular these are very different things black only applies to people who have sole or predominately african ancestry while people of mixed ancestry generally consider themselves brown moreno on the census presumably this is what you are calling mestizo if we simply used the black figure from the census we'd be ignoring the large number of people who have mixed african and european native american ancestry we can't use the brown figure either as this would include many people who have both european and native american ancestry but no african ancestry so the census figures are no good for us and we need to find a different source that estimates african ancestry directly without using the black brown colour labels the estimation comes from an official document from the venezuelan government the embassy in the us which specifically states this as the number of people with african ancestry so is a reliable source for our purposes if you have an equal or better reliable source that gives an alternative figure then please let me know what it is the issue is a red herring mestizo and african ancestry are overlapping categories and can't be added together as if they were distinct mestizo in venezuela means a mixture of european native american and or african ancestry so some of the people included in mestizo are also included in african ancestry and you'd be counting them twice if you added the two together a better check is that we'd expect afican ancestry to be all of the black category plus part of the brown category so more than and less than the estimate fits this perfectly