Common canard holds that Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez, whatever his faults, at least is ending poverty through his soup-kitchen programs. Andres Oppenheimer blows the lid off that steaming pot, though, by taking a good look at the Venezuelan government’s own statistics. What he sees appalls him. He writes:

Indeed, the latest poverty figures from Venezuela’s official National Institute of Statistics — buried in a mountain of figures deep in the bowels of its Internet site, www.ine.gov.ve — contain the most damning condemnation of the Ch????vez government I have seen anywhere.

The figures, on Page 5 of the Institute’s Social Report, show that poverty in Venezuela rose from 43 percent to 54 percent of the population during Ch????vez’s first four years in office. And extreme poverty — the percentage of the population that lives on less than $1 a day — grew from 17 percent to 25 percent during the same period, the figures show.

These are stunning figures, not only because Ch????vez is going around Latin America proclaiming to be heading a ”Bolivarian revolution” to help the poor, but also because the rise in poverty during his tenure has taken place at the very time when Venezuela has been benefiting from its greatest oil boom in recent history.

Meanwhile, blogger Miguel Octavio has a good translation of an essay by economics journalist Victor Salmeron who outlines the coming disaster of Hugo Chavez’s state capitalism. The result is the same result that every other place that’s tried it has found. He writes:

Up to now, the creation of public companies has not been successful. The banks of the People and the Women, emblematic institutions in the game board of the financial system that the Chavismo has created, are closing 2004 in the red, according to the financials of the Ministry of Finance.

The oxygen tank that the public budget represents will require that the price of the Venezuelan oil basket stays at high levels to continue pumping fuel to this new state structure.

Read the whole thing here.