…on poverty figures. It’s one of the most disgusting things he’s ever done.

Andres Oppenheimer of the Miami Herald, in one of his best columns, uncovered what bloggers have been saying all along: poverty has risen, not fallen, in Hugo Chavez’s ’21st-century-socialist’ Venezuela, supposedly a champion of the poor. They of course meant: creating more poor during a time of record high oil prices. The item is here.

Miguel Octavio had the original item on the re-cooked statistics on poverty, probably as a result of Oppenheimer’s column.

In all, it amounts to the Cubanization of Venezuela’s once-reliable statistics, a corruption of true knowledge about the country and the results of Chavismo, and obviously a bad attempt to cover something up.