I hate to have to waste bandwidth on this but there are still people out there who think Hugo Chavez has improved the situation in Venezuela, and is only in power because he is popular. Having been there and talked to people, I strongly doubt it. But I also used my eyes.

If it’s true that Chavez is popular because he’s made things so much better for the poor, how come this is the Caracas reality today?

The above PowerPoint presentation, courtesy of The Real Cuba shows the deterioration of Caracas from 1998, the last year before Hugo Chavez took office as president in 1999, to what is now is in 2006.

We see defaced artwork, crumbling infrastructure, graffiti, broken statues, burned skyscrapers, trash, and teeming masses of barely employed buhoneros occupying the whole street – from what was once an attractive, modern, proudly slick city in South America. It’s almost like descending into Dante’s Inferno.

It’s also a sign of something, something very negative going on, that a vast cosmopolitan city, one which had been obviously rich and glittering, is now a supersize Tijuana, full of obvious misery rooted in lack of confidence to invest in and maintain the place. Normal cities don’t get like that when positive economic action is going on. Only tyrannized cities, characterized by the increasing power of the state do. The epitome of this ugly effect on once-beautiful cities is Havana.

For me, this before-after presentation was especially informative, because the only Caracas I ever saw was the 2006 version. People repeatedly told me the place had gone to hell since Chavez took power, but I had no way of really knowing. Seeing a picture of the Sabana Grande, once a major shopping street and now a giant row of hawker stalls – just before Chavez took power, and comparing it to the mess that it is since Chavez, was particularly informative.

See the whole presentation here.

UPDATE: Michael Rowan at El Universal has an excellent new essay on how Chavez has raised poverty and misery in Venezuela here.