Even in oil-rich, socialist-minded Venezuela, the campaign against poverty has had mixed results.

BY PHIL GUNSON AND STEVEN DUDLEY

CARACAS - Yili González and Carolina Roja share the sorrows of poverty: malnourished children, unemployment, squalid living conditions, lack of food and education. Yet they differ on President Hugo Chávez, avowed champion of Venezuela's poor.

Roja says that while she's still poor, under Chávez her life has improved noticeably, with more subsidized food, medical care and educational opportunities. But González says she is wary of Chávez because after seven years of his rule she's lost her job and her kids remain hungry.

Together, their stories tell a complex tale that dry statistics cannot: that under a president who is putting Venezuela's huge windfall profits from oil exports to work fighting poverty, the lives of some poor people have improved and the lives of others have not.

The number of poor in this country of 25 million people indeed has begun to shrink amid Chavez's massive social welfare programs, making people like Roja happy and Chávez so popular that he seems likely to remain in power for a long time despite complaints that his policies have undermined Venezuela's democratic institutions.

Yet critics say Chávez is failing to use the oil income to ensure long-term progress, and point to the high unemployment and underemployment, the flight abroad of billions of dollars in capital and the closing of some 7,000 private companies -- more than half the country's industrial sector.

On Sunday, Chávez -- who often tells Venezuelans that ''being rich is bad'' while calling capitalism a ''savage'' economic system used by the world's most powerful countries to ''dominate and colonize'' poor nations -- urged Venezuelans to embrace his ``21st century socialism.''

This, as recent poll results showed less than one-third of the population supports the economic model.

Speaking during his weekly radio and television program, Chávez called on Venezuelans to ''leave behind any confusion or any type of fears, phantoms,'' regarding socialism.

The latest reports from the National Statistics Institute, known as the INE, give reason to both critics and supporters.

INE's figures show that the percentage of people considered poor -- earning less than $2 a day -- rose from 43 percent in 1999, when Chávez was first elected, to 53 percent last year. Yet the rate in fact dropped slightly from 2003 to last year, according to the INE figures.

However, only the staunchest of Chávez supporters would claim that his policies and social welfare programs have really broken the back of poverty -- the latest official data shows that the country's infant mortality rate, one key index of well-being, has increased in the past two years.

''Poverty levels have dropped,'' said Luis Pedro España, a professor at the Andres Bello Catholic University in Caracas, which is finishing off its own annual report on poverty. ``But the chronic problems of poverty continue.''

But perception can be more important than reality in judging poverty. In the end, poverty is a phenomenon that includes not just income but housing, food availability, health care and education opportunities.

And so far, Chávez has made the issue of easing poverty a centerpiece of his initially ''Bolivarian'' and more recently ''socialist'' revolution.

With help from at least $4 billion in revenues from the state oil company, PDVSA, in the last two years, he has launched ambitious antipoverty programs known as ''missions'' that deliver everything from literacy classes to subsidized food and housing and free basic health care -- mostly through 17,000 Cuban medical personnel.

The education missions give monthly stipends to those who go to literacy programs or return to study for their high school diplomas.

Chávez has increased the minimum wage, and his government adopted a law forcing private companies to pay employees a $70-a-month food allowance if they earn less than $450 per month.

''This is a New Deal,'' like Franklin D. Roosevelt, said Ed Saade, head of Datos Information Resources, a marketing research company that recently released a comprehensive study that, in part, looked at Chávez's effect on the poor. ``What Chávez has done is very powerful: He's established an emotional link to the poor.''

A recent poll by NOP World marketing group showed that Venezuelans were more confident than nearly everyone else, including U.S. citizens and Canadians, that their economic situation would improve in the coming year, according to the British newsweekly The Economist.

That came after a different polling company here reported Chávez's approval rate at 70 percent -- high by any standards.

Chávez's effect in poor neighborhoods is palpable for people like Roja, a 24-year-old mother of three who receives a monthly bag of rations that includes red beans, rice, milk, and cooking oil, among other staples.

She says she sees public works projects fixing the streets and frequently goes with her children to see the Cuban doctors on the hill above her sprawling neighborhood of cinder-block houses on the western edge of Caracas.

''Things are better,'' she insisted. ``Chávez put in health clinics. There are soup kitchens. They give away bags of food.''

But while some poor areas are getting lots of Chávez government attention, others are not.

''If I had anything to give them for lunch, I would,'' Yili González said with an embarrassed glance at her five children, all under 12, as they played in the dirt around her cinder-block hut home in Mara, a municipality in the parched scrublands of the Guajira peninsula in northwestern Venezuela.

González, 31, is a Wayuu Indian who speaks limited Spanish. Her husband is a laborer, but he is sick, she says.

She herself has what she calls, ''a plague,'' and baby Lismary, 18 months, has had diarrhea for the past week.

Mayor Luis Calderas, a Chávez supporter elected last year, says he is setting up 21 projects -- in health, education and housing -- with funding from the central government. But another 72 are on hold for lack of cash.

Mara used to have a thriving agricultural sector, based on grapes, guava and cattle. But pests and soil contamination finished off the guava, and the grape industry is in dire straits. The downturn cost González her job in the vineyards, where she pruned the vines and harvested grapes.

A fading election sticker for a congressional candidate from Chávez's Fifth Republic Movement still hangs above González's front door. Will she vote next time?

''I don't think so,'' she said.