What a crock. Chavez is a totalitarian who destroyed his country's economy.

You blame corporate media, but it wasn't the media that beat and locked up journalists who criticised his regime. It was his thugs.

Interesting timing for this article, coming just the day after Margaret Thatcher's death. It's a great opportunity to compare and contrast the western media's obsequious eulogies to MT with the demonising obituaries on Chavez.

The former destroyed her own country and subverted its economy, turning it into little more than a service centre for international finance, and treating its workers as throwaway rubbish. The latter transformed his country into a beacon of proactive, bottom-up social democracy, revitalising a population that had been downtrodden for centuries by the kind of brutal, self-serving elites that Thatcher loved to have tea with.

Chavez died too soon, but if there is any justice, his followers will continue and finish what he started. MT died just at the right time - as the world economy desperately tries to save itself from the long-term effects (totally predicted back in the 80s) of her disastrous neoliberal legacy.