Hugo Chavez: what the media are saying

Left Foot Forward looks at the media's reaction to the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Left Foot Forward looks at the media’s reaction to the death of Hugo Chavez

The death of Hugo Chavez is “a body blow for the poor and the oppressed, throughout Latin America and the wider world”, writes George Galloway in today’s Independent.

Meanwhile, fellow Independent Voices writer Owen Jones has penned an article claiming that Hugo Chavez “demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity”.

The BBC reports that Hugo Chavez has left the Venezuelan economy in a muddle. “So every Venezuelan now has a more equal slice of the cake. The trouble is, that cake has not been getting much bigger.”

“In the ranking of dictators, Hugo Chávez is in the welterweight class,” writes David Pryce-Jones in the Spectator.

The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has given “free rein to fears that Cuba will plunge into an economic abyss again if Caracas halts its subsidies estimated at well above the massive aid that the Soviet Union once provided to Havana”, reports the Miami Herald.

According to the editorial of the same paper, Hugo Chávez leaves behind “a country in far worse condition than it was when he became president, its future clouded by rivals for succession in a constitutional crisis of his Bolivarian party’s making and an economy in chaos”.

“Hugo Chávez strikes me as a familiar type of Latin American caudillo whose career would probably end in tears – his own or other people’s,” writes Michael White in the Guardian.

“With the death of Hugo Chavez, Cuba also lost the longed for great political leader after the slow public demise of Fidel Castro,” reports Isaac Risco in Cuba’s Havana Times.

State-run Islamic Republic of Iran News Network TV said Chavez was “a stubborn enemy of American imperialism in Latin America.”

Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz says that Chavez’s foreign policy was “one big provocation”.

Earlier today we looked at the mixed legacy Chavez leaves behind.

33 Responses to “Hugo Chavez: what the media are saying”

  1. Newsbot9

    Yes, keep thinking I need to be pitied like you. Keep talking up your anti-democratic plans. In a democracy, power can be peacefully handed over – anethma to you!

    Keep trying to overthrow any government you feel isn’t ideologically correct.

  2. Mick

    And the Left know all about that.

  3. Newsbot9

    Yes, we keep exposing it in your right all the time.

  4. Mick

    Oh poor Newsbot. Calm down dear and take a leaf from our Prime Minster’s book. He is, of course, in charge after having years of departmental experience whilst mutualists only rave from over there in the distance.

    Newsbot’s well aware in reality that under our democracy power is indeed peaceably transferred. Chavez’s prisoners, now citizens again, can enjoy that prospect as we do.

    Unless, mutualists and other anarchists see an ‘opening’ over there to keep the oppression going.

  5. Newsbot9

    Why would I take a lesson from an incompetent self-serving loser? His experience is folding towels.

    And keep saying what “I” know. You’re trying to bring transfer of power to an end, of course. Keep on talking up your plans for Britain.

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