I was never a big Chavez fan, but the truth is that he won all the elections he stood in by a wide margin. Those elections were verified by international observers as fair and lawful.
Yet the western media repeated again and again that he was a dictator.
One of the often most repeated lies about Chavez is that he shut down an opposition TV station. This story was created by the (then) US State Department funded Human Rights Watch.
The reality is that RCTV didn't get their terrestrial broadcast license renewed in 2007, five years after they were heavily involved in organizing the unconstitutional (and US backed) coup attempt of 2002.
It's sickening to see how western media outlets and organizations like HRW routinely lie and distort the truth for the benefit of corporate interests.
We know a lot about Sweden and they are for all intents and purposes a US client state.
Americans seem oblivious to how their government "project power" round the world.
This is how it goes:
Majority in parliament or equivalent: "we're not going to buy US fighter jets"/"we won't support this war"/"we're going to go on record saying that this group of people deserve some kind of basic human rights support".
Anonymous US embassy source: "That would be extremely ill advised".
Majority in parliament: "Oops, sorry. Forgot who we were working for there."
The US media is outstanding at blacking out protests with hundreds of thousands or even millions of participants if the protesters agenda run counter to that of the government or other large corporations. See for example the anti-war protests in the run up to, and after the invasion of Iraq.
A good thing to come out of all this might be that even right wingers realize how difficult it actually is to get heard in a supposedly democratic nation.