Caliente, I think your problem is that you see Chavez in only black and white, when the truth is actually grey.
Was he a dictator? No, not in the sense of the Kims in North Korea or Saddam in Iraq. Chavez won free, fair, and open elections.
Was he a true democrat? No, there's plenty of evidence, which you've posted, that suggest otherwise.
He was deeply unpopular in segments of the population...but he was also wildly popular within other segments of the population. He was a populist, who greatly increase voter turnout and used that to win significant electoral majorities.
His Venezuela was no utopia. Many of his policies had serious negative effects on the country. But, some of his policies did have positive effects on some of the poorest and most disenfranchised Venezuelans.
I want to make it clear -- I'm no fan of Chavez, nor am I a Chavez apologist.
I'm just not so blinded by my hatred of the man that it keeps me from seeing the entire picture, with all its grey.
He was a populist anti-American leftist, with an ideology that very much was the result of the last eighty-plus years of Latin American history. Just as the modern Islamist parties of Egypt and Tunisia are the result of US and European Cold War policies in the Middle East, and the pan-Arab and pan-African movements of the 1950s and 60s were the result of (de)colonization.
In a weird way -- Chavez saw the world much in the same way you see him. In absolute terms, black and white.
He saw anti-Imperialism=anti-Americanism, and was so blinded by his hate of the "Imperial" America that he ended up in awkward partnerships, including the conservative Ayatollahs in Iran. Juan Cole had a fantastic piece on this recently.
