Latin American leaders bid Hugo Chavez farewell

expected to be convened within 30 days.
Venezuela has given a lavish farewell to the leftist firebrand, with hundreds of thousands of people filing past his open casket nonstop since Wednesday to say goodbye to the man who was worshipped by the oil-rich nation’s poor. His body will lie in state for seven more days and officials said his body will be embalmed and preserved “like Lenin” to rest in a glass casket in the military barracks where he plotted a failed coup in 1992.
Foreign Minister Elias Jaua and a crowd of flag-waving Chavez supporters greeted leaders who began to arrive at the military academy for the funeral. Most Latin American leaders were attending the funeral, as well as bugbears of the West long courted by the anti-US Chavez, including Cuba’s Raul Castro, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Belarussian strongman Alexander Lukashenko.
Ahmadinejad, looking emotional, hugged Jaua and pumped both fists in the air toward the Chavez loyalists cheering behind a fence in from the academy’s entrance.
When he had landed early Friday, the Iranian leader, whose nation’s nuclear programme has angered the United States, said “Chavez will never die, his soul and spirit are alive in the hearts of fighters.”
Lukashenko, once dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” by the United States, smiled and pumped his left fist at the crowd.
Castro, whose nation’s economy relies on cheap Venezuelan oil shipments to stay afloat, waved both hands and then held them together. Chavez’s mother, Elena Frias, raised her arms toward the cheering crowd, crying and wiping her tears with a white handkerchief. – AFP/Xinhua.