Venezuela’s bloggers have found a call from the BBC World Services to submit questions to Venezuela’s dictator Hugo Chavez online.

This event probably is part of a coordinated propaganda effort from the Western hemisphere’s communist tyrants to reach out to the outside world through the Internet.

Fidel Castro did almost the very same thing last week, albeit under greater conditions of state control.

For Castro and Chavez, the idea is get online with the rest of us and appear hip or perhaps human, via the easily controlled medium of the Internet. It’s not like live TV where a tyrant could get asked an embarassing question and either blow up or not know how to reply and thus have no control over the outcome. On the Internet, a dictator can always sift and delete the questions he doesn’t like, as well as ascertain the identities of one’s questioners without their knowing it – if one’s technology is fancy enough.

As for dictators moving in on this medium, I’ve never seen this before, but I will note that both Castro and Chavez are a determined lot who are savvy about public relations. Castro in particular, so despised for his murderous crimes in years past, seems to be coming up in this art, and Chavez is already a natural.

The closest analogy to what these dictators are doing is in Manuel Noriega’s and Saddam Hussein’s efforts to reach out to Sandalista groups like Global Exchange in the early 1990s, in the days before the 1989 Panama invasion and the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Back in those days, the earlier dictators courted these reflexively-anti-American groups assiduously through invitations to see and write about their tyrannies. The San Francisco Chronicle was always happy to accomodate the Sandalistas afterward.

I suspect this idea for the dictators’ coordinated effort comes from the public relations agencies based in Washington and near Berkeley who represent them. Net result: Castro and Chavez are at least periodically going online. That’s new.

Daniel and Miguel cordially encourage you to participate if you can, and their respective links to the BBC site where you can ask Chavez your questions – as well as discussions of questions – can be found here and here.

UPDATE: And don’t miss Aleksander Boyd’s really good suggested questions here.