With the help of Cuban-backed intelligence services, Venezuelan ruler Hugo Chávez has recorded his opponents’ private conversations, which the regime now broadcast on state television to humiliate the opposition:

Government wiretaps of opposition politicians usually remain secret, restricted to the ears of spooks and ministers. But in democracy Venezuela-style, everyone gets to listen in.

President Hugo Chávez has filled the airwaves with tapped conversations of his political foes to embarrass and apparently intimidate them in the run-up to regional elections. State TV has broadcast the recordings, enhanced with comic sound effects, in a barrage of attack adverts that would make even Karl Rove blush.

The prime target has been Manuel Rosales, an opposition leader who is tipped to become mayor of Maracaibo, Venezuela's second city. One advert features him discussing buying expensive jewellery, along with sound and visual effects of rings and a Cartier watch.

Another advert plays a conversation with Rosales negotiating the purchase of cattle, to a backdrop of mooing sounds and cartoon pictures of coins.

Other politicians, as well as journalists and diplomats, have found private conversations, as well as photographs and video images, broadcast on state TV.

Things like this only happen in totalitarian countries. And no one is more totalitarian than Hugo Chávez. None of his many socialist fans in Europe would accept a liberal or conservative government to do to them what the Chávez regime does to liberals and conservatives in Venezuela. But it is well known that socialists are only democrats in opposition.