Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's embattled president, is living on borrowed time. The real problem for Venezuelans, though, is that their economy is also living on borrowed time, and the day of fiscal reckoning may be near. Venezuela has an enormous fiscal deficit, and it is running out of places to borrow from. Like Ponzi schemes, the Venezuelan government needs ever growing sources of funding in order to keep paying for the generous promises it has made to its people.

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If history is any guide, it's the bread-and-butter issues that tend to make Burmese people take to the streets. Then, when the authorities use force against these initial protests instead of peacefully managing popular demands, popular outrage mushrooms into a full-scale uprising. That's what happened with the pro-democracy protests in 1988 and the Buddhist monk-led "Saffron Revolution" in 2007. The first was triggered by a confiscatory currency reform along with police brutality against student protesters, the second by a hike in fuel prices in combination with police attacks on monks. Now Burma appears to be facing a similar situation once again.

For days people in cities around the country have been publicly protesting chronic power shortages. The authorities tolerated the demonstrations at first. Then, on Thursday, police in the town of Prome (Pyay), 160 miles northwest of Rangoon, beat up hundreds of protesters, most of them holding candles to symbolize the lack of electricity. Several protestors were detained and subsequently released after intervention by local parliamentarians. Whether this crackdown was an isolated incident or a sign of growing impatience among the country's security forces remains to be seen.

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Thirty-five years after the end of the "Dirty War," Alex Gibson shows how a trial in Argentina is struggling to come to terms with a legacy of state-sponsored violence.

Peter Reuter explains why the West won't be able to contain money laundering from developing countries unless it cleans up its own act first.

Min Zin asks whether Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi is making a mistake in her latest confrontation with the powers-that-be, and also offers an entertaining primer on the politics behind the latest Burmese New Year celebrations.

Mohamed El Dahshan explores the decision that has thrown Egypt's presidential election into disarray.

Juan Nagel shows why the Venezuelan government's recent decision to subsidize beauty products will score it political points.

Endy Bayuni explains how Aceh's separatist leaders have morphed from guerillas into governors.

And in his column, Christian Caryl argues that economic inequality is now becoming a hot political issue in both rich countries and poor ones.

This week's recommended reads:

In Foreign Affairs, Leon Goldsmith writes on the Alawite community of Syria and the motives for their persistent support of the Assad regime.

In an essay in the current issue of Journal of Democracy, political philosopher Abdou Filali-Ansary casts light on why many voters in the Arab world prefer Islamist parties -- and arrives at some surprising conclusions.

A new report by the International Crisis Group documents the growing fight over resources between the Iraqi central government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan regional government.

Writing for Project Syndicate, Alfred Stepan and Etienne Smith discuss the surprising resilience of democracy in Senegal.

Democracy Digest reports on the difficulties faced by Russian dissidents following Vladimir Putin's victory in the March 4 presidential elections. And the German Marshal Fund examines the recent release of imprisoned opposition leaders in Belarus. (The photo above shows activist Dmitry Bondarenko meeting his wife after leaving prison.)

And don't miss Jeffrey Bartholet's great travelogue from post-Mubarak Egypt in National Geographic.

Say "macroeconomic adjustment" and Venezuelans immediately think back to 1989. That year, an IMF-inspired shock therapy program pushed through by President Carlos Andrés Pérez set-off serious rioting throughout the country, costing hundreds of lives and undermining governability for years to come. The memory of the traumatic events that followed sharp devaluation, fuel subsidy cuts and the end of price controls still colors policy discussions today.

As this fall's presidential election draws near, Venezuela's opposition is thinking through its macroeconomic approach to transition. At first blush, the parallels are jarring. Just as in 1988, the country faces a fixed, severely overvalued exchange rate, a structural budget deficit fed by a sprawling, loss-making state-owned enterprise sector, rigid price controls, and ruinous gasoline subsidies. It's enough to give any Venezuelan macro-economist the heebie-jeebies. So is the country is on the verge of another massively disruptive adjustment experience?

Not at all, for two reasons: the economic fundamentals of 2012 are nothing like those of1988, and the opposition's presidential candidate this year, Henrique Capriles, is nothing like Carlos Andrés Pérez.

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