Is Hugo Chávez Preparing Venezuela for His Departure? [View all]

[Zorro]

Get your personal affairs in order. It’s the hardest thing doctors have to tell cancer patients who are as ill as media reports suggest Hugo Chávez is. With an election looming in less than five months, the 57-year-old Venezuelan President would also need to get his political affairs in order – and many believe the socialist leader took the first step last week when, before going to Cuba for more treatment, he named a “council of state” as a presidential consulting body. But the council’s murky role is now as much a source of morbid speculation as Chávez’s health is, and that has raised the level of tension and uncertainty inside the home of the western hemisphere’s largest oil reserves.

When Chávez announced the council on May 1 — its eight members, including Vice President Elías Jaua, are all loyal Chavistas — he only ordered it to draft a plan for withdrawing Venezuela from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission. (The commission, an arm of the Organization of American States, or OAS, has often butted heads with the often authoritarian President and his left-wing revolution.) But since then, pundits across the hemisphere have surmised that the council’s real purpose is to steer Venezuela and Chávez’s United Socialist Party (PSUV) through a chaotic transition after his death. That includes picking his replacement, if need be, on the October 7 presidential ballot. “Chávez is setting up a mechanism for the final phase of his presence in this world,” one anti-Chávez analyst breathlessly told the Miami daily El Nuevo Herald.

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2012/05/10/is-hugo-chavez-preparing-venezuela-for-his-departure/#ixzz1uWPjl05H