AP Photo

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.