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Bachelet —a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist with studies in military strategy— served as Health Minister and Defense Minister under President Ricardo Lagos. She is a separated mother of three and a self-described agnostic, which sets her apart in a predominantly conservative and Catholic country. A polyglot, she speaks Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and French. In 2006, Forbes magazine ranked her as 17th in the list of the 100 most powerful women in the world. [1]

Life and career

Early life

Bachelet was born in Santiago, the second child of anthropologist Ángela Jeria Gómez and Air Force Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet Martínez. Her paternal great-great-grandfather, Joseph Bachelet Lapierre, was a French wine merchant from Chassagne-Montrachet who emigrated to Chile with his Parisian wife in 1860 hired as a wine-making expert by the Subercaseaux vineyards. Her paternal great-grandfather, Germán Bachelet, was born in Chile and married to a French-Swiss woman. Of Greek ancestors, her maternal grandfather, Máximo Jeria Chacón, was the first person to receive a degree in agronomic engineering in Chile and funded several agronomy schools in the country.

Much of Bachelet's childhood years were spent traveling around Chile, moving with her family from one military base to another. She attended primary school in Quintero, Cerro Moreno, Antofagasta and San Bernardo. In 1962 she moved with her family to the United States, where her father was assigned to the military mission at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. Her family spent almost two years living in Bethesda, Maryland, where she attended Western Junior High School (now known as Westland Middle School) and learned to speak English fluently. Back in Chile, she graduated from high school in 1969 at Liceo Nº 1 Javiera Carrera, a prestigious girls-only public school, finishing near the top of her class. There, she was president of her class, a member of the school's choir and volleyball teams, and part of a theater group and a music band called Las Clap Clap (which she helped found) that toured through many school festivals. She entered medical school at the University of Chile in 1970, obtaining one of the highest national scores in the university admission test. She originally wanted to study sociology but was prevailed upon by her father to study medicine instead.

Torture and exile

Facing growing food shortages, the government of Salvador Allende placed Bachelet's father in charge of the Food Distribution Office. When Augusto Pinochet came to power in the September 11, 1973 coup, General Bachelet, refusing exile, was detained at the Air War Academy, under charges of treason. Following months of daily torture at Santiago's Public Prison, on March 12, 1974, he suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death. On January 10, 1975, Bachelet and her mother were detained, and tortured, at Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago.^[1] Some days later they were transferred to Cuatro Álamos ("Four Poplars") detention center, where they were held until the end of January. Later in 1975, due to sympathetic connections in the military, both were exiled to Australia, where Bachelet's older brother Alberto had moved in 1969.

In May 1975, Bachelet left Australia and moved to East Germany, to an apartment assigned by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government in Am Stern, Potsdam; her mother joined her a month later. In October 1976 she began working at a communal clinic in the Babelsberg neighborhood, as a preparation step to continue her medical studies at an East German university. During this period she met architect Jorge Dávalos, another Chilean exile, whom she married in 1977. In January 1978 she went to Leipzig to learn German at the Karl Marx University's Herder Institute (now the University of Leipzig). Her first child with Dávalos, Sebastián, was born there that same year. She returned to Potsdam in September 1978, to continue her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin for two years. However, only five months after enrolling as a student, she obtained authorization to return to her country.

Return to Chile

In February 1979 Bachelet returned to Santiago, Chile from East Germany. Her medical school coursework from the GDR was not recognized at the University of Chile (under the control of the military at the time of her return), forcing her to resume her studies from where she had left off before fleeing the country. She graduated as an M.D. in 1982 as one of the best students in her class. Her academic performance and published papers earned her a scholarship to specialize in pediatrics and public health at Children's Hospital Roberto del Río (1983–1986). During this time she also worked at PIDEE (Protection of Children Injured by States of Emergency Foundation), a non-governmental organization helping children of the tortured and missing in Santiago and Chillán. She was head of the foundation's Medical Department between 1986 and 1990. Some time after her second child with Dávalos, Francisca, was born in 1984, she and her husband legally separated.

Between 1985 and 1987 Bachelet had a romantic relationship with Alex Vojkovic Trier^[2], a Communist engineer and spokesman for the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, an armed group which among other activities attempted to assassinate Augusto Pinochet in 1986. This affair turned into a minor issue during her presidential campaign, during which she argued that she never supported any of Vojkovic's activities.

In 1990, after democracy was restored in Chile, Bachelet worked for the Ministry of Health's West Santiago Health Service and was a consultant for the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Health Organization and the German Corporation for Technical Cooperation. While working for the National AIDS Commission (Conasida), she met Aníbal Henríquez, a physician, with whom she had her third child, Sofia, born in 1992. Between March 1994 and July 1997, Bachelet worked as Senior Assistant to the Deputy Health Minister.

Driven by an interest in civil-military relations, in 1996 she began studies in military strategy at the National Academy for Strategic and Policy Studies (Anepe) in Chile, obtaining first place in her class. Her student achievement earned her a presidential scholarship, permitting her to continue her studies in the United States at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, DC, completing a Continental Defense Course in 1997. In 1998 she returned to Chile to work for the Defense Ministry as Senior Assistant to the Defense Minister. She subsequently graduated from a Master's program in military science at the Chilean Army's War Academy.

Political life

A Socialist Party member

On her first year as university student, in 1970, Bachelet became a member of the Socialist Youth, then presided by future deputy and now disappeared physician Carlos Lorca. She then joined the Socialist Party of Chile and was politically active during the second half of the 1980s, fighting —though not in the front line— for the re-establishment of democracy in Chile. In 1995 she became part of the party's Central Committee, and from 1998 until 2000 she was an active member of the Political Commission.

In 1996, Bachelet ran against future presidential adversary Joaquín Lavín for the mayorship of Las Condes, a wealthy Santiago suburb. Lavín was elected mayor with nearly 78% of the vote, while she only finished fourth at 2.35%. In the 1999 CPD —Coalition of Parties for Democracy, Chile's governing coalition since 1990— presidential primary, she worked for Ricardo Lagos's nomination, heading the Santiago electoral zone.

Ministership

On March 11, 2000 Bachelet, a virtual unknown at the time, was appointed Minister of Health by President Ricardo Lagos. She began with an in-depth reform of the public healthcare system that led to the AUGE plan a few years later. She was also given the task of eliminating waiting lists in the public hospital system within the first 100 days of Lagos's government. Unable to meet this goal, she offered her resignation, which was promptly rejected by the President.

On January 7, 2002 Bachelet was appointed Defense Minister, becoming the first woman to hold this post in a Latin American country and one of the few in the world. While Minister of Defense, she played a key role in the historic 2003 declaration by General Juan Emilio Cheyre, head of the army, that "never again" would the military subvert democracy in Chile. She also oversaw a reform of the military pension system which is commonly viewed as a successful effort and continued with the process of modernization of the Chilean armed forces with the purchasing of new military equipment.

Presidential candidacy

Main article: Chilean presidential election, 2005-2006

In late 2004, following a surge of her popularity in opinion polls, Bachelet was asked to become the Socialists' candidate for the presidency^[3]. Ángela Jeria, her mother, revealed in an interview that her daughter was hesitant to accept the nomination, but finally agreed because she "couldn't let [her] people down."^[4] On October 1 of that year she resigned from her government post in order to begin her campaign.

An open primary scheduled for July 2005 to define the sole presidential candidate of the CPD was canceled after Bachelet's only rival, Christian Democrat Soledad Alvear, a cabinet member in the three CPD administrations, pulled out early due to a lack of support within her own party and in opinion polls.

At the December 2005 election, Bachelet faced the center-right candidate Sebastián Piñera (RN), the right-wing candidate Joaquín Lavín (UDI) and the far-left candidate Tomás Hirsch (JPM). As predicted by opinion polls, she failed to obtain the absolute majority needed to win the election outright, winning 46% of the vote. In the runoff election on January 15, 2006, Bachelet faced Piñera, and won the presidency with 53.5% of the vote, thus becoming her country's first female elected president and the first woman who was not the wife of a previous head of state or political leader to reach the presidency of a Latin American nation in a direct election.

On January 30, 2006, after being declared President-elect by the Electoral Qualifier Tribunal (Tricel), Bachelet announced her cabinet of ministers, which was unprecedentedly composed of an equal number of men and women, as was promised during her campaign. In keeping with the coalition's internal balance of power, she named seven ministers from the Christian Democrat Party (PDC), five from the Party for Democracy (PPD), four from the Socialist Party (PS), one from the Social Democrat Radical Party (PRSD) and three of no party affiliation. In the days that followed, she named the group of deputy ministers and regional intendants, following the same rule of "gender parity."

Presidency

Bachelet was sworn in as President of the Republic of Chile on March 11, 2006, in a ceremony held in a plenary session of the National Congress in Valparaíso, which was attended by a record number of foreign heads of states and delegates.

Internal issues

Most of Bachelet's first three months in office were spent working on 36 measures she had promised during her campaign to implement during her first 100 days as president. They ranged from simple presidential decrees, such as providing free health care for older patients, to complex bills to reform the social security system and the electoral system.

Bachelet's first political crisis came in late April 2006, when massive high school student demonstrations, unseen in three decades, broke out throughout the country demanding a better education for the poor. (See 2006 student protests in Chile.) These protests and a drop in popularity, forced Bachelet to reshuffle her cabinet only after four months in office, a record in the country's history. (It might be argued that Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle's cabinet reshuffling, on his sixth month in office, is comparable, considering he had a 6-year mandate, two more than Bachelet.)

Foreign relations

During her first six months in office, Bachelet faced continuing problems from neighboring Argentina. On July 2006, she sent a letter of protest to president of Argentina Néstor Kirchner, after his government issued a decree increasing export tariffs of natural gas to Chile, which was considered by Bachelet a violation of a tacit bilateral agreement. A month later an old border dispute with Argentina surfaced once again after the neighboring country published some tourist maps featuring a contested territory in southern Chile —known as Campo de Hielo Sur— as its own, violating an agreement not to draw a border over the area.

Chile's upcoming vote on a two-year non-permanent UN Security Council seat was viewed as a major test for Bachelet. While the majority of Latin American nations are expected to vote for Venezuela, the United States has been lobbying for Guatemala. The president has hitherto refused to reveal her position and the issue has the CPD governing coalition divided.

In August, 2006, Bachelet signed a free trade agreement with the People's Republic of China, the Asian country's first with a Latin American nation, continuing the coalition's free-trade strategy. Bachelet was also in advanced free-trade talks with several other countries, including Japan and Australia.

Cabinet

References

• Rohter, Larry. "Woman in the News; A Leader Making Peace With Chile's Past." The New York Times. January 16, 2006
• "Biografía de Michelle Bachelet" (La Nación - January 15, 2006)
• "La vida de la primera Presidenta de Chile" (La Nación - January 16, 2006)
• "Las huellas de Bachelet en Alemania Oriental" (Reportajes de La Tercera - April 9, 2006)
• "Biografías de Líderes Políticos CIDOB: Michelle Bachelet Jeria" (Fundació CIDOB, February 20, 2006)

External links

• (Spanish) Presidencia de la República official site (English version)
• (Spanish) Official presidential campaign site
• PBS Newshour - Interview transcript with video
• "The woman taking Chile's top job" (BBC News)
• "The unexpected travails of the woman who would be president" (The Economist - December 8, 2005)
• "Bachelet's citizens' democracy" (The Economist - March 10, 2006)
• "With a New Leader, Chile Seems to Shuck Its Strait Laces" (The New York Times - March 8, 2006)
• "Welcome Madam Chilean President to Washington" —Council on Hemispheric Affairs