The Guardian 25 January, 2006
Chile —
first woman President promises change
Bob Briton
Michelle Bachelet, a former Minister for Health and Defence Minister in the government of outgoing President Ricardo Lagos was elected as Chile’s head of state a fortnight ago with a comfortable margin over her right-wing billionaire opponent. In many respects, she sounds like the sort of conventional right-wing social democrat that has dominated the scene since the Concertación coalition of centrist parties took over power from Pinochet’s junta in 1990. "I am a socialist, but I wear many hats. I was not a minister of the socialists; I was a minister of all Chileans. I will be a President for all Chileans", she told the media after election.
Despite this, the 54-year-old doctor and human rights activist carries the hopes of many progressive Chileans. She has a number of entries in her résumé that would encourage this cautious optimism. She is the first woman President of the socially conservative Latin American country in which divorce was introduced only last year. She has promised to do something about the situation in the government where four per cent of senators are women. She is a single mother with a 12-year-old daughter and two grown up children. She is an agnostic in a strongly Catholic country.
The new President elect is the daughter Air Force General Alberto Bachelet Martínez who remained loyal to President Allende at the time of the military coup in 1973. He was in charge of the Food Distribution Office at that time. He was charged with treason by his fascist captors and died of heart failure while being tortured. Michelle and her mother were also detained briefly and tortured. By that time, the future President and brilliant student was an underground activist in the Socialist Youth.
Michelle and her mother fled Chile and lived briefly in Australia before settling in the German Democratic Republic. Following her late father’s wishes, she undertook medical studies at Berlin’s Humboldt University and graduated as a medical doctor. She and her mother returned to Chile in 1979 but her qualifications were not recognised. She redid her medical training and was among the best students in her year.
She then worked in a succession of NGOs and headed the PIDEE, an organisation which helped children of the tortured and disappeared in the Chilean capital Santiago and Chillán. During this time she had a relationship with Alex Vojkovic of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, which was carrying out armed resistance to the Pinochet regime. The right wing made much of this connection during the recent elections but with little apparent effect.
After formal democracy was restored in Chile in 1990, Bachelet worked in the Ministry of Health, the Pan-American Health Organisation, the World Health Organisation and the National AIDS Commission. Her career then took a surprising turn. She began studies in military strategy at the National Academy of Political and Strategic Studies in Chile before attending the Inter-American Defence College in Washington. She became Minister of Health in the neo-liberal "socialist" government of Ricardo Lagos in 2000 and Defence Minister in 2004.
Bachelet won the presidential race at the second round of voting with 53.3 per cent against mega-rich media and airline magnate, Senator Sebastián Piñera. Arch-conservative former Mayor of Las Condes, Joaquín Lavín was eliminated in the first round of voting on December 11 as was Tomás Hirch of the left coalition Juntos Podemos, which includes Chile’s Communist Party. Juntos Podemos scored a disappointing seven per cent of the vote at that poll and only five per cent at the parliamentary elections held at the same time.
However, Bachelet secured the crucial support of the left-wing grouping at the second round by approaching them and giving undertakings to:
Replace Chile’s current binominal voting system with one based on proportional representation so that the left could have the representation due to it in the parliament
Lift the minimum wage
Establish universal health care in Chile
Take measures to assist Chile’s Indigenous people and defend the environment.
Bachelet is committed to maintaining the free trade economic policies carried on by previous governments and Communist Party President Guillermo Tellier has pledged his party’s opposition to the basic neo-liberal thrust of the new government. Nevertheless, the changes promised by Chile’s new President contain the prospect of a much more radical shift in future.