Bachelet, Michelle (President of Chile)

VerÃ³nica Michelle Bachelet Jeria (born September 29, 1951) is the current President of Chile, the first woman to hold this position in the country’s history. She won the 2006 election in a runoff, beating center-right billionaire businessman and former senator SebastiÃ¡n PiÃ±era, with 53.5% of the vote. A moderate Socialist, she campaigned on a platform of continuing Chile’s free market policies, while increasing social benefits to help reduce the country’s gap between rich and poor, one of the largest in the world. Her term was inaugurated on March 11, 2006.

Bachelet is a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist with studies in military strategy, who 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.

Early life

Bachelet was born in Santiago, the second child of anthropologist Ãngela Jeria GÃ³mez and Air Force General Alberto Bachelet MartÃnez. She spent much of her childhood years 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 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 also detained, and tortured at Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago. Some days later they were transferred to Cuatro Ãlamos 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. Bachelet and her mother decided to settle in East Germany where Bachelet learned German at the Herder Institute in Leipzig, continuing her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin for two years. There she met architect Jorge DÃ¡valos, another Chilean exile, whom she married. Their first child, SebastiÃ¡n, was born in Leipzig in 1978.

Return to Chile

In 1979 Bachelet returned to Chile. Her medical school coursework from East Germany 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. (surgeon) 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 RÃo (1983-1986). During this time she also worked with non-governmental organizations (NGOs), such as PIDEE (which she headed between 1986 and 1990), helping children of the tortured and disappeared in Santiago and ChillÃ¡n. Some time after their second child, Francisca, was born in 1984, she and her husband separated.

Between 1985 and 1987 Bachelet had a romantic relationship with Alex Vojkovic, a spokesman for the Manuel RodrÃguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), an armed group which among other activities attempted to assassinate Pinochet in 1986. This affair turned into a minor issue during her presidential campaign, during which she argued that she never supported any of her former lover’s activities.

In 1990, after democracy was restored in Chile, Bachelet worked for the Ministry of Health and was a consultant for the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Health Organization and the German Corporation for Technical Cooperation (GTZ). While working for the National AIDS Commission (Conasida), she met AnÃbal HenrÃquez, a physician, with whom she had her third child, Sofia, born in 1992. Between 1994 and July 1997, Bachelet worked as an adviser to the Health Undersecretary.

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

A socialist militant

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 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 JoaquÃn LavÃn for the mayorship of Las Condes, a wealthy Santiago suburb. LavÃn 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

Bachelet was appointed Minister of Health by President Ricardo Lagos on March 11, 2000. 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 she 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, Bachelet 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

In late 2004, following a surge of her popularity in opinion polls, Bachelet was asked to become the Socialists’ candidate for the presidency. Ãngela 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.” On October 1 of that year she resigned from her government post in order to begin her campaign.

A primary that was to take place to define the sole presidential candidate of the CPD was canceled after Bachelet’s only rival, Christian Democrat Soledad Alvear, a former cabinet member of the three CPD administrations, pulled out early due to a lack of support within her own party and in opinion polls.

At the 2005 election, Bachelet faced the center-right candidate SebastiÃ¡n PiÃ±era (RN), the right-wing candidate JoaquÃn LavÃn (UDI) and the far-left candidate TomÃ¡s Hirsch (JPM). At 46% of the vote, she failed to obtain the absolute majority needed to win the election outright. In the runoff election on January 15, 2006, Bachelet faced PiÃ±era, 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.

Presidency

Bachelet was sworn in as President of the Republic of Chile on March 11, 2006.

Bachelet announced her cabinet on January 30, 2006, following confirmation from the Electoral Qualifier Tribunal (Tricel) officially declaring her winner of the election.

The cabinet is composed of ten men and ten women, which fulfilled her campaign promise to make half her cabinet women. 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 without party affiliation. The ministers took office on March 11, 2006, along with the President.

Source: Wikipedia