This Sunday, Chile will undertake a great expression of democracy in its relatively new republic through its presidential elections. Gone are the days of dictators and caudillos and tinpots. Having totally renounced them and their lack of democracy, what’s left are two good candidates, one leaning left and one leaning right, heading down to the wire on Sunday’s elections. This whole election will serve as a benchmark to the rest of Latin America of what a good election should be. All countries should try to measure up to this excellent Chilean standard.

Agencia EFE has a great profile of one of the contenders, Michelle Bachelet, an important read if you want to know who she is and how to understand her. If you’re on the right, she may not be your cup of tea, but don’t worry, she’s not in the same league as Hugo Chavez. If you’re on the left, she’s probably recognizable as a Democrat, a member of the democratic left, but with a much more intense story.

Personally, I’d like to know how her East German experiences shaped her. Normally, if you have one of those experiences – as another fine leader, Germany’s Angela Merkel, did – you engrave in your heart as deeply as you can that you don’t want any part of communism as a system. African leaders during the 1980s explicitly used to send their kids to Moscow and East Germany just to ‘immunize’ them from romanticizing communist regimes.

And maybe that’s the case with Bachelet.

EFE stories never last on their wire and this one doesn’t have a link, so I’m pasting it up in this posting here:

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Doctor, daughter of torture victim, might be 1st woman president

Santiago, Jan 13 (EFE).- A divorced physician who is, among other things, the daughter of a general tortured to death by the Pinochet dictatorship and a former political prisoner and exile herself, hopes to be chosen by her compatriots on Sunday as this nation’s first woman president.

Michelle Bachelet, 54, in some ways personifies the experience of Chile’s middle class since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup.

She says with only a touch of irony that she encapsulates “all the deadly sins in Chile,” being a woman, a Socialist, separated and a professed agnostic. Even so, Bachelet remains the slight favorite going into Sunday’s runoff with conservative business tycoon Sebastian Pi????era.

Yet while the twice-wed mother of three is now the face of the Christian Democrat-Socialist coalition that has governed Chile since the restoration of democracy in 1990, there was nothing inevitable about her ascent to the top of the political establishment. Michelle Bachelet was born Sept. 29, 1951, in Santiago, the second child of air force officer Alberto Bachelet and anthropologist Angela Jeria. Michelle was a medical student and an activist with the Young Socialists at the time of the September 1973 putsch that ousted Socialist President Salvador Allende, whose administration had included her father, by then a brigadier general.

The Pinochet-led junta had Brig. Gen. Bachelet arrested and tortured for his opposition to the coup, and he eventually died in custody.

Meanwhile, Michelle and her comrades in the Young Socialists began organizing an underground cell to aid dissidents and battle the Pinochet regime, whose agents seized Michelle and Angela Jeria in 1975, about a year after the death of Alberto Bachelet. The two women were taken to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious clandestine jail.

“They separated me from my mother,” Michelle Bachelet recounted in an interview. “They began to interrogate me. They tortured me … it’s hard for me to recall, as my mind blocked out the worst memories. But my experience was nothing next to what others suffered.” Thanks to the intervention of relatives in the military, mother and daughter were released and went into exile, going first to Australia and later to then-Communist East Germany, where Michelle resumed her studies at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

She returned to Chile in 1979 and graduated from the University of Chile medical school three years later.

From 1983 through 1986, Bachelet was a practicing pediatrician who put her medical skills in the service of her political convictions as a volunteer with groups helping the children of victims of the Pinochet regime, which killed some 3,000 people and subjected tens of thousands to illegal detention and torture.

With the return of democratic rule in 1990, she joined the public health service as an epidemiologist, later becoming a member of the National Commission on AIDS.
Having grown up around men in uniform and then seen her father die at the hands of his brother officers, Bachelet felt a personal stake in the state of relations between the military and civil society in post-dictatorship Chile, which led her to enroll in a course at the National Academy of Political and Strategic Studies.

She finished at the top of her class and received a presidential scholarship to attend the Inter-American Defense College in Washington in 1997, which paved the way for her subsequent appointment as an adviser to Chile’s defense ministry.

At the same time, Bachelet continued to rise within the Socialist Party, being elected to the central committee in 1995 and named to the organization’s highest executive body in 1998.
When Socialist Ricardo Lagos became Chile’s president in March 2000, he tapped Bachelet to become health minister. Less than two years later, in January 2002, Lagos named her defense minister, a watershed for a woman here.

Bachelet quickly put her stamp on the ministry, winning the respect of the brass with her air of quiet, dignified strength. The new defense chief also eschewed recriminations over the armed forces’ past mistreatment of her family, even when she found herself on an elevator with one of the men who had tortured her.

Her stint as defense minister also witnessed the emergence of the “Bachelet phenomenon,” which, according to Chilean political analysts, took shape the day she turned up in a flooded Santiago neighborhood to direct rescue operations from atop an army tank.

The first manifestation of the “phenomenon” came a few days later at a concert in the Chilean capital by Spanish singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat, a personal friend of the defense minister. After greeting the entries of the performer and President Lagos with polite applause, the crowd burst into a thunderous ovation when Bachelet appeared.

Lagos accepted Bachelet’s resignation in October 2004, freeing her to pursue her presidential bid.
After an intense campaign, Bachelet, seen by some as further to the left than the governing coalition’s previous nominees, finished first on Dec. 11 with just under 46 percent of the vote, while Pi????era received 25.4 percent. But there was another rightist candidate in that first round who got 23 percent of the vote, and most of that is expected to go Sunday to the conservative.

Fluent in six languages, Bachelet is known for her direct, affable manner and lack of ostentation. Despite the demands of campaigning, she prepares breakfast every morning at home before taking her youngest daughter to school.