The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 11. Michelle Bachelet

227 E L E V E N Michelle Bachelet I She had been Latin America’s first female defense minister and would soon become president, one of the few female heads of state in the world whose career owed nothing to a husband. She was a Socialist and a general’s daughter, a pediatrician and a specialist on defense matters who had studied at the National War College in Washington, D.C., and obtained a master’s degree in military science at the Chilean army’s War Academy. She spoke five languages and had lived in three foreign countries. Michelle Bachelet’s personal story was as impressive as her curriculum vitae. Part of her education included two years at a public school in Bethesda, Maryland, while her father, air force general Alberto Bachelet, 228 C o n s o l i d a t i n g D e m o c r a c y served as Chile’s military attaché in Washington. He was later transferred to the Allende government’s food distribution department, earning him the enmity of Chile’s political Right. He was arrested and tortured after the coup, dying of a heart attack while in detention in March 1974. Bachelet, then a medical student, and her mother were arrested early the following year by security agents and taken to Villa Grimaldi, where they were separated, blindfolded, and beaten. She was spared electric shock and the worst forms of torture but was told her mother would be killed if she didn’t cooperate. She was kept in a cell with eight other female prisoners, including a sixteen-year-old and three pregnant women. Two of the pregnant women had been raped by their captors, and several of her other cellmates had been brutally tortured. Bachelet and her mother were moved to another DINA detention center , Tres Alamos. After two weeks she was released without explanation , but her mother was held for another two weeks while Bachelet frantically called on every family friend and contact to try to secure her release. Bachelet’s brother helped arrange political asylum in Australia, where he was living, and mother and daughter were reunited in the airport shortly before their departure.1 Bachelet and her mother later made their way to East Germany, where she diligently learned the language, took a job as a hospital orderly, and eventually resumed her medical studies. In 1979 she returned to Chile with her husband, a fellow former exile, and two young children. Her German medical credentials were not recognized in Chile, and so she had to get additional training to qualify as a doctor. During this difficult time, her marriage broke up. Undaunted, she got further training and managed to establish a medical practice as well as work with a medical charity to help Chilean children traumatized by political violence. With the return of democracy, she took a job as a health advisor at the Defense Ministry and later joined President Ricardo Lagos’s cabinet, first as health minister and then as defense minister. “The military respected her; they knew her from her previous job at the Defense Ministry,” recalled Ricardo Lagos.2 A new generation of officers were now leading the country’s armed forces, though many Left-leaning Chileans wondered how Bachelet, a former political prisoner, could bear to do the job. “In a certain way I M i c h e l l e B a c h e l e t 229 was re-encountering part of my roots, which had been severed during that period of Chilean history in which our society was so polarized,” she said. “Most people with my background feel a profound rejection towards anything that has to do with the military, but I felt like I was recovering part of my being.” Her conciliatory demeanor and academic defense credentials won over many skeptics in the military, who sent her a combat jacket with her name on it when her appointment was announced.3 She quickly became the most visible and popular member of Lagos’s cabinet, a symbol of resilience and reconciliation. Lagos, who had won the presidency by a fraction of votes, proved to be one of Chile’s most admired presidents ever, with an approval rating of 71 percent as he neared the end of his term. Per capita income had risen from $4,860 in 2000 to $5,903 in...