Michelle Bachelet Totally Explained

Everything about Michelle Bachelet totally explained

Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria /beˈɾonika mɪˈʃɛl baʃˈle ˈxeɾja/ (born September 29 1951) is a center-left politician and the current President of Chile—the first woman to hold this position in the country's history. She won the 2006 presidential election in a runoff, beating center-right billionaire businessman and former senator Sebastián Piñera, 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. She was inaugurated on March 11 2006.
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. A polyglot, she speaks Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and French. In 2007, Forbes magazine ranked her as 27th in the list of the 100 most powerful women in the world (10 spots down from the 2006 list). In 2008, TIME magazine ranked her 15 on its list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Life and career

Early life

Bachelet was born in Santiago, the second child of archaeologist 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. Bachelet Lapierre's son, Germán—Michelle Bachelet's great-grandfather—, 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 founded 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 lived and 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. Returning to Chile in 1964, 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, after obtaining one of the highest national scores in the university admission test. She has said she opted for medicine because it was "a concrete way of helping people cope with pain" and "a way to contribute to improve health in Chile." 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 to her by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government in Am Stern, Potsdam; her mother joined her a month later (living separately in Leipzig). 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. Five months after enrolling as a student, however, 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 credits from the GDR were not transferred, forcing her to resume her studies from where she'd left off before fleeing the country. She graduated as an M.D. in 1982, opting to work in the public sector, applying for a position as general practitioner, to wherever attention was most needed; her petition was, however, rejected by the military government on "political grounds.", 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.), and was an active supporter of the Popular Unity. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, she and her mother worked as couriers for the underground Socialist Party directorate that was trying to organize a Resistance movement; eventually almost all of them were captured and made disappeared. Following her return from exile she became politically active during the second half of the 1980s, fighting —though not on 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 won the election with nearly 78% of the vote, while she finished fourth at 2.35%. At the 1999 Coalition of Parties for Democracy (CPD—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 an in-depth study of the public health-care system that led to the AUGE plan a few years later. She was also given the task of eliminating waiting lists in the saturated public hospital system within the first 100 days of Lagos's government. Unable to meet this goal (she had reduced waiting lists by 90%) She was at first hesitant to accept the nomination, as it was never one of her goals, but finally agreed because she felt she couldn't disappoint her supporters. On October 1 of that year she was freed from her government post in order to begin her campaign and to help the CPD at the municipal elections. On January 28 2005, she was proclaimed the Socialist Party's candidate for president.
   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 first 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 wasn't 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 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.

Domestic affairs

Most of Bachelet's first three months as president were spent working on 36 measures she'd promised during her campaign to implement during her first 100 days in office. 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 rise of quality levels in public education (see: 2006 student protests in Chile). These protests and a sharp drop in her popularity, forced Bachelet to reshuffle her cabinet after only four months in office— a record in the country's history.
   The final months of 2006 were marred by reports of alleged misspending of public funds during the previous administration, specially in Chiledeportes, a government sports funding organization. There were also accusations of misappropriation of funds channeled through phantom firms and identity theft to fund congressional campaigns in late 2005. The scandal prompted Bachelet to present an anti-corruption plan in late November (see: 2006 corruption scandals in Chile). Other issues faced by Bachelet during her first year included, the death of general Augusto Pinochet, a controversial decree allowing for the free distribution of the "morning-after pill" to girls as young as 14 years of age without parental consent, a nine-month Government-Congress deadlock over the naming of a new Comptroller General, and a difficult implementation of a new public transport system for the capital Santiago (see: Transantiago). The latter issue scaled into a major crisis that damaged her popularity and which resulted in a second cabinet adjustment, just two weeks into her second year.
   Bachelet's second year saw a dip in her popularity, reaching a nadir of 35% approval, 46% disapproval, in September, 2007. The cause behind this fall was mainly attributed to the Transantiago transport fiasco, put into motion in February that year. On her decision not to abort the plan's start, she said in April 2007 she was given erroneous information which caused her to act against her "instincts." That same month she'd a disastrous public relations incident, when a group of earthquake victims she was visiting in the southern region of Aisén received her with black flags and berated her publicly in front of television cameras, accusing her of arriving late and asking her to leave. More positively, in November, after months of discussions, Bachelet reached preliminary agreements with the opposition in the issue of education reform and in measures to tackle urban crime. On the economic side, while the year saw the lowest unemployment rates since 1998, and growth was forecast to be above 5% (better than 2006's disappointing 4%), inflation nearly doubled the Central Bank's upper target of 4% —due to a rise in food prices, the result of a harsh winter that cut harvests— and the peso strengthened to an eight-year high against the US dollar, hurting exporters.
   Bachelet began her term with an unprecedented absolute majority in both chambers of Congress —before appointed senators were eliminated in the 2005 constitutional reforms, the CPD never enjoyed majority in the Senate—, but she was soon faced with internal opposition coming from a number of dissatisfied lawmakers from both chambers of Congress —the so-called díscolos ("disobedient," "ungovernable")—, which jeopardized the coalition's narrow —and historic— Congress majority on a number of key government-sponsored bills during much of her first half in office, and forced her to negotiate with a right-wing opposition she saw as being obstructionist. During the course of 2007, the government lost absolute majority in both chambers of Congress, as several senators and deputies from the CPD became independent.

Foreign relations

During her first year in office, Bachelet faced continuing problems from neighbors Argentina and Peru. On July 2006, she sent a letter of protest to Argentinean president 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 a long-standing border dispute resurfaced after Argentina published some tourist maps featuring a contested territory in southern Chile —the Southern Patagonian Ice Field (Campo de Hielo Patagónico Sur)— as Argentinean territory, violating an agreement not to draw a border over the area. In early 2007, Peru accused Chile of unilaterally redefining their shared sea boundary on a law, passed by Congress, which detailed the borders of the new administrative region of Arica-Parinacota. The impasse was resolved by the Chilean Constitutional Tribunal, which declared the particular section of the law unconstitutional. In March 2007, the Chilean state-owned —but editorially independent— television channel TVN cancelled the broadcast of a documentary about the War of the Pacific, after a cautionary call was made to the stations' board of directors by Chilean Foreign Relations Minister Alejandro Foxley, apparently acting on demands made by the Peruvian ambassador to Chile. The show was finally broadcast in late May of that year. In August 2007, the Chilean government filed a formal diplomatic protest to Peru and summoned home its ambassador, after the neighboring country published an official map claiming a part of the Pacific Ocean that Chile considers its sovereign territory. Peru said this was just another step in its plans to bring the dispute to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Chile's October 16, 2006 vote in the United Nations Security Council election—with Venezuela and Guatemala deadlocked in a bid for the two-year, non-permanent Latin American and Caribbean seat on the Security Council—developed into a major ideological issue in the country and was seen as a test for Bachelet. The governing coalition was divided between the Socialists, who supported a vote for Venezuela, and the Christian Democrats, who strongly opposed it. Ending months of speculation, the president announced —through her spokesman—, the day before the vote, that Chile would abstain, citing as reason a lack of regional consensus over a single candidate. On March 2007 Chile's ambassador to Venezuela, Claudio Huepe, revealed in an interview with teleSUR that Bachelet personally told him that she initially wanted to vote for Venezuela, but then "there were a series of circumstances that forced me to abstain." The government quickly recalled Huepe and accepted his resignation.
Continuing the coalition's free-trade strategy, in August 2006 Bachelet promulgated a free trade agreement with the People's Republic of China (signed under the previous administration of Ricardo Lagos), the first Chinese free-trade agreement with a Latin American nation; similar deals with Japan and India were promulgated in August 2007. In October 2006, Bachelet promulgated a multilateral trade deal with New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei—the Trans-Pacific Strategic Economic Partnership (P4), also signed under Lagos' presidency. She was also in free-trade talks with other countries, such as Australia, Vietnam, Turkey and Malaysia. Regionally, she signed bilateral free trade agreements with Panama, Peru and Colombia.

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