Michelle Bachelet
Michelle Bachelet was president of Chile twice, in 2006-10 and 2014-18, the first woman, the paediatrician and socialist whose father, an air force general who had stayed loyal to Allende, died of a heart attack under torture in 1974, and who was herself detained with her mother at Villa Grimaldi in 1975 before exile in Australia and East Germany. The first government was the pension reform that gave a basic pension to the sixty per cent poorest, the crèches, the copper windfall saved in a sovereign fund that paid for the response to the crash of 2008. There was the students' penguin revolution of 2006 over the schools, and the earthquake of 27 February 2010, magnitude 8.8, eleven days before she left office with eighty-four per cent approval. The second was the tax reform, the free university places, the end of the binomial electoral system the dictatorship had designed. There was the legalisation of abortion on three grounds after the constitutional court allowed it. There was the scandal of her son's wife's property deal, which took her approval to twenty-four per cent. She was born in Santiago in 1951, studied medicine at the University of Chile and, after the exile, finished it in 1983, worked in a children's clinic and for the foundation that treated the dictatorship's victims, and studied military strategy at the inter-American defence college in Washington. Lagos made her health minister in 2000. In 2002 she became the first woman defence minister in Latin America, who rode in a tank in the floods. She had the army's commander say the army would never again do what it had done, which was the image the election of 2006 was won on. Between the terms she was the first head of UN Women. After them she was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2018 to 2022, whose visit to Xinjiang in 2022 and report on it, published in her last hour in office, ended her tenure. She declined to run again in 2025, and remains the coalition's most popular figure, which is a comment on the coalition.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Chilean
- Roles: president, physician, politician
