Unlikely Candidate Leads in Chile

PUERTO AISEN, Chile —  The candidate faced the hard women of this rugged Patagonian town. They were angry about the fate of their sons and husbands, a dozen lost in recent years to drownings, suicides, street crime.

The women feared a murderous conspiracy -- and blamed the government for not doing enough to get to the bottom of it.

Michelle Bachelet, a product of the country’s political elite in the far-off capital, listened to their pleas in a cramped church office here. She took notes and vowed to look into it. She promised no solutions, but that didn’t matter to the widows and mothers.

“Finally, someone seems to care about us,” said Rosa Flores, leader of the mothers group. “I think she will help.”

As Chileans go to the polls today to elect a new president, the scene that unfolded in this salmon-fishing outpost says much about the allure of Michelle Bachelet.

The blond pediatrician with signature spectacles and seemingly boundless energy is the favorite to win what is expected to be the first round of the election.

But she might not seem like the obvious front-runner to lead this South American nation.

She is a woman on a continent where governments have long been dominated by men.

She is a mother of three, separated from her husband in a conservative country that legalized divorce only a year ago.

She is the daughter of an air force general loyal to left-wing President Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by Gen. Augusto Pinochet in 1973. Her father was arrested and tortured, and died of a heart attack in custody. She too was imprisoned by Pinochet’s regime before fleeing into exile in East Germany.

With Bachelet’s prospective ascension to the presidency, it seems easy enough to declare that Chilean politics has finally come full circle. The 90-year-old Pinochet, said to be suffering from dementia, faces charges of human rights abuses and corruption and is fighting to stay out of jail.

Meanwhile, outside the stately presidential palace that was bombed by Pinochet’s supporters on Sept. 11, 1973, a statue of Allende now greets passersby. “I have faith in Chile and its destiny,” reads the inscription, among Allende’s last words before his death on that convulsive day.

But many on the left assail Bachelet and the left-wing coalition she represents as sellouts, politicians who have proved to be just as fiscally conservative, and pro-Washington, as Pinochet. Chile has become an economic powerhouse of the 21st century, but for all its fiscal progress, it still has one of the continent’s largest gulfs between rich and poor.

“The politics of Michelle Bachelet has nothing to do with the politics of Salvador Allende,” said Francisco “Pancho” Villa, a popular singer who is running for Congress on a left-wing ticket. “She and the others have betrayed the beliefs of Salvador Allende.”

Bachelet, 54, is not an ideologue. She is widely considered to be an intelligent, tireless worker who conveys an overwhelming sense of purpose and is careful to master whatever issue confronts her.

But there is something else: an ability to touch people and transcend technocratic barriers -- a Bill Clinton-like capacity to appear to feel people’s pain, if you will.

“Many people seem to see Michelle Bachelet as someone who is truly concerned about bringing about a better quality of life for them,” said Carlos Montes, a congressman in Bachelet’s Socialist Party and a top campaign aide. “It’s not necessarily that she can help them earn more money or buy property, but that she understands their aspirations for a better life.”

Most polls indicate that Bachelet will get 40% or more of the votes today, falling short of a majority. That would force a runoff next month with her closest rival, probably one of two conservatives: Joaquin Lavin, a former mayor of Santiago who narrowly lost the last election, in 2000; and Sebastian Pinera, a billionaire entrepreneur who has been rising in the polls and sounding almost like a socialist, vowing to fight persistent poverty.

Bachelet is the hand-picked candidate and protege of President Ricardo Lagos, who remains popular here but is prohibited by law from seeking reelection. She would be the fourth president of the so-called Concertacion -- the left-wing coalition that has dominated Chilean politics since the return of democracy in 1990.

The moderate governments of the Concertacion have reshaped the country into “Chile Inc.” This is a country where investors, bankers and businesspeople have gotten along famously with a government full of socialists. Most expect that Bachelet would continue the trend.

“You hear some people say that Bachelet is really more of a leftist at heart than she lets on and will act more radically once she becomes president,” said one Western diplomat working in the region. “But I don’t believe that.

“The Chileans have figured something out: You can have your socialist agenda but you also have to be able to get along with the business community. That was an important lesson.”

Bachelet’s poll numbers have slipped recently, and a sense of uncertainty has overtaken her campaign. Her performance in two televised debates was widely viewed as less than optimal -- she is at her best mixing with people, analysts say, not in the debate format, where her schoolmarm side tends to obscure her personal warmth.

“I have a sense of humor, although some say I have lost my smile,” Bachelet conceded this month in a televised interview.

Those who know her say that being a politician does not come naturally to Bachelet, who often speaks of a sense of duty. She accepted the challenge of running for president because Lagos, and other senior leaders, decided that she was the best candidate.

“Michelle Bachelet is a person who has always put duty above her desires,” said Andrea Insunza, a journalist who co-wrote an “unauthorized” biography of the candidate that has been praised for its insights. “She is a candidate unlike all other candidates because she genuinely never wanted to be president of Chile.... It’s clear that she hoped there would be another candidate until she had no other option and decided, ‘All right, I accept that I have to take on this work.’ ”

She has no great love of public life, by all accounts. She resents the loss of privacy and seldom appears in public with her children. She is said to be happiest at her lakeside retreat, walking along the shore with her children and old friends.

As a young medical student, she was active in the socialist movement, following the political orientation of her mother, Angela Jeria, an anthropologist. She watched the bombing of the presidential palace from the roof of the Medical School on Avenida Independencia. She continued her socialist work in a clandestine manner until January 1975, when she and her mother were arrested and taken to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious torture center.

Bachelet has said she was blindfolded and beaten, but has indicated that she got off easy compared with most prisoners at Villa Grimaldi, including her mother. Friends in the military intervened and the pair were allowed to leave the country.

They eventually settled in East Germany, where Bachelet continued her medical studies, fell in with the vigorous Chilean expatriate movement and married a fellow exile. Her eldest child, Sebastian, was born in 1978 in Leipzig.

The next year, word came that it was safe for the family to return to Chile; the couple split soon after. She threw herself back into her medical and political work.

The return to democracy in 1990 allowed her to continue her Socialist Party activism, and, in 1999, she headed Lagos’ campaign apparatus in Santiago, the capital, again demonstrating her efficiency and dedication.

Upon his election as president, Lagos named Bachelet minister of health. In 2002, she became the first female defense minister on the continent.

She resigned as defense minister last year to begin her campaign for the presidency, and she has been crisscrossing the country since. Her campaign swing through Patagonia was part of an effort to reach out to every region of the nation. She flew in on a commercial jet with a small cadre of aides; there were no obvious bodyguards.

Here in Puerto Aisen, she met the other Chile: a hardscrabble place where salmon fishermen and their families have experienced little of the economic boom so obvious in Santiago, with its shimmering office buildings and upscale cafes.

Bachelet, as usual, was well-versed on the region’s needs. She met with the widows and mothers of Puerto Aisen, and pledged to improve medical services in the countryside. In the evening, she spent hours speaking fluidly about issues such as the environment, education and job-creation, and listening to complaints that the far-off region gets short shrift from Santiago.

As Bachelet pressed the flesh in the nearby town of Coihaique, a woman in a cook’s uniform approached the candidate and handed her a note.

“I think she will help,” the woman, Olga Calisto, said afterward, sitting at a table at the restaurant where she works.

The note, Calisto said, expressed her concern about Chile’s shaky, privatized pension system.

“I know she is busy, but I’m sure she will read my note,” Calisto said. “I have worked for 40 years and have no one else to take care of me. She seems like a person who cares.”

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Andres D’Alessandro of The Times’ Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Michelle Bachelet

Born: Sept. 29, 1951, in Santiago, Chile.

Career: Minister of defense, 2002-2004; minister of health, 2000-2002; pediatrician and public health advisor, 1982-2000.

Education: Medical degree, University of Chile; master’s degree in military science, Army War College (Chile).

Languages: Speaks Spanish, English, German, French and Portuguese.

Parents: Her father, Alberto Bachelet, was a Chilean air force general and an official in the government of Salvador Allende. He was arrested after the 1973 coup by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and died in jail in 1974. Her mother, Angela Jeria, is an anthropologist.

Exile: After being expelled from Chile in 1975, she lived in Australia and East Germany before returning in 1979.

Children: She has a son, Sebastian, 26, and two daughters, Francisca, 21, and Sofia, 12.

Los Angeles Times