Chile: Michelle Bachelet, a lifelong socialist, former political exile and former prisoner of the military dictatorship, was sworn in on Saturday as Chile's first woman president with the luminaries of South America's new leftist leaderships and US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in the audience.
"Our strength will be the women," Dr Bachelet (54), told an animated, largely female crowd of thousands downtown as she made her initial address as chief of state from the ornate presidential palace in Santiago, La Moneda. "In Chile, there will be no forgotten citizens. This is my promise."
Many Chilean women donned presidential sashes of white, red and blue in homage to the bespectacled physician and daughter of a general whose dramatic personal story encapsulates for many the recent history of Chile.
Thousands of admirers lined the route as the president's motorcade made its way into the capital from the seaside port of Valparaiso, where she was formally inaugurated for a four-year term.
Dr Bachelet, donning a two-piece cream-coloured suit, waved from her standing perch in an official Ford Galaxy convertible as the heavily guarded motorcade made its way toward the presidential palace.
"The past is past and we will never forget it," the new president, speaking from a balcony, told the enthusiastic multitudes during her brisk, 19-minute address.
World attention has focused on Dr Bachelet since her victory, in part because of her past but also because of the cultural and political significance of her election.
Dr Bachelet is an agnostic and separated mother of three from two different fathers. Until recently, she drove her youngest daughter, Sofia, (12) to school each morning and did the family shopping in her Suv. She likes cooking with her family, a glass of wine with dinner and playing folk music on guitar.
Her rise highlighted a cultural shift in a mostly Catholic country long regarded as among the most conservative in Latin America, a nation where divorce was only recently legalised, abortion remains illegal and women often earn as much as 40 per cent less than men with similar jobs.
Dr Bachelet has pledged a "parity government", with equal numbers of men and women in key jobs, and has named 10 women and 10 men to her Cabinet.
She rose to national prominence in the cabinet of outgoing president Ricardo Lagos, serving as minister of health and defence. Dr Bachelet was a physician and had worked for Mr Lagos's campaign.
She heads the fourth consecutive government of the centre-left coalition known as the Concertacion that has ruled since the 1990 ousting of the military regime of Gen Augusto Pinochet, who took power in a September 11th, 1973, coup that overthrew leftist president Salvador Allende.
Chile, swimming in funds from exports of copper and other commodities, is considered one of Latin America's major economic and political success stories, a place where the widespread political corruption and citizen dissatisfaction so evident elsewhere is less apparent.
Dr Bachelet, like Mr Lagos, embodies a pragmatic socialism that embraces US notions of free trade and democracy even while differing on issues like the war in Iraq. However, Dr Bachelet has consistently bemoaned the wide income gap between Chile's elite and working classes and has pledged to help provide "decent and dignified" jobs for all.
In her speech, the new president also pointedly noted that yesterday marked the 32nd anniversary of the death in custody of her father, former air force general Alberto Bachelet, who served in the Allende government and was arrested as a traitor after the coup.
Dr Bachelet and her mother were also arrested and suffered at notorious torture centre Villa Grimaldi before being released and allowed to go into exile to the former East Germany.
- (Los Angeles Times-Washington Post service)