Argentina:Here in the land of machismo, where leaders were long supposed to conform to the standard of the strong-armed military man in epaulettes, a rising wave of leaders is working on a new 21st-century cliche: la presidenta.
The movement started at South America's southern tip, where Chile elected Michelle Bachelet president last year. Argentina followed this week, choosing first lady Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner as its first elected female president.
"Permit me to specifically address my sisters in gender, to call out to all of them who have remained alone in the home, to the female factory workers and students, the professionals and business women," Kirchner (54) said during her first speech as president-elect. "I know we can all do great work."
The gender-specific rallying cry now seems poised to spread north. In Paraguay, outgoing president Nicanor Duarte is backing former education minister Blanca Ovelar as his replacement in next year's presidential election. And in Brazil, many political observers say that the president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, seems to be grooming his chief of staff and former energy minister - a woman named Dilma Rousseff - to carry his party's torch when his term ends in 2010.
"This term is only 10 months old," Rousseff reminded listeners during a forum at the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper this month, seeking to douse some of the rampant speculation about a possible campaign. "I'm not a candidate." But the possibility that she could become one has South Americans confronting a prospect that just a few years ago would have seemed utterly impossible - a continent where the majority of the population is led by women.
Fernandez de Kirchner briefly danced around the subject during her acceptance speech, obliquely referring to a woman's "special aptitudes - not better, just special". Similarly, Ovelar has pointed out the advantages of "a woman's vision" in solving the social problems that voters in South America customarily list as their most pressing concerns.
"I think people generally just want a change," said Ana Esposito, a 55-year-old social worker in Buenos Aires province. "I also think that a woman might have a wider vision than a man, because generally women do more things simultaneously than men do - but that's just my opinion."
Their rise to the highest seats of power has been sudden, but women have been working their way up through the region's political systems for years. Both Bachelet and Fernandez de Kirchner became involved in politics during the 1970s as opponents of military governments. In the 1990s, Bachelet served as a minister of health and defence. Fernandez de Kirchner was a prominent senator in the national legislature before succeeding her husband, Nestor Kirchner, who declined to run for re-election this year.
Marta Lagos, who conducts polls throughout Latin America and is based in Chile, said both women rose to prominence because people were desperately seeking a new class of political elites. Like most of the region, Chile and Argentina were ruled by military dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s. As elsewhere on the continent, the politicians who subsequently ushered in democratic rule there failed to convince voters that they were making sufficient progress against problems like poverty and social inequality.
"When people began demanding strongly a change in elites, women suddenly became an option," Lagos said.
That said, she doesn't believe that the news is all good for female candidates in South America. In Chile, Bachelet's approval rating has fallen to below 50 per cent, and she is often criticised for being indecisive. "She is always saying that when she gets mad, people here in Chile say that she has a bad temper," Lagos said of Bachelet, "but when a man gets mad, they say he's a strong leader."
According to the World Economic Forum's ranking of 116 countries in terms of gender gaps, opportunities for women in South America still lagged behind in 2006. Argentina ranked 42nd in terms of equal opportunities for women, Paraguay 65th, Brazil 68th and Chile 79th, according to the survey. But in terms of political empowerment for women, Argentina jumped to 23rd on the list, ahead of the US and Canada. Many here credit that to a law passed in 1991 aimed at increasing female representation in congress. The number of women in Argentina's legislature more than quadrupled after the law was enacted, and 11 other Latin American countries have passed similar laws.