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Current polls on the Dec. 11 election show Michelle Bachelet, 54, the country's minister of defense from 2002 to 2004, with a staggering 24-percentage-point lead on her . . nearest competitor. Joaquin Lavin, a right-wing conservative Catholic, has been floundering since the beginning of the campaign.

"Fifty percent of my cabinet will be women," Chilean presidential candidate Michelle Bachelet promised a crowd of supporters last week. "We are going to set a standard for Latin America."

Chileans lived, and too many died, under a dictatorship from 1973 to 1990. Since then, however, the return to civilian rule has left the country far more stable than many of its South American neighbors. Now the relative staid nation may be on the verge of making history as the first country in South America to elect a female president.

In a country where politics are dominated by traditional party structures and hostilities, supporters say they like the refreshing spirit of inclusion conveyed by Bachelet, a single mother with three children.

"Michelle makes you feel like we did it together . . The other day I went to a birthday party with 15 women and 10 men. They were all talking about Michelle Bachelet and her magic. She is awakening the idea that we need new style of politics, not confrontational. She generates confidence."

Until just the last month she has refused to campaign on weekends and is often seen at the supermarket or rushing to drop her children at school.

"Today in Chile, one third of households are run by women, we wake up, get the children ready and go to work. To them I am hope."

That Bachelet is alive and able to run for office is a dramatic story of survival.

While socialist President Salvador Allende was in office, the U.S. government under Richard Nixon aided a military coup against him. After several attempts, the military took over on Sept. 11, 1973, and immediately began executing political and social activists.

In January 1975 Bachelet was arrested by a Chilean military squad. As a member of the outlawed Socialist Party, Bachelet was part of an underground resistance and one of thousands accused of being an enemy of the military government led by Army General Augusto Pinochet.

Bachelet found herself under surveillance and then the military sought to eliminate her.

But first the torture.

"It was horrifying," said Elizabeth Lira, a leading Chilean academic who has studied and researched human rights abuses in Chile. "You were arrested by 10 men, heavily armed. They smacked you, beat you, then half dressed in the middle of the night they threw you into a vehicle. Then you were packed into cells and trapped in a very small space."

"Our room had bars on the window," said Bachelet. "We had four or five bunks, and we were eight women. The beds were full, sometimes two women slept together, we didn't all fit . . . We were blindfolded all day, we took them off, but obviously when the guards arrived we lowered the blindfolds. If not, they beat us."

The 1973-1990 Pinochet government killed approximately 3,000 Chileans. Many of them, including Bachelet's boyfriend, simply "disappeared" and their bodies have never been located.

Bachelet's father Alberto, a general in the Chilean Air Force, was accused of working with the socialist Allende government. He was tortured by his colleagues until his heart collapsed. He died in a public prison cell.

Bachelet's mother, Angela Jeria, was kidnapped together with her daughter and locked in a cage for five days without food. Their cellmates were raped by guards.

"You can't just say that she was held for 30 days. It was 30 days of total fear," said Lira. "Rape was frequent. Plus the punches, sexual abuse, denigration. They had very long interrogations and the use of electric current was common. You had to listen to the others being tortured."

Thanks to their family connections to top military officials, Bachelet and her mother were spared death. Instead they were beaten, then exiled to Australia with orders not to re-enter Chile. Bachelet, ever the rebel, quickly helped organize Socialist Party resistance groups and secretly planned her return to Chile.

From Australia, Bachelet moved to East Germany, where she helped rebuild the Chilean Socialist party.

In 1979, the military surprised them and let them return.

By then Bachelet was a pediatrician who specialized in trauma to children who live under dictatorships or whose parents have been kidnapped.

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According to a recent interview with Isabel Allende Bachelet's center-left governing coalition, the Concertación, is not socialist and doesn’t have a particularly leftwing program.

“But even so," she says, "that a socialist be allowed to govern this country, that the institutions continue to function, and indeed that we have made substantial progress normalizing relations between civil government and the military is remarkable.”

An article in the New Statesman suggests that not much is about to change in Chile:

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Long associated with the hard left, Bachelet has surrounded herself with liberal economic advisers, to the point where, after a five-hour meeting with her, the chief of the powerful Chilean Federation of Industry told reporters that "it doesn't make any difference who wins the presidency". A Bachelet government would, he believed, keep faith with Chile's neoliberal economic model.

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Good news...Looks like the Nazi candidate, Joaquín Lavín Infante, isn't going to make the run off.

The Socialist Party of Allende split after his murder. The farthest left element generally sought asylum in East Germany, while the more moderate socialists chose France, Spain, or even Canada.

She's not the first woman President in Latin America, of course. Violetta Chamorro was preceded by Isabel Peron.

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Michelle Bachelet 45.93%
Sebastian Pinera 25.44%
Joaquin Lavin 23.23%
Tomas Hirsch 5.39%

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Michelle Bachelet thanked her followers and promised she would win in January:

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"I would have liked to have won in the first round," she admitted.

"I take this as a reason to work harder, to push ourselves even harder, because after all, women are used to working twice as hard," she added to loud applause.

If Ms Bachelet wins she may find she has a complicit Congress, with the Concertacion bloc expected to win a majority in the Senate and expand its current majority in the Chamber of Deputies.

Her family history makes her a popular figure among many Chileans. She is the daughter of an air force general tortured to death by Pinochet's secret police.

Two years after his death, she and her mother were arrested and tortured.

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The Communist Party, which is the largest party in the Podemos coalition, has declared its support for Bachelet. The other main coalition partner, Hirsch's Humanist Party, refuses to back Bachelet, saying that there is essentially no difference between her coalition (which has ruled Chile continuously since the fall of Pinochet in 1990) and the new coalition of the right, led by Sebastián Piñera, since both support neo-liberal economic policies. Hirsch is calling on voters to spoil their ballots in protest.

Some other leftist parties and trade unions are also urging their members to hold their noses and vote for Bachelet, out of fear of a right-wing victory. (Sound familiar?)

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siempre hemos tenido que rendir al cien por ciento en la casa y en el trabajo, estar bien las 24 horas del día y por supuesto, no tener dolores de cabeza", dijo la candidata

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Here's an excerpt from his Blog:

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Unfortunately, the Chilean center-left is plagued with an almost endemic lack of courage and a resulting inability to sharply distinguish itself from its own tainted right-wing opposition (sound familiar?). While other emerging populist governments in Latin America – from Venezuela to Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil — have strongly distanced themselves from the Washington Consensus of free-market nostrums, the Chilean administration has continued to toe the neo-liberal recipe only with slight modifications. Only now, after her coalition has been in power for 15 years, is Bachelet daring to propose reform of the country’s notoriously inadequate private pension system which was imposed on Chile by force of bayonet (note that the Chilean Armed Forces meanwhile retained for itself the more generous state social security scheme).

Chile’s economy has shown consistent growth over the last decade and a half, but it remains one of the most wildly unequal in the hemisphere. The poor remain really poor; salaries are very low; health care is abominable; basic education is semi-privatized; and the country survives basically by selling-off finite natural resources.

To become a true history-changing President, Michelle Bachelet is going to have to go beyond the immediate symbolism of her secularism and her gender. She’s going to have to be able to make some dramatic and concrete improvements in the lives of the bottom half of Chileans – a task at which her three predecessors have not distinguished themselves.

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Originally posted by M. Spector:

Some other leftist parties and trade unions are also urging their members to hold their noses and vote for Bachelet, out of fear of a right-wing victory. (Sound familiar?)

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