Hundreds of Chileans have made their way to the country’s presidential office to say goodbye to one of the most popular heads of state in the world.
Despite widespread criticism over the government response to a devastating earthquake and tsunami and a rocky start to her tenure four years ago as a result of a poorly managed transportation system upgrade in Santiago, Michelle Bachelet is leaving office tomorrow with an opinion poll rating of 84 percent.
Though Chile was among the first Latin American countries to give women the right to vote conditionally in 1931 and universally in 1949, women rarely played a role in Chilean politics. Michelle Bachelet changed that.
“Chile is no longer our fatherland—it’s our motherland” became a popular refrain when she was elected four years ago to become the South America’s first female president since Bolivia’s Lydia Gueiler Tejada became interim president of that Andean nation in 1979. Gueiler, however, became president via appointment by the Bolivian Congress and she was deposed in the country’s 129th coup on July 18, 1980.
It’s somewhat remarkable that she even became President. Bachelet, an agnostic and single mother of three boys, is an atypical mother in a country widely viewed as one of the more conservative Catholic countries. Divorce only became legal in 2004. She is the daughter of an air force general who died after being tortured during the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1989). Bachelet with her mother fled into exile returning only the situation in Chile stabilized. Between 2000 and 2002, Bachelet was health minister in the government of fellow Socialist Ricardo Lagos, and she was later the country’s defense minister, up until October 2004 when she resigned in order to run for the presidency.
A pediatrician by training, Dr. Bachelet embraced gender issues from the start, vowing that her government “will fight with all its capacity for the full exercise of women’s rights.”
Among her government’s accomplishments:
- A law gave women the right to breast-feed at work.
- A law stiffened the penalties for men who fail to pay alimony.
- Hundreds of nurseries have been established nationwide, along with domestic violence shelters for women and children.
- Equal numbers of women and men are now serving in top government jobs, including her Cabinet.
- Women were for the first time admitted at the naval academy.
But it is in the realm of social investment and especially in the area of childhood development that Bachelet left her mark. Under Bachelet Chile shaved off 0.3 points off the country’s GINI co-efficient narrowing the income inequality gap from 0.56 to 0.53.
During much of the 1990s, Chile’s economy averaged annual growth of 7.8%, earning it the title of Latin America’s most turbocharged but the country’s growth was uneven with the rich getting richer and the bottom half of Chileans getting left behind. Chilean leaders had long hoped to match the affluence in Portugal or a Greece, two of the less affluent European nations.
Chile’s growth was fueled by free-trade agreements with 56 countries that opened markets to Chile’s natural resources such as copper (which remains in state hands) and timber, and to food items such as fruit, fish and wine. Chile in a public-private partnership, for example, developed the country farmed salmon industry from zero in 1990 to where it is today, the world’s second largest after Norway.
But despite the global commodities boom, growth slowed at the start of this decade to half what it was in the 1990s, to an average of 3.7%. The economic expansion was no longer keeping pace with the growth of the labor force. Far from catching up to Portugal’s economic output of about $23,000 per capita, Chile’s remained stuck at $14,000.
And its income inequality was among the worst anywhere. Women can get welfare but few can get a job, according to data that show the nation ranks near the bottom among Latin American countries in terms of formal employment. This is what Bachelet changed by making the narrowing of social inequality a policy goal.
At a 2008 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, President Bachelet noted that “Chile has set even more ambitious goals for itself. Chile’s currently a middle-income country, and within the next few years its per capita income, measured through the use of the purchasing power parity, will be in excess of $20,000 per year. In keeping with this, the country’s now in the process of conducting reforms that will enable us to make a strong leap towards development…We must increase competitiveness, promote innovation and ensure that all members of our societies participate in the development process, what we have called social cohesion. We need to go further in social cohesion, too.”
Under her tenure direct foreign investment in Chile increased 64 percent and Chile became the first South American and the second Latin American country to join the OECD, a group of the world’s top 31 industrialized economies.
Bachelet is part of Latin Ameica’s “pragmatic socialism” movement, a left-leaning democratic coalition of countries that includes Brazil, Uruguay, and El Salvador that aims for progressive social policies coupled with traditional economic policy. She’ll be greatly missed.
The Chilean Constitution does not allow for successive presidential terms. She is eligible to run again in 2013 when Chile next holds presidential elections. In the meantime, she is headed to work on childhood development issues at the United Nations.
