Michelle Bachelet

Michelle Bachelet: The Prisoner Who Ran the Army

In January 2002 a fifty-year-old paediatrician was appointed Chile's Minister of National Defence — the first woman to hold that office anywhere in Latin America. Twenty-seven years earlier, agents of the Chilean secret police had taken her to Villa Grimaldi and tortured her. Her father, an air force brigadier general, had died in custody after months of daily torture in a Santiago prison. Now she was the civilian in charge of the institution that had done it. Later that year, during floods north of Santiago, photographers caught her directing a rescue operation from the top of an amphibious tank. Chile understood immediately what it was looking at.

Bases and Coups

Michelle Bachelet Jeria was born on 29 September 1951 in La Cisterna, a middle-class suburb of Santiago, and named after the French actress Michèle Morgan. Her father, Alberto Bachelet Martínez, was an air force officer; her mother, Ángela Jeria Gómez, an archaeologist. Her childhood was spent moving between military postings, which is how a girl who would later be tortured by the armed forces came to be entirely comfortable inside them.

She entered medical school at the University of Chile in 1970. Three years later came the coup. Her father was detained at the Air War Academy on treason charges, tortured daily at the Public Prison, and died of cardiac arrest on 12 March 1974. In January 1975 DINA agents arrested Bachelet and her mother and took them to Villa Grimaldi, then to Cuatro Álamos. She has always been careful to describe her own treatment as mild by comparison with what others endured — shouted at, shaken, threatened, but not given electric shock. She was released at the end of the month and went into exile, first in Australia, then in Potsdam, East Germany.

Becoming a Doctor Twice

She studied at Humboldt University in Berlin. When she returned to Chile in 1979 her East German credits were not recognised, so she began again, qualifying as a physician-surgeon on 7 January 1983. She specialised in paediatrics and public health at the Roberto del Río Children's Hospital, and worked for PIDEE, an organisation supporting the children of the disappeared and the tortured.

Then she did something almost no one expected. In 1996 she enrolled at Chile's National Academy of Political and Strategic Studies to study military strategy and finished first in her class, going on to the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. A woman whose father the military had killed had decided to learn the profession from the inside.

Health, Then Defence

President Ricardo Lagos made her Minister of Health in March 2000. She built the AUGE plan, guaranteeing treatment for a defined list of conditions, and authorised free emergency contraception for victims of sexual assault. In January 2002 she moved to Defence, where her project was reconciliation between the military and the society it had terrorised, alongside pension reform and modernisation of the forces.

By 2004 she was the only figure in the governing coalition capable of beating the right's Joaquín Lavín. She took 46 per cent in December 2005 and won the runoff in January 2006 with 53.5 per cent — Chile's first woman president, and the first woman in Latin America to win a presidency in her own right rather than as a leader's widow or wife.

Two Presidencies

Her first cabinet was split evenly between women and men, unprecedented in Chile. The record of 2006–2010 is substantial: Basic Solidarity Pensions guaranteeing a minimum income to the poorest 60 per cent of retirees; protections for roughly 1.2 million subcontracted workers; "Chile Grows with You," a package of services for vulnerable children under six; an Economic and Social Stabilisation Fund to save copper revenue; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights and the National Institute for Human Rights. The economy grew 3.3 per cent a year. The Transantiago transport overhaul was a debacle, and her response to the magnitude 8.8 earthquake of February 2010 was widely judged too slow. She still left office in March 2010 with 84 per cent approval.

Ban Ki-moon appointed her the founding head of UN Women in September 2010. She resigned in March 2013 to run again, won the primary with 73 per cent, and took the December runoff against Evelyn Matthei with over 62 per cent.

The second term (2014–2018) was more ambitious and much harder. Tax reform raised corporate rates from 20 to 25–27 per cent. Free university tuition, cut back by the Constitutional Court in 2015, was finally legislated in January 2018 for the poorest 60 per cent. Civil unions became law in April 2015; some 1,600 couples registered on the first day. She created the Ministry for Women and Gender Equality in 2016, abolished Pinochet's binomial electoral system in favour of proportional representation with a 40 per cent quota for female candidates, and in August 2017 saw Chile's total abortion ban lifted for cases of rape, non-viability and danger to the mother. Her environmental record is extraordinary and underdiscussed: a 720,000-square-kilometre marine reserve near Easter Island, five new Patagonian national parks, and a final decree lifting Chile's protected ocean from 4.2 to 42.4 per cent.

It ended badly. The Caval affair — her son and daughter-in-law obtaining favourable bank loans — drove her approval to 15 per cent by August 2016, the lowest of any president since the return of democracy. She left office at 39 per cent.

Geneva

She became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on 1 September 2018, pressing China on Xinjiang, Saudi Arabia on Yemen, Israel on settlements she described as possible war crimes, and Sri Lanka on impunity. In May 2022 she made the first visit to Xinjiang by a High Commissioner in seventeen years — and produced a statement praising China's poverty alleviation and universal health care while noting she had "raised questions and concerns." Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Uyghur organisations condemned it. On 13 June 2022 she announced she would not seek a second term.

Why Michelle Is Called a Genius

The word, applied here, is not about intellect in the abstract, though she has plenty — a medical degree earned twice, five languages, first in her class in military strategy. It is about a specific and very rare capacity: the ability to work inside an institution that has injured you without either forgiving it prematurely or being consumed by it.

Chile's transition from dictatorship required someone who could sit across a table from the armed forces and be credible to both sides. Bachelet was tortured by that state and buried her father because of it, then studied the military's own doctrine, ran its ministry, and used the position to build reconciliation rather than retribution — while simultaneously founding the museum and the institute that made the crimes permanent public record. Doing both at once is the achievement. Her second presidency added to it a legislative programme — tax, education, abortion, civil unions, electoral reform, ocean protection — that reshaped the country's settlement more than any government since 1990.

The counter-case is serious. Transantiago failed. The earthquake response was slow. The Caval scandal, involving her own family, collapsed her authority and left her at 15 per cent approval. And the Xinjiang statement of 2022 is the hardest item on the ledger: a career human rights advocate produced language that major human rights organisations judged closer to Beijing's framing than to the evidence. On a living political figure, judgment should stay open. She is best described not as a genius of ideas but as a practitioner of exceptional nerve, with a record that includes both durable reform and real failure.

Legacy

Chile's laws on abortion, civil unions, electoral representation and higher education were rewritten under her, and nearly half its ocean is protected because of a decree she signed. She holds the 2024 Indira Gandhi Prize for Peace, Disarmament and Development and honorary degrees from Columbia and the Sorbonne. In September 2025 President Gabriel Boric nominated her as Chile's candidate to succeed António Guterres as United Nations Secretary-General.

Achievements

• Order of Merit — 2006
• Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour — 2006
• Affiliated with United Nations
• Educated at Westland Middle School, Liceo Nº 1 Javiera Carrera and University of Chile
• Worked as politician, surgeon and epidemiologist