From torture victim to president.

• Author: Daniels, Alfonso
• Position: Michelle Bachelet

Meet Michelle Bachelet, the new socialist president of Chile, and the first woman to head that country. She embodies Chile's transformation from the days of the dictator Augusto Pinochet.

Her father was in the military but supported Socialist President Salvador Allende. For this, he paid a price when Pinochet overthrew Allende on September 11, 1973.

"My father was an air force general," she told The Progressive while still on the campaign trail. "The same day of the military coup he was arrested and accused of treason for collaborating with Salvador Allende's government. He died in 1974 of a heart attack after being tortured."

Bachelet calls the years after the coup "the most difficult period of my life." Resisting Pinochet, she secretly worked with the Socialist Youth while a medical student. But Pinochet's secret police caught up with her.

"Two secret agents abducted me and my mother and took us blindfolded to Villa Grimaldi, the dictatorship's main torture centre," she recounts. "There they separated us, and we were interrogated and abused physically."

Lucrecia Brito shared the cramped cell with Bachelet. "We could hear the screams from the torture chamber opposite our cell," Brito tells me. "She remained calm and tried to help us with her medical skills, singing with us in the afternoons, even though it annoyed our guards. They kept telling her that if she didn't collaborate, they would kill her mother, but she never broke down."

Thanks to family connections, Bachelet and her mother were released within months and exiled to Australia and, later, East Germany, only to return to Chile in 1979, despite their fear of arrest, to try to help other torture victims.

Now, Bachelet, a fifty-four-year-old former pediatrician, single mother of three, and lifelong Socialist Party member, will sit in Allende's old spot while Pinochet, ninety and facing corruption charges, remains under house arrest.

"Bachelet is like Mandela," says Hdctor Soto, editor of the influential Chilean magazine Capital. "Her family's military history and tragic leftist past made her the only person who could reconcile the civilians and the military."

Bachelet rose through the ranks of the Socialist Party after the return of democracy. As homage to her father, she joined Chile's most prestigious military academy, where she combined her studies with part-time work at the ministry of health. She was top of her class, winning a scholarship in 1997 to study at the InterAmerican...