I'm spinning Coltrane's "Liberia" & "Alabama" today, in honor of the Liberian inauguration & MLK.
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has major challenges ahead of her. Let's wish her luck.
And the new Chilean leader seems like my kind of woman too:
Bachelet propelled by leftists, centrists
SANTIAGO: Michelle Bachelet is a socialist, an agnostic and a single mother—hardly the traditional profile for a leader of Chile, a conservative Catholic bastion in South America.
Yet Bachelet, 54, became the country’s first woman president after a runoff vote on Sunday, in which she garnered 53.5 percent of the vote and defeated conservative billionaire Sebastian Pinera.
Bachelet ran as the candidate for the Center-Left Concertacion, the coalition of leftist and centrist parties that has governed Chile since the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinoche*t ended in 1990.
“I am just a Chilean woman no more and no less than millions of other Chileans,” Bachelet said. “I work, I take care of my home and I drop my daughter off at school. But I’m also a Chilean that feels a calling to fight for justice and for public service.”
According to people who work with her, Bachelet is a workaholic who still manages to enjoy parties and dancing.
Bachelet is separated from her husband—divorce only became legal in 2004—and has three children from two different relationships.
A pediatrician, she served as health minister before becoming Latin America’s first female defense minister in 2002.
Born September 29, 1951, in Santiago, Bachelet studied medicine and joined the Socialist Youth as a teenager. Her father, Air Force General Alberto Bachelet, was a close adviser to the socialist president Salvador Allende, who was toppled by Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.
Tortured while in prison, Bachelet’s father died six months later.
Secret police whisked her and her mother off to Villa Grimaldi, a known torture center, in January 1975.
“Torture is terrible, especially from the psychological point of view, because it is so humiliating,” she said of her experience.
The two women were later freed and fled, first to Australia and then to East Germany, where Bachelet completed her medical studies.
Bachelet, already the mother of a young son, Sebastian, returned to Chile in 1979 but was prevented from practicing as a doctor by the dictatorship.
She continued studying, specializing in pediatrics and public health. Then in 1984 she gave birth to a daughter, Francesca.
But Bachelet also became aware of the isolation of the Chilean military after Pino*chet finally ended his dictatorship in 1990.
She studied military strategy in Santiago and later at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington.
In 2000 President Ricardo Lagos made her health minister to carry out a major reform of the sector.
Two years later, Bachelet became defense minister and on the 30th anniversary of Pinochet’s coup called for a national reconciliation with the military.
The speech was the launch pad for her rise to power.
Bachelet has won over Chileans like Andres Chellew, the son of an officer who took part in Pinochet’s coup. He says Bachelet represents the end of a political and economic era in Chile.
“She represents the middle class, Chile’s reconciliation with its military, she is opening a new chapter in our history. The country is going to change a lot in the next four years even if some people do not want this,” he said.
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/...60117wor1.html
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