Single mother heads for historic Chilean presidency

Michelle Bachelet, a 54-year-old Chilean single mother of three who still does the school run to pick up her 13-year-old daughter, is poised to become the first elected woman president of a South American nation, if not today then almost certainly in a run-off next month.

The socialist Bachelet, a former paediatrician who has served as Minister of Health and of Defence, was 21 points ahead in the run-up to yesterday's Chilean presidential election.

As polling ended last night, the most likely scenario was that she might fall just short of the simple majority - one vote more than 50 per cent - needed to claim outright victory today.

But if that is the case, she is considered a shoo-in in a January 15 run-off against the second-placed candidate, certain to be one of the two conservatives, billionaire businessman Sebastian Pinera or the mayor of Santiago, Joaquin Lavin.

Ms Bachelet, a long-haired Joan Baez lookalike when she was a student activist, is now a short-haired blonde with gold-rimmed glasses.

She has taken traditionally macho Chile by storm during her campaign, which ended in tragedy last week when four of her supporters died in a campaign bus crash.

She called off her closing rally.

Commenting on traditional Chilean Catholicism and conservatism, the candidate said in a recent interview: "As the old joke goes, (to Chileans) I have all the sins together. I am a woman, socialist, separated and agnostic."

Joke or not, it seems to be working.

She had already become South America's first-ever woman Defence Minister in 2002 - putting her in charge of some of the men who may have ordered her torture or caused her father's death - a post she gave up last October to chase the title of South America's first woman president.

(Violeta de Chamorro was elected president of Nicaragua in 1990, and Mireya Moscoso of Panama in 1999, but those small nations are part of Central, rather than South, America).

Ms Bachelet is the candidate of the Concertacion, a coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has ruled since democracy replaced the last Pinochet regime in 1990.

Current socialist President Ricardo Lagos was legally barred from running again.

She has pledged, if elected, to split her cabinet evenly between men and women, a breakthrough in a country where, almost incredibly, divorce was banned until May 2004 and sexual harassment at work was deemed illegal only this year.

On the issue for which Chile has most often been in the headlines recently - whether or not Gen. Augusto Pinochet should be tried for human rights abuses - she has been ambiguous.

She has always said she was not an "avenging angel," despite her own torture, her father's death in a prison cell and the permanent "disappearance" of her boyfriend Jamie Lopez around the same time.

She has always avoided revealing details of her own torture and that of her mother, for three weeks in January 1975, saying only that some of her cellmates were raped and that she was spared the notorious parrillada, or grill, where prisoners were placed to receive electric shocks.

The fact that her father had been a military man may have spared the women the worst abuse, and possibly their "disappearance." The Pinochet saga is less of a legal wrangle and more a deep social schism among Chileans, an unhealed wound left over from the 17 years of the General's military dictatorship.

With the country still split between those who despise him and those who revere him for his anti-communism, Ms Bachelet has said she wants to be a bridge between the two sides.

Her first test could be if and when the ailing Pinochet, who turned 90 last month, dies during her watch.

Protocol demands a state funeral for an ex-President but to many Chileans that would be unconscionable.

- INDEPENDENT