Reply #4: Michelle is indeed a remarkable woman. Excellent quote in that interview [View All]

[Say_What]

and it's still accurate after all these years, which is the sad part.

...MICHELLE BACHELET: First of all I'd say my first contact with United States when I was 12 and my father was in the Air Force Mission there in Washington, DC, and it was very surprising for me to see that in the United States nobody knew anything about Chile. And I was --They thought we lived in - like - Indian houses, things like that.

So it was very strange for me that such a huge and powerful country knew so little about so many, many countries. But I had a wonderful life there; I had good friends. I enjoyed a lot going to public libraries. I read every book of M. Louise Alcott - you know, "Little Women" and so on. I was really happy.

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Isabel Allende recently spoke of her in an interview with DemocracyNow:

<clips>

...ISABEL ALLENDE: Michele Bachelet is an extraordinary person, no matter that she’s a woman. It’s wonderful that we have a woman president in Chile for the first time. And what is even more wonderful is that she has come to the government and appointed 50% of women in every level of government. So when you see a photograph of the secretaries of state or any official photograph, the caption says, “Count the women,” because 50% are women. It’s the first time in history that female energy and male energy, in equal terms, are running a country. It’s the management of the country with this female energy. And I think that it’s an extraordinary experiment. And if it works, it will be imitated, and it will open up new spaces for peace and understanding in the world.

Now, Michele's story is very interesting. She was the daughter of a general, General Bachelet, who did not comply with the coup, the day of the military coup. He was arrested by his peers, and he died in torture, tortured by his friends. And then his wife and his daughter, who was then practically a child, were also arrested, and they were tortured. Eventually they were set free, and they ended up first in Australia, then in Germany, where Michele became a doctor, a pediatrician. And as soon as she could, she returned to Chile, even in times of Pinochet, and started working to defeat Pinochet. Then she became Minister of Health, Minister of Defense, the first woman Minister of Defense, who had to deal with the same people who had killed her father and tortured her and her mother. And this woman lived in a building, where she would meet her torturer in the elevator. So this is what Chile has had to put up with.

So when General Pinochet, after 30-something years, says that he’s willing to meet the victims, it’s not enough. It’s not enough. Now, Michele has never talked about revenge. She has never talked about these things. She doesn't want to be used as an example. And she doesn't talk about reconciliation, because that is a word that she thinks is very personal. You reconcile and you forgive in the deepest of your heart, and you cannot ask that from anyone. She talks about reuniting the Chilean family, getting together and building the future together. But reconciliation, forgiveness is something that is very personal. So I have great admiration for this woman.

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/17/1454233


Lula, Bachelet, and Chavez at Mercosur in Rio a couple of weeks ago.