The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Chile’s president now alone in Americas
Bachelet now last female head of state in the Americas.
SANTIAGO, CHILE — No one relished the milestone more than President Michelle Bachelet of Chile.
For a few years, she and two other female leaders presided over much of South America, representing more than half the continent’s population.
Their presidencies — in Argentina, Brazil and Chile — made the region an exemplar of the global push for a more equitable footing for women in politics. And their moment came long before the United States, often regarded as less sexist than Latin America, even came close to electing a female president.
But now, with one of her counterparts impeached and the other fighting corruption charges, Bachelet finds herself in an unsettling position: the last female head of government standing in the Americas.
And in a few months, she will be gone, too.
After Bachelet’s term ends next year, none of the countries in North or South America is expected to have a female president, a notable turnaround in a part of the world where, until recently, women have been elected to lead influential democracies.
“Perhaps we had a cycle of hyper-abundance,” she said during a recent interview at the presidential palace in Santiago.
The end of the Bachelet era is raising troubling questions for advocates of women’s rights who had hoped that the region’s recent track record of electing women was a lasting step toward gender equality.
Dozens of countries around the world, including Chile, have adopted quota systems in an effort to increase the representation of women in government. Yet progress has been stubbornly slow. A goal set by the United Nations in the 1990s to have at least 30 percent of lawmakers in national legislatures be women remains elusive; today, just over 23 percent of legislators are women.
“It’s three steps forward and six steps back,” said Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of U.N. Women, a U.N. agency once led by Bachelet that was established in 2010 to promote women’s rights.
“In all of these countries where there have been such leaps forward on gender equality, the tide could easily recede,” Puri said.
The three powerful female presidents in South America — Bachelet, Dilma Rousseff in Brazil and Cristina Fernández in Argentina — came to office with the endorsement of popular male incumbents at a time when leftist parties promising to create more equitable societies appealed to voters.
But the standing of the three presidents — and the perception of their parties — suffered as the end of a commodities boom hurt regional economies and a series of corruption scandals called into question their integrity and leadership.
“They’re all flawed leaders in their own way,” said Shannon K. O’Neil, a Latin America expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. She noted that none of the presidents managed to get ahead of the corruption sweeping the region, leaving their parties, to varying degrees, tainted by scandal.
Presidents often see their support plunge while in office. But the three female presidents say their gender exposed them to particularly virulent backlashes.
Rousseff said she had been called a cow “about 600,000 times,” and attributed her downfall partly to misogyny.
“They accused me of being overly tough and harsh, while a man would have been considered firm, strong,” Rousseff said. “Or they would say I was too emotional and fragile, when a man would have been considered sensitive. I was seen as someone too obsessed with work, while a man would have been considered hardworking.”
Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, appointed an all-male Cabinet. And Brazil’s Congress remains one of the region’s most heavily male, with only 11 percent of the lawmakers women.
Chile’s president, Bachelet, 65, is a pediatrician and single mother who began her government career as an adviser in the Health Ministry, rising quickly to become the nation’s first female health minister in 2000 and then its first female defense minister in 2002.
She won her first presidency handily in 2006, succeeding a political ally, Ricardo Lagos. Bachelet was not the region’s first female head of state, but she was widely regarded as the first to be elected on her own merits, without riding the coattails of a politically powerful husband. The watershed moment inspired women across Latin America.
After the celebrations on the night of her victory in 2006, Bachelet returned home haunted by a fleeting encounter on the campaign trail.
“If you’re elected, my husband will never hit me again,” a voter told Bachelet. It was a sobering feeling, she said, that she had become “a repository of the dreams and aspirations of so many people who had great expectations for my government.”
During her first four-year term, Bachelet steered legislative efforts to curb workplace discrimination, to protect victims of domestic violence and to expand health care for women, arguing that it was much more than a matter of fairness.
“I always make a soccer analogy,” Bachelet said. “If, of the 11 players, we only had half in the field, we would never win a game. The country, in order to develop, needs the skills of men and women.”
When she left office in 2010, Bachelet, who was not eligible to run for a second consecutive term, was tapped to serve as the inaugural executive director of U.N. Women. She took star power to a new agency that funded poverty-fighting initiatives and pushed to get more women elected.
But its ambitions were limited in part by an inability to raise enough money. Despite the close relationship between Bachelet and Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, the United States has been a marginal funder of U.N. Women, providing between $4.5 million and $7.6 million annually since 2009.
Bachelet soon returned to politics, winning the presidency again in 2013. During her second term, she created a ministry of women and gender equality, and passed an electoral change requiring that at least 40 percent of candidates for elected office be women. Before stepping down, she is seeking to partly decriminalize abortion, a proposal that Congress is considering.
Still, Bachelet said she would leave office with plenty of unfinished business. Only 16 percent of Chilean lawmakers are women. Beyond that, Chilean women earn roughly 32 percent less than men, are more likely to be unemployed and are less likely to get loans.
“The hardest thing to change is the culture,” Bachelet said.
Just last month, Sebastián Piñera, the conservative former president who is now the front-runner in the race to succeed Bachelet, came under fire after the release of a video in which he made a joke about rape as he sought to fire up a crowd at a rally.
Bachelet fumed. “To joke about that is to belittle all of us and that is unacceptable,” she wrote on Twitter.
While sexism may remain in Chilean politics, Virginia Guzmán, a sociologist at the Center for the Study of Women in Santiago, said Bachelet’s presidencies had left an indelible mark.