WUNRN

http://www.wunrn.com

CHILE - 2 WOMEN LEADERS DIVIDED IN IDEOLOGY VIE FOR PRESIDENCY OF CHILE - MICHELLE BACHELET & EVELYN MATTHEI

Chile's former president, Michelle Bachelet, waves to supporters after announcing her intention to run for president again. Photograph: Luis Hidalgo/AP

Jonathan Watts - The Observer, 6 October 2013

If a novelist had submitted the script for the coming presidential election in Chile, the plot might well have been dismissed as too perfectly symmetrical to be plausible.

The two leading candidates – Michelle Bachelet and Evelyn Matthei – are both daughters of air force generals. As girls, they played in the same military barracks and their fathers were friends. But when the country was ripped apart in the 1973 coup by General Augusto Pinochet, their families were on opposite sides of a murderous divide. One father was promoted to run the air force. The other was tortured and died in prison.

Forty years on, the two women are still on opposite sides, but this time in an election campaign that looks set to usher in major changes – of the constitution, abortion law, tax and education – in one of South America's most dynamic economies.

The timing could hardly be more sensitive. Chile has just marked the 40th anniversary of the CIA-backed coup with sombre memorials to the 3,000 victims who were killed or "disappeared" in its aftermath. And Santiago, for all its growing wealth and maturing democracy, is still frequently racked by student protests, workers' strikes, teargas and water cannon.

As much as the two leading candidates would like to look to the future, much of the coverage of the campaign has focused on their close but very different pasts. In part, this is because the race almost seems to be over before it has begun. Ahead of the vote on 17 November, polls suggest Bachelet – the Social Democrat candidate – has the support of 38% to 44% of voters, compared with 12% to 27% for her rightwing rival Matthei. But the throng of other candidates means she is not yet certain of a conclusive first-round victory.

The Observer met the former paediatrician who was Chile's first woman president from 2006-2010 at her party's campaign headquarters in a refurbished factory near the centre of Santiago. The mood among her staff is ebullient, though no one is taking victory for granted, least of all Bachelet. "It's like football, even if you are ahead the game is not won until the last minute," she tells me in fluent English. "I also need a parliament that will support me to make the structural changes that are needed."

Despite the parallels with Matthei, she would prefer the election to be seen as a contest between different visions of the future, but acknowledges that Chile still needs to face some of the unresolved issues from the past.

I ask whether she feels the air force, and in particular Matthei's father, Fernando, could have done more to help her father, Alberto. "If they hadn't seen us as enemies, probably they would never have tortured and violated our human rights as they did," she says. "The problem was that the national security policy meant people on the left were seen as enemies, not adversaries … Could they have done more? Yes. They could have not taken him into prison, not tortured him. But more than that, I want to know how we avoid repeating what happened in the past."

The two generals were close colleagues before the coup. But she emphasises that the two men had no more in common in their personalities and beliefs than their daughters.

"My father and her father were good friends, but they were very different. My dad spoke a lot and laughed a lot. I'm like him. Matthei is more German. She's quiet," Bachelet says. "They have tried to show us as clones, but we are not clones … My family really believed in social justice and were open-minded. That was seen as strange in the military of the time. That is why we have completely different visions."

The contrast became even more marked after the coup. Bachelet worked covertly as a courier for the underground socialist movement, concealing documents in her fridge. She was caught, placed in a secret jail, blindfolded and maltreated. Her father was jailed and tortured, eventually dying in detention of a stroke. "I'm from the victims' side, from the painful side," Bachelet says. "The best I can do is to contribute to the construction of a more democratic country."

Matthei's fortunes were very different. She was studying in London at the time of the coup and her father was promoted to commander-in-chief of the air force. Now the candidate for the rightwing Alianza coalition, she was not available for an interview. However, in the past she has said she should not be blamed for events that happened when she was young, and paid homage to her father as a man who raised himself up from humble beginnings. "My father could not go to college, there was no way to pay for it. He entered the air force, which he served to his best," she told supporters when she was chosen as the ruling party candidate.

While Bachelet pledges radical change, including free university education, Matthei is running on a promise of continuity – to keep delivering the growth seen under the current centre-right president, Sebastián Piñera. "Looking back now, we can be proud. No country in Latin America has progressed as far as Chile in reducing unemployment, raising wages, cutting poverty and almost eliminating extreme poverty. We are on our way to becoming a developed country," she said.

But her association with Pinochet looks likely to undermine a campaign already damaged by splits in the ruling camp and the last-minute withdrawal of its leading candidate because of depression. Matthei campaigned for Pinochet in the 1988 referendum that saw the general ousted from power and has appeared reluctant to criticise the excesses of his regime. This does not play well in an anniversary year when local television stations are filled with dramas and documentaries about the horrors of the dictatorship's death squads and "Caravan of Death".

Bachelet and Matthei are not the only candidates from families shaped by the coup. Marco Enríquez-Ominami, currently fourth in the polls, was born months before Pinochet grabbed power. His father, the Marxist guerrilla leader Miguel Enríquez, was executed a year later. His grandfathers – one of whom founded the Christian Democratic party – were tortured, and his half-brother and two uncles were killed. The future presidential candidate was taken by his mother to Cuba, where he spent 13 years in exile. Enríquez-Ominami says: "I was born into a nightmare and that's why I have the right to dream." Young and charismatic, the former film-maker is running for the Progressive party on a leftwing platform that promises free university education and a more liberal policy on abortion and same-sex marriage. "Bachelet lacks conviction," he says. "We may have a similar biography – her father was killed and so was mine. But her father was a general, mine was a revolutionary."

If she wins, Bachelet has vowed to push forward with greater equality for same-sex couples and a loosening of Chile's prohibition on abortion. She also wants a revision of the tax code and major constitutional reform to make it easier to pass legislation, to improve the rights of women and aboriginal groups, and to extend the presidential term limit (currently four years with no consecutive re-elections). This may ring alarm bells in some quarters.

Other leftwing leaders in Latin America, namely Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Rafael Correa in Ecuador, reformed their countries' constitutions to allow their re-election, prompting concerns that they had become addicted to power. But Bachelet says there is "no chance" she will follow their example. "I'm not doing this for myself. When I was president last time, I had approval ratings of 75-80% and people asked me to change the constitution so I could extend my time in office. I told them 'over my dead body'," she says. "Only two leaders didn't do it: [Brazil's] Lula and me."

Chile is determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past. Bachelet knows this more than most. "There was a time when I had so much pain and rage. Things were polarised," she says. "All these years later, what I want to understand is what happened in my country and to ensure it does not happen again."

Additional reporting: Jonathan Franklin

TURBULENT TIMES

1970 Salvador Allende elected president and begins a programme of nationalisation of industries.

1973 Allende deposed in a military coup backed by the CIA and dies after troops surround the presidential palace. A military junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet, takes control. More than 3,000 people are killed and tens of thousands tortured.

1990 Democracy restored to Chile when Patricio Aylwin is elected president.

1998 Pinochet arrested in London in connection with a number of human rights allegations.

2000 Pinochet released after a long legal battle and returns to Chile.

2004 Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia rules that Pinochet is medically fit to stand trial and places him under house arrest.

2006 Michelle Bachelet elected president, the first woman to hold the post. Unable to seek a second successive term, she leaves office in 2010 to become head of the newly created United Nations body UN Women.

2006 Pinochet dies on 10 December with around 300 criminal charges still pending against him in Chile for human rights violations, tax evasion and embezzlement.

2010 Sebastián Piñera, the current president of Chile, is elected to office in January.

2013 Bachelet resigns from her UN post to run for a second term as the president of Chile.