Chile’s First Female President Sworn In

Michelle Bachelet, a lifelong socialist, former political exile and ex-prisoner of the military dictatorship, was sworn in Saturday as Chile’s first female president with the luminaries of South America’s new leftist leadership and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in the audience.

“Our strength will be the women,” Bachelet, 54, told an animated, largely female crowd of thousands downtown as she made her initial address as chief of state from the ornate presidential palace, La Moneda. “In Chile, there will be no forgotten citizens. This is my promise.”

Many Chilean women donned presidential sashes of white, red and blue in homage to the bespectacled physician and daughter of a general whose dramatic personal story encapsulates for many the recent history of Chile.

Thousands of admirers lined the route as the president’s motorcade made its way into the capital from the seaside port of Valparaiso, where she was formally inaugurated for a four-year term.

Bachelet, wearing a two-piece, cream-colored suit featuring an Asian-style jacket, waved from her standing perch in an official Ford Galaxy convertible as the heavily guarded motorcade made its way toward the presidential palace.

“The past is past and we will never forget it,” the president, speaking from a balcony, told the enthusiastic multitudes during her brisk, 19-minute address.

World attention has focused on Bachelet since her victory Jan. 15 in a runoff election, in part because of her past but also because of the cultural and political significance of her election.

Bachelet is an agnostic and single mother of three. Until recently, she drove her youngest daughter, Sofia, 12, to school each morning and did the family shopping in her SUV. She enjoys cooking with her family, a glass of wine with dinner and strumming a guitar while singing 1970s folk songs.

Her rise highlighted a cultural shift in a mostly Roman Catholic country long regarded as among the most conservative in Latin America, a nation where divorce was only recently legalized, abortion remains illegal and women often earn as much as 40% less than men with similar jobs.

“I hope now things will truly change, that I will finally earn the same as my male colleagues,” said Veronica Zeballos, 26, an engineer who came downtown to salute the new president.

Bachelet has pledged a “parity government,” with equal numbers of men and women in key jobs, and has named 10 women and 10 men to her Cabinet. She rose to national prominence in the Cabinet of outgoing President Ricardo Lagos, serving as health minister and defense minister. Bachelet was a physician and had worked for Lagos’ campaign.

Bachelet heads the fourth consecutive government of the center-left coalition known as the Concertacion that has ruled since the 1990 ouster of the military regime of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who took power in a 1973 coup that overthrew leftist President Salvador Allende.

Chile, awash in funds from exports of copper and other commodities, is considered one of Latin America’s major economic and political success stories, a nation where the widespread political corruption and citizen dissatisfaction so evident elsewhere is less apparent.

Bachelet, like Lagos, embodies a pragmatic socialism that embraces U.S. notions of free trade and democracy while differing on issues such as the war in Iraq, which is very unpopular here.

However, Bachelet has consistently bemoaned the wide income gap between Chile’s elite and working classes, and has pledged to help provide “decent and dignified” jobs for all. Part of her appeal, along with her personal charisma, has been her consistent refrain, which most Chileans seem to view as sincere, that she didn’t seek high office, but rather accepted the challenge as her responsibility.

In her speech, the new president also pointedly noted that today marks the 32nd anniversary of the death in custody of her father, former Air Force Gen. Alberto Bachelet, who served in the Allende government and was arrested as a traitor after the coup. Bachelet and her mother were ultimately arrested as well and suffered at the notorious torture center Villa Grimaldi before being released and allowed to go into exile to the former East Germany.

During her speech, Bachelet paid brief homage to the late Allende, whose leftist government the Nixon administration tried to undermine. But the presence of Rice here underscored the robust relationship between the United States and Chile at a time when a leftward drift on the continent has led to the ascension of many U.S. critics as national leaders.

Among the two dozen heads of state present were Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, whom the Bush administration considers a belligerent anti-U.S. demagogue, and Bolivia’s newly elected Evo Morales, a Chavez acolyte who has vowed to decriminalize coca leaf production.

But, in a sign that Washington still has hopes for an amicable relationship with the new Bolivian government, Rice met briefly with Morales. Both sides termed the session positive, and Morales presented Rice with a charango, a kind of miniature guitar popular in Andean music, inlaid with coca leaves.

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Times staff writer McDonnell reported from Buenos Aires and special correspondent Vergara from Santiago. Andres D’Alessandro of The Times’ Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.