Bachelet Jeria, Verónica Michelle (1951– )

Chilean left-of centre politician, president of Chile from 2006. A moderate socialist, she became Chile's first female president in March 2006 after narrowly defeating Sebastián Pinera, a centre-right billionaire businessman-politician. She continued Chile's free-market economic policies, signing a free-trade treaty with China. She also sought to narrow the large gap between the country's rich and poor through increasing social benefits, including free healthcare for the elderly.

Born in Santiago, the daughter of an air force brigadier general and an anthropologist, she joined the Socialist Party of Chile as a student and trained and later worked as a pediatrician. Her father died in 1974 following torture by the Augusto Pinochet regime and she and her mother were also detained and tortured, before moving to exile in east Germany, 1975–78. In the 1980s she was active in the campaign for the return of democracy to Chile. In the 1990s she worked in Chile's ministry of health and in 2000 President Ricardo Lagos appointed her health minister and, in 2002, defence minister. In 2003, while she was defence minister, the army declared that it would respect democracy in Chile.