Word: bachelet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Chile in the wake of his 1973, U.S.-backed military coup. His passing comes near the end of a year in which the leftist political forces he worked so violently to expunge have swept back into power in presidential elections all over Latin America - including Chile, where socialist Michele Bachelet now rules. As a result, pundits from Mexico City to Buenos Aires are sure to remark in their obituaries that the left wouldn't be enjoying such resilient support in the region if it were not for the reactionary excesses of figures like Pinochet that pockmark Latin American history like...
...years until he ceded power to an elected civilian government in 1990, was responsible for the deaths or disappearances of more than 3,000 suspected communists and other leftists - "disappeared," in fact, became a noun during his reign - while thousands more were tortured or forced into exile (including Bachelet's family). Even banishment wasn't safe: in 1976, Pinochet henchmen assassinated former Chilean ambassador and Pinochet opponent Orlando Letelier by planting a bomb under his car in Washington, D.C. That same year, Pinochet's successes helped inspire the right-wing military coup that led to the even bloodier Dirty...
...economics may be pretty conventional, but in the social sphere, Chile's agnostic, no-longer-married-mother President Michele Bachelet is revolutionizing this traditionally conservative Catholic country. The government is tackling the problem of teenage pregnancy by handing out morning-after pills to 14-year olds without their parents' permission. A bill to allow terminally ill patients to choose a "merciful death" was recently introduced to the legislature, and there is growing momentum behind calls for a civil-union law that would extend the legal benefits of marriage to gay and unwed heterosexual couples. The legal system is struggling under...
...Hardly surprising, then, that right-wing conservatives see Bachelet's government as a menace to traditional values. "This is the ideology of liberation from taboos, blocks, burdens and traumas that promises happiness for all. A happiness that never arrives" says Gonzalo Rojas, a law professor, columnist and self-declared supporter of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet. He summarizes the new social ethic as "I demand, the State grants, society accepts, and critics stay away," and he likens it to the "me" generation of the United States in the 1970s. He laments what he sees as the failure of the sustained...
...Bachelet administration has canvassed expert and citizen opinion in the course of recent efforts at education and welfare reform. Brunner says surveys show people are shedding their traditional submissive attitude toward authority and instead adopting a level of mistrust, which may actually help build a more democratic society...