An Unlikely Pioneer; Michelle Bachelet: The first woman to be elected to lead a major Latin American nation could well be an agnostic, socialist, single mother. But that's just what Chileans like about her.(Cover Story)(Biography)

Byline: Jimmy Langman and Joseph Contreras

The events of Sept. 11, 1973, turned Michelle Bachelet's world upside down. On that morning the 21-year-old medical student watched Chilean Air Force fighter jets fire rockets into the presidential palace known as La Moneda, a chilling salvo in the bloody coup that took the life of President Salvador Allende and installed a military junta led by Army commander Augusto Pinochet. Her father, Alberto, an Air Force general who worked in the Allende administration, was immediately arrested and tortured and later died of a heart attack at the age of 50. In 1975, Michelle and her mother were themselves rounded up and beaten during a monthlong detention. The two women later went into exile, and when Michelle returned to Chile in 1979 she vowed to help restore the democracy that Pinochet had destroyed. "I saw friends disappear, who were jailed or tortured," says Bachelet. "But I decided to turn my pain into a constructive force--guaranteeing that future generations never --have to go through what we went through."

The same woman who witnessed La Moneda go up in flames is now poised to become its next occupant. The 54-year-old pediatrician turned politician will enter a presidential-runoff election next month as the prohibitive favorite. Barring a last-minute collapse in Bachelet's poll numbers, the Socialist Party leader will make history as the first woman ever to be elected president of a major Latin American country. That will be no small feat in a conservative and heavily Roman Catholic society where divorce was legalized only in 2004; as Bachelet joked in an interview earlier this year, the single mother of three doesn't fit the typical profile of a Chilean pol: "I am a woman, socialist, separated and agnostic." But much of Bachelet's appeal among voters may, in fact, stem from the candidate's unconventional background. "Chileans want to change the structure of the exclusionary politics in this country," says Marta Lagos, director of the Santiago-based polling firm Latinobarometro. "Bachelet happens to represent the furthest possible point away from old-style politics."

The return of democracy to Chile in 1990 opened the way for Bachelet's plunge into mainstream politics. Her medical background qualified her for a position at the Health Ministry, ...