A General's Daughter.(Michelle Bachelet, daughter of former general Alberto Bachelet, Chile)(Brief Article)

One of Chilean President Ricardo Lagos's boldest moves was to transfer Health Minister Michelle Bachelet to another cabinet position earlier this year--Defense minister. Bachelet, a 50-year-old pediatrician by training, is the first female to ever hold that job in the bastion of old-fashioned machismo that is Latin America. But her appointment is interesting for another reason: her father, Alberto Bachelet, was a Chilean Air Force general and one of the more prominent victims of the country's 14-year-long dirty war. He stood by the late Salvador Allende in the bloody 1973 military coup that brought Augusto Pinochet to power, and suffered for it. Bachelet was arrested, tortured and later died in prison within months of the takeover.

Bachelet has "suffered" from that personal loss, she says. But she insists she harbors no ill will toward the armed forces that she now heads. She took the job, she told NEWSWEEK, because "I felt I could serve as a bridge between the military and civil society." That the top brass voiced no objection to her appointment reflects, in part, her impressive qualifications. Bachelet gained a thorough grounding in national-security issues in the 1990s as a standout student at military academies in Santiago and Washington, and later served as a policy adviser to the Defense Ministry under Lagos's predecessor, Eduardo Frei.

Bachelet is a lifelong member of the Socialist Party, and experts say that fact, more than her gender, is a milestone in Chile. "It would have been inconceivable only a few years ago to imagine a Socialist politician heading up the Defense Ministry," says Guillermo Holzmann of the ...