CHILE:
Moving Inaugural Ceremony for First Female President
Gustavo González

SANTIAGO,  (IPS) - Socialist pediatrician Michelle Bachelet, the daughter of a general who died as a result of torture under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, became Chile's first female president Saturday in a moving ceremony in which the first ministerial cabinet in Latin America made up of equal numbers of men and women was sworn in.

Former president Eduardo Frei (1994-2000), the president of the Senate, placed the presidential sash on Bachelet, 54, in this country where women did not gain the right to vote until 1949.

The ceremony also highlighted the popularity of outgoing President Ricardo Lagos - like Bachelet, a member of the co-governing Socialist Party - who received a standing ovation from the audience that included 128 foreign delegations and 30 heads of state and government.

"This is the first government in Latin America marked by parity between men and women," said Ricardo Lagos Weber, the son of the outgoing president, who said he was "triply happy" - because of the affection his father received during the ceremony, Bachelet's inauguration, and the fact that he forms part of the new cabinet, as the president's spokesman.

Of the 20 cabinet ministries, 10 will be held by women: the general secretariat of the presidency, the national women's service, and the ministries of defence, economy, planning, culture, health, housing and urban planning, mining, and national assets.

The principle of gender parity also governed Bachelet's choice of deputy ministers, as well as the appointment of the heads of state enterprises and public utilities, in a "courageous" gesture that "is a beautiful lesson for everyone," said Italian Minister for Equal Opportunity, Stefania Prestigiacomo, who headed the delegation from her country.

Evo Morales, the first Bolivian president to attend a presidential inauguration ceremony in Chile since the two countries broke off diplomatic relations in 1978, received louder applause than any of the other visiting heads of government.

While Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez avoided contact with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Morales met with her for 25 minutes. He also conversed with Bachelet for half an hour on Friday night.

Morales gave both Bachelet and Rice Bolivian charangos (small South American lutes) encrusted with coca leaves - a symbol of his defence of the cultivation of coca, a traditional crop that has been used for centuries by indigenous people in the Andes for medicinal and ritual purposes, and also a symbol of his opposition to the coca crop eradication policy imposed in Latin America by the government of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Morales described his conversation with Rice as "a formal greeting; protocol," and said "we are willing to strengthen our relations with the United States government."

"We hope the self-determination of nations will be respected by the U.S. government," added the leftist Morales, Bolivia’s first-ever indigenous president.

A member of the Bolivian delegation told IPS that Morales and Rice discussed the threatened cutoff of U.S. military aid to Bolivia - in retaliation for Bolivia’s refusal to grant U.S. soldiers and officials immunity from prosecution by the International Criminal Court (ICC) - economic relations, and coca crops.

"The coca leaf is not cocaine," Morales reiterated Friday night before an audience of more than 7,000 people who showed up to greet him in a Santiago stadium. "We do not form part of the culture of cocaine, let alone drug addiction," added the Aymara indigenous leader who called on all governments to combat the drug cartels.

"I feel that in Chile I am loved more than in Bolivia," said the president at the end of the rally, in which the participants chanted slogans in favour of Bolivia’s claim to an outlet to the Pacific Ocean, which it lost to Chile in a late 19th century war.

Bachelet and Morales agreed Friday to launch a broad-based dialogue - meaning the issue of an outlet to the sea would be included on the agenda - in the search for closer ties between the two countries, which have had an antagonistic relationship for decades.

Alejandro Foxley, Bachelet's minister of Foreign Relations, said the central aim of the new administration in that field would be "to build stable, balanced and peaceful relations with all countries, and especially our neighbours."

Rice, who also held a bilateral meeting with Uruguay’s Socialist President Tabaré Vázquez, attended the ceremony in Chile with a number of Latin American and Caribbean leaders who are anything but aligned with Bush’s foreign policy, political analyst Adolfo Rodríguez told IPS.

That includes several presidents attending Bachelet's inauguration, such as Haitian President René Preval, Chávez, Morales, Néstor Kirchner of Argentina, Vázquez, and Brazil's Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who said that "in Latin America and South America, democracy is undergoing a profound process of consolidation."

Foxley, one of the seven representatives of the co-governing Christian Democracy Party in Bachelet’s cabinet, said the dialogue with Rice showed that "relations with the United States are excellent," and that the two governments are working on a "common agenda" for the coming months.

The most dramatic remarks about Bachelet's inauguration came from the charismatic Chávez, who said that "when Michelle is being sworn in, so is (former Chilean Socialist President Salvador) Allende, (Chilean poet Pablo) Neruda and (Chile's independence hero Bernardo) O'Higgins."

Air Force Gen. Alberto Bachelet, the new president's father, worked closely with the leftist government led by Allende (1970-1973), for which he was thrown into prison after the Sept. 11, 1973 coup d’etat staged by Gen. Pinochet, who ruled the country with an iron fist until 1990. Gen. Bachelet died of a heart attack brought on by torture in March 1974.

Michelle Bachelet and her mother, archaeologist Ángela Jeria, were briefly arrested and tortured during the dictatorship before they were sent into exile to Australia and the former East Germany.

Bachelet, a virtual unknown, rapidly became popular after Lagos named her minister of health in 2000 and minister of defence - the first woman to hold that position in Chile - in 2002.

Chile's new legislature was also sworn in on Saturday. The centre-left coalition of Parties for Democracy, which has ruled the country since March 1990, won a majority in both houses of Congress in the Dec. 11 elections, for the first time since the dictatorship came to an end.

Another former exile, Antonio Leal of the co-governing Party for Democracy, was sworn in as president of the Chamber of Deputies.