Michelle Bachelet Is Chile's Steely Survivor

(March 2) -- The catastrophic earthquake that rattled Chile just two weeks before President Michelle Bachelet leaves office is almost certainly not enough to define her political legacy.

For Bachelet -- who lost her father in 1974 after months of torture under Augusto Pinochet's brutal rule and was later tortured herself -- the earthquake is just one more challenge in a life punctuated by tectonic shifts.

Barred under law from serving a second term, the socialist Bachelet will be succeeded March 11 by right-wing billionaire Sebastian Piñera, who managed the 1989 presidential campaign for a former Pinochet finance minister.

Piñera's victory in the last presidential election marks a considerable gain for the part of Chile's right with ties to Pinochet, which has been spurned by voters since the dictatorship ended in 1990. But Piñera, who lost to Bachelet in the 2005 election, will take office under some of the worst possible circumstances for an incoming president.

Bachelet, a separated mother of three who speaks five languages, was already a surgeon, pediatrician and epidemiologist and former minister of defense and of health when she became the first woman president of long-patriarchal Chile in 2006.

For those achievements alone, she commands the respect of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who met with Bachelet on Tuesday in Santiago and offered U.S. aid in the wake of the Feb. 27 quake.

"Being a woman in politics can be tough business, and Bachelet made it look effortless," Clinton wrote about Bachelet in a 2008 tribute in Time magazine.

But even Clinton's legendary trials pale in comparison to Bachelet's saga of overcoming extreme odds, even torture and exile, and rising to the political pinnacle in Chile -- all on her own terms and with a romantic streak.

Bachelet was tough enough to withstand the pain of her father's 1974 death from cardiac arrest after months of torture at Santiago's Public Prison, a year after Pinochet toppled Salvador Allende in a coup and seized power. She was a politically active university student at the time.

Bachelet survived a month of torture herself after soldiers broke into the house she shared with her mother in 1975 and kidnapped both of them. They were brought to the infamous Villa Grimaldi, a secret detention center in Santiago.

"They put tape and dark glasses over our eyes. We couldn't see," Bachelet told the Guardian in a 2005 interview.

"They tortured me. They hit me. But they did not put me on the parillada," she said, referring to a metal table used to torture prisoners with electricity.

Bachelet's mother was also tortured. The two were allowed to leave the country in 1975 for Australia. From there they eventually moved to East Germany, where Bachelet began her medical studies. She returned to Chile in 1979 and worked as a pediatric surgeon while joining political efforts in the shadows against Pinochet.

Some of Bachelet's romances have been straight out of a Costa-Gavras film. One early boyfriend, Jaime López, cracked under repeated torture and gave Pinochet's men the names of other guerrillas fighting the dictator.

Lopez later became one of the notorious "disappeared" -- the hundreds of people drugged and dropped alive from helicopters into the Pacific Ocean so their bodies would never be found.

Bachelet also had a two-year affair with the communist leader of an armed guerrilla group, who tried to assassinate Pinochet in 1986.

Her relationship with fellow physician Anibal Hernan Henriquez Marich, which blossomed in the early 1990s, was controversial in another way: He was a Pinochet supporter. Marich is the father of her third child, Sofia.

After democracy was restored to Chile in 1990, Bachelet became the minister of health and then, in 2002, minister of defense.

Around that time, when Bachelet's popularity and political power were on the rise, a group of senators invited her to a secret meeting to see if she wanted the party's nomination.

They asked her what she wanted out of life, expecting her to be awed by the prospect of leading Chile.

"You all want to know what is my dream?" Bachelet responded, as she later told the Guardian. "Very simple. To walk along the beach, holding the hand of my lover."