In any case, Bachelet told me, “Many people who committed the worst abuses are in jail, including several of the people I have reason to believe were among my father’s torturers.” Then she added, “And you know my father died of a myocardial infarction after torture, whereas his torturers were in jail for far worse crimes.”  Whatever else you can say about Michelle Bachelet, there is not an ounce of self-pity in her. She herself says that she is “a world-historical optimist. And of course, when one is in jail, one discovers the real value of liberty. You come to appreciate what before you took for granted. What I was mostly interested in, what I remain committed to, is less dwelling on the past than creating a better future.”  There are limits to her optimism. As she puts it, “We Chileans may not be able to agree about what happened, but we can agree we have established the consensus that we have to resolve our problems democratically,” adding that “a strong consensus now exists in Chile that human rights must be sacrosanct.” But Bachelet is not naïve. She knows full well that many Chileans still believe the military’s coup against Allende was warranted, and while the country is far less divided than it used to be, important cleavages remain. Although she does not say this explicitly, I had the impression that she is not persuaded Chileans will ever reach a similar consensus about the past. Painful as it is for many, above all the victims of the Pinochet era, they may have to agree to disagree. Bachelet is careful not to claim too much. “I don’t use the phrase ‘reconciliation’ because it is a religious expression,” she told me. “Besides, reconciliation implies turning the page.”  Bachelet was saying, in effect, that there have to be limits to collective accountability even as the government tries its best to prosecute those guilty of individual crimes during the dictatorship. There can be judicial redress, but the chances of South African-style truth and reconciliation are slim. South Africa had clear winners and losers. In Chile, many of the leading figures within National Renewal, the center-right opposition, supported the dictatorship and even opposed the return to civilian rule in the plebiscite that Pinochet called in 1988 and that led to his stepping down.  In any case, for Bachelet, reconciliation is a problematic concept for reasons other than its practical applicability. “In my view,” she told me, “it does a disservice to the memories of the thousands of victims of the Pinochet regime, to the many thousands more who were tortured and to their families — many of whom still do not know what actually happened to their relatives, spouses, friends.”  Bachelet’s refusal to speak of reconciliation has been welcomed by the associations representing the families of the disappeared. One of their leaders, Lorena Pizarro, told me that she and her colleagues felt that Bachelet was more open to their concerns than her predecessors were. “The president understands in a visceral way, a way I feel that none of her predecessors have, how imperative it is for us to know what happened, what anguish it is not to know, even after all these years. Perhaps it is because she suffered herself.”  The Chilean political scientist Arturo Valenzuela, who knows Bachelet well and admires her, told me that he considers her election the first important event of what he calls “the post-transition” from the dictatorship. Even under Ricardo Lagos, president from 2000 to 2006, it was not yet clear that the military had relinquished all political ambitions and returned once and for all to the apolitical status that characterized the Chilean armed forces until the election of Allende and that Bachelet’s own father had exemplified. Indeed, Lagos told me that early in his term, the chiefs of the army, navy, air force and military police met publicly in a Santiago restaurant. He called them into his office, said their display of independence was unacceptable. He felt that facing them down was a key moment in the re-establishment of democracy. That was in May 2000, soon after his inauguration.  Today, however, no Chilean speaks or writes as if the military poses any threat to the country’s democracy. Instead, the army is transforming itself. Gen. Eduardo Aldunate, who oversees Chile’s military schools, started his career as an infantry officer but also studied international humanitarian law at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, where the dean is Claudio Grossman — a longstanding opponent of Pinochet’s who fled Chile for the Netherlands after Allende’s fall. They speak warmly of each other. Aldunate was acting force commander of Minustah, the United Nations peacekeeping operation in Haiti, in 2005-6; in his office, he displays prominently his U.N. blue helmet and other memorabilia of international service. And he is adamant that the Chilean Army is now emphasizing international and humanitarian missions. When I met him, he spoke in great detail about the emphasis put on the laws of war — above all, the four Geneva conventions — in the teaching of new officer cadets, and the course syllabuses of the military academy very much reflect these concerns.  Obviously, there are limits, which may be what disappoints some left-wing critics of the Concertación and of Michelle Bachelet’s tenure as president. When I asked Aldunate whether there were discussions in seminars about what happened during the Pinochet years — which he, like other officers I spoke with, referred to as a “unique” or “anomalous” period — he replied: “Not really. What we emphasize is understanding of the law and the need to adhere to both its letter and its spirit.” He echoed Bachelet’s insistence that human rights were sacrosanct and that flouting them was incompatible with the duty of a Chilean officer.  Understandably, the families of the disappeared continue to hope for more. They remain largely unreconciled to the reigning spirit of compromise. A measure of their bitterness was evident during last year’s funeral ceremonies for Pinochet, when Francisco Cuadrado Prats, the grandson of Allende’s army chief, Carlos Prats, who was assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1974 on orders from Pinochet, waited in line among the dictator’s mourners for hours and then, when he approached the coffin, spat on it. It would be unreasonable to expect such wounds to ever heal. But as Bachelet pointed out to me several times, more officers have been tried in Chile for crimes committed during the dictatorship than in any other country where there has been a transition from an abusive military regime to democracy.  Most Chileans seem to support Bachelet’s careful, nonconfrontational approach. Even those on the left who are disappointed with what she has accomplished during the two years she has been in office are quick to point out how important her election was. As the writer Ariel Dorfman puts it, “Whether Bachelet does or doesn’t do anything significant during her tenure as president, she did something hugely important, and hugely positive for Chile, just by being elected.”  To a foreigner, the subtext of trauma that the dictatorship still engenders among Chileans is initially hard to discern. Santiago is booming; its skyline punctuated by construction cranes. The whole nation is prospering, having benefited both from the extraordinary rise in commodity prices of the past few years and from increased trade with the United States, the European Union and, above all, the rising economies of East Asia, especially China. Poverty, though still widespread, was drastically reduced under Ricardo Lagos, and Bachelet has reduced it further. Educational opportunities have been expanded. Chileans talk about their country’s future not in terms of Latin American models but in comparison to Asian economies like Singapore’s and South Korea’s. Sebastián Piñera, a National Renewal leader and the right’s likely standard bearer in the 2010 presidential elections, told me flatly that there was no reason Chile couldn’t enjoy similar success, and no senior member of the Concertación seemed to disagree.  To be sure, successive Chilean governments have had little success helping the 10-to-15 percent of Chileans who live in poverty. (Government statistics suggest a lower percentage but are widely contested by activists.) Ricardo Lagos told me regretfully that the tools that worked to reduce poverty from 21 percent to 13 percent had not proved effective in reducing the rate still further. For Piñera, many of whose ideas seem close to those of Nicolas Sarkozy in France, voucher systems for health and education provide a large part of the answer, though whether such a solution will appeal to Chileans, who have grown accustomed to having the state play a central role, is an open question. Bachelet has emphasized education and given her minister, Yasna Provoste, considerable leeway in restructuring it. And in fairness, reducing core poverty is hardly something that the major industrial countries have had much success with, either, in the past several decades.  Outside the poorest precincts, young Chileans have high expectations of their own futures and take democratic stability for granted. After all, most Chilean high schoolers weren’t even born when Augusto Pinochet relinquished power. But at least among people over 30 in Chile, you can still identify a somewhat inchoate undercurrent of anxiety about the dictatorship and its legacy. The anxiety is not limited to those outraged by the fact that, as Jorge Edwards pointed out, so many of those complicit in the dictatorship have not only escaped punishment but have also prospered. (A number of the great Chilean fortunes of today were made during the Pinochet years, in a way not so dissimilar to the rise of the plutocracy in Russia under Boris Yeltsin.) There is also anxiety among those who were, in one way or another, whether enthusiastically or tacitly, on Pinochet’s side. The uncomfortable truth is that they numbered in the millions, and pretending that the coup was simply a plot hatched between Chilean officers and the C.I.A. is to deny this crucial reality.  Some Chilean retired military officers go as far as to insist that “the nation asked the army to carry out the coup.” As the former army commander Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre put it to me, “The coup was not exactly like other coups, because while Allende was elected legitimately, he governed illegitimately.” These are overstatements, but it is true that both the coup itself and the military dictatorship had widespread popular support. And Chile remains as divided as it was on Sept. 11, 1973, when the presidential palace was in flames, attacked from both the ground and the air by units of the armed forces. The last photographs taken of the events that day show Allende incongruously dressed in a business suit while wearing a military helmet and carrying an AK-47, surrounded by his personal guards. He died of gunshot wounds soon afterward.  Bachelet’s insistence on the need for a “re-encounter” between Chileans, rather than a reconciliation, is meant to recognize the reality and the enduring importance of these divisions. Cheyre displays considerable discomfort with the idea that the military should be singled out for blame for what happened after Allende’s overthrow, when, as he put it to me, “the entire nation demanded that we take action.” And yet, by all accounts, Cheyre proselytized tirelessly within the military, traveling from cantonment to cantonment, lecturing, cajoling, listening, persuading his brother officers to take another path. And it was Cheyre who literally made history when, in a crucial speech on the future of the army, he pronounced the two words that sum up the demands and the vision of those who have campaigned so long and hard for there to be accountability for the crimes of the Pinochet years: “Nunca mas.” “Never again.”  Many of the shrewdest observers of the Chilean scene believe that it was only someone like Cheyre — a freshly minted second lieutenant at the time of the coup — who could have nudged the army along toward the new dispensation. José Zalaquett is a professor of law at the University of Chile and arguably the most distinguished Chilean expert on human rights. He was imprisoned for three months by the Pinochet regime. But Zalaquett says that Cheyre did exactly what needed to be done, and that Lagos (and his minister of defense, Bachelet) were absolutely correct in not demanding that the army go faster than it did. Claudio Grossman is even more emphatic: “Those who are demanding that the Concertación take a more absolutist stance are indulging themselves in aesthetics, not politics. And one of the things I learned in my years in exile is that aesthetics belong in museums!”  The pressing question in Chile today, however, is whether Bachelet can actually manage Chile’s future as well as she manages its past. Bachelet’s critics, inside and outside her coalition, insist that she is not an able administrator. They point out that she was wrong-footed first by widespread protests by high-school students shortly after she assumed the presidency — and then saw her government’s popularity shattered by the failure of the Transantiago metropolitan transportation plan.  The students could be pacified, particularly once Bachelet replaced her minister of education with Yasna Provoste, who was minister of planning under Lagos. But although Bachelet also replaced her minister of transportation with a widely admired figure from the private sector, René Cortázar, Transantiago continues to undermine the credibility of the government, particularly with its natural constituency among the poor and the lower middle class. Bachelet herself minces no words: “We have let down the people we most want to help, and we have to make it right.”  Both Cortázar and Clemente Perez, another replacement Bachelet brought into government from the private sector, who now runs the Santiago subway system, are convinced that they have turned the corner. For the moment, however, it takes ordinary Chileans far longer to get to work than it did before the Transantiago plan was implemented. In fairness, Transantiago was Ricardo Lagos’s brainchild, and indeed, it was partly on the basis of promises he made about how people’s lives would be eased by the new transit plan that Lagos succeeded in leaving office with 70 percent approval ratings. (Chilean presidents may not serve consecutive terms, though they can run again, as Lagos is rumored to be considering doing in 2010.) There is even a story making the rounds in Santiago political circles — one denied by Lagos and Bachelet but widely credited just the same — that at Bachelet’s inauguration, as he handed her the sash that is the symbol of presidential office in Chile, Lagos whispered in her ear, “I’m leaving you a few problems.”  From her first days in office, Bachelet has followed a very different style from that of her predecessors. She has also been under a political microscope. After all, Bachelet did not have her office bequeathed upon her by a powerful husband, as Juan Perón did for his wife Isabel in Argentina in 1974, or as the Argentine president, Néstor Kirchner, did late last month with his wife, Cristina, who has now succeeded him. More than most contemporary politicians, Bachelet has made a point of trying to maintain a home life distinct from her political one. When possible, members of her staff will tell you, Bachelet, a single mother in a country where conservative social mores remain at least the official norm, spends Sundays at home with her three children. (She and her husband, the Chilean architect Jorge Davalos, separated after she returned to Chile in 1979.) Recently, when her elder daughter fell gravely ill, Bachelet, who is herself a physician, first was able to diagnose what was wrong, then to drive her daughter to the hospital and finally to spend more than 48 hours at her daughter’s bedside until it was clear that the danger had passed.  It is not a modus operandi that you can easily imagine being followed by Bachelet’s (male) predecessors or the current roster of her (mostly male) political rivals. But then, Bachelet is anything but a typical politician. During the presidential campaign in 2006, Bachelet liked to say that “as the old joke goes, I have all the sins together. I am a woman, a Socialist, separated and agnostic.” The gender issue loomed large in Bachelet’s political campaign and, if anything, has loomed larger in her administration. It seemed to me, after only a few days in Chile, that the longer people had to complain about Bachelet, the likelier it was that the gender issue would come up. She has faced the issue head on, and to a large extent succeeded in turning it to her advantage during her campaign. Although Lagos, her predecessor, was extremely sympathetic to women’s issues and pushed the first law in Chilean history permitting divorce through Parliament — as well as taking symbolic steps, like ordering that women be included in the detail guarding the presidential palace — Bachelet went further, insisting on gender parity in both cabinet and subcabinet positions in her administration.  Bachelet was stating a fact, not boasting, when she told me that “women say that my election represents a cultural break with the past — a past of sexism, of misogyny.” It is increasingly common to hear Bachelet’s critics identify her with failings that men conventionally impute to women in politics — indecisiveness and the like. The polls consistently suggest, however, that at a time when her government’s popularity has fallen sharply, her own popularity seems more durable. That is largely because she retains a tremendous popularity among women. Anecdotally, at least, this finding seems borne out by what is so immediately striking at any public event at which Bachelet appears: the women in the crowd seem far more enthusiastic than the men.  For her part, Bachelet says firmly, “I believe that we have succeeded in creating a stable, solid democracy, and surely I’m not being self-serving when I say that it is extraordinary that a woman can be elected in a society like this one.” At the same time, she added: “There are tremendous expectations. Symbolically, we’ve opened the windows and doors to let ordinary people in, to encourage them to participate, but things simply cannot move as fast as people hope. And in a sense, the fact that people hope for change, as they did, rightly, with Transantiago, makes them angrier when change is not immediately forthcoming.” That anger has continued to swell over the past few months, even as the public outrage over the Transantiago fiasco has begun to subside. There have been trade-union and student demonstrations in which, much to Bachelet’s publicly expressed annoyance, some members of her government have participated — a breakdown in discipline that Lagos never faced and that is a continuing challenge to Bachelet’s authority. Still, the betting in Santiago is that she will weather the storm.  Having said that, the two years remaining in her term are an eternity in politics, and it is dangerous to judge Bachelet’s future on the basis of what the newspapers (which are mostly controlled by the right) and the chattering classes in Santiago say. As Arturo Valenzuela, the Chilean political scientist, points out, Bachelet’s election was anything but a fluke: “What Bachelet perceived was the urgent need to renew politics in Chile. She saw that the parties of the Concertación had been losing contact with their base and that as a coalition they were having increasing difficulty holding themselves together.” Bachelet, he added, only really became active in politics in the 1990s, but she was “right to see the crisis looming for the Concertación.” When I spoke with him in New York, Ricardo Lagos agreed. “We have been in power for 17 years,” he said flatly, “and that is a very long time in politics — longer than Thatcher had or Mitterrand. I think that if we are going to win again in 2010, we are going to have to have a new agenda and new faces, not the same old cast of characters.”  Valenzuela emphasized that Bachelet’s is the first post-transition government Chile has had and also the first in which a majority of important cabinet and subcabinet officials were neither witnesses to nor actors in the dictatorship. “When Pinochet left,” he told me, “the Concertación had to fulfill three imperatives: show they knew how to rebuild the country’s democratic institutions, show that in contrast to Allende the left could govern effectively and stay united politically themselves.” Like most observers, Valenzuela says he believes they did a fairly good job of fulfilling all three. But, he insists, this achievement is eroding, and he points to the steep decline in voter turnout as testimony to the souring public mood. It is, Valenzuela insists, “a structural problem, not just an issue of how effective a leader Bachelet has proven to be.”  There are worse challenges to face. Valenzuela has said that Chile has “the problems of success,” and there is every reason to believe he is right. That is no small accomplishment, above all in the Latin American context, where a return to populism seems to have taken hold in a number of the continent’s most important countries, like Venezuela and Argentina. But it is hardly reasonable for the Chilean political class to expect citizens to be satisfied with being better off than their Argentine, Peruvian and Bolivian neighbors when the record commodity prices that have fueled the boom in Chile’s exports make them dream of living like Singaporeans or South Koreans. Whether that ambition is warranted obviously depends on Chile making good use of the revenues flowing into the state treasury and not falling victim, as so many countries have done, to what development economists call the “resource curse.”  Bachelet argues passionately that this is precisely what her government has been doing, though Sebastián Piñera, who will doubtless run for president in 2010, just as passionately argues the reverse. In a sense, the debate itself is an accomplishment, for it is an emblem of the fact that, today, politics as practiced in Chile is much the same as politics in any country that is basically at peace with itself, reasonably prosperous, in which there is no systemic crisis and in which hope is the common coin of sane political discourse rather than the obscene distortion of reality that it becomes when employed by populist charlatans or self-serving oligarchies. Because Chileans are like everyone else and can’t go on being grateful for how much better things are in the present than they were in the past, they don’t tend to see things that way, nor should they be expected to. But transformation of their country from the Chile of Pinochet to the Chile of Michelle Bachelet is that rarest of commodities in our wounded times — genuine good news.  David Rieff, a contributing writer, covered the recent elections in Bolivia and Mexico for the magazine. His book “Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son’s Memoir,” about the struggle of his mother, Susan Sontag, with cancer, will be published early next year.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page 650 of the New York edition with the headline: After the Caudillo. Today's Paper|Subscribe
Michelle Bachelet, the president of Chile, is one of a growing number of female heads of state in Latin America. But for her, the political being personal goes way beyond gender.