El veintinueve de septiembre/September 29th

¡Feliz cumpleaños a ... Michelle Bachelet! (1951-      )
*y a Miguel Cervantes (1547-1616), autor de Don Quijote

Photo from wikipedia. 

The President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018, Bachelet was the first woman in her country elected to this position. She is a member of the Socialist Party of Chile and was elected in 2013 with 62% of the vote. Bachelet is also a physician with studies in military strategy and speaks Spanish, English, German, Portuguese and French. Her father was in the military and she spent much of her childhood moving from one military base to another in Chile. When she was a teenager, the family moved to Bethesda, Maryland, where she attended high school and learned to speak English fluently. She returned to Chile to finish high school and graduated near the top of her class from a prestigious girls' school. Because her father worked as director for the Food Distribution Office under the government of Salvador Allende, when the right-wing coup d'etat putting Augusto Pinochet in power occurred, he was detained and tortured. He died of a heart attack while being tortured. Bachelet and her mother were then also detained and tortured, though they were released and went into exile in Australia, and then East Germany. She returned to Chile in 1979 and graduated as a physician surgeon in 1983. She became active in politics near the end of the 1980s. She worked as the Minister of Health and the Minister of National Defense before being elected president in 2006 with 52% of the vote in a run-off election. She was elected again in 2014 for a four year term, which ended in March of 2018 (the current President of Chile is Sebastián Piñera, a Harvard graduate who was also president from 2010 to 2014).

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