SANTIAGO, Chile, Dec. 10 – Chileans go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, and for the first time in their country’s turbulent political history, the front-running candidate is a woman.

She is Michelle Bachelet, 54, a former defense minister and health minister who has become the standard-bearer of the center-left coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats that has been in power here since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship ended in 1990. She is also a doctor, a former political prisoner and exile and the daughter of a prominent general who was convicted of treason, tortured and died in prison shortly after General Pinochet seized power in 1973.
nytimes.com

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