MICHELLE BACHELET
Defence Minister, Chile
Michelle Bachelet is poised to make history on December 11: the 52-year-old looks likely to become Chile's – and Latin America's – first woman president. Polls indicate she will defeat the probable male right-wing candidate and coast to victory in the first round.
The presidential frontrunner has broken many conventions on the way to political success. She is an agnostic single mother of three in a Catholic country whose religious conservatism held divorce illegal until as recently as 2003. She is also a socialist whose political allegiances are said to be to the left of outgoing president Ricardo Lagos.
Bachelet has served as Chile's defence minister since 2002 – the first woman in Latin America ever to hold the post. The appointment marked an unusual career twist for the daughter of a general who was allegedly tortured to death in 1974 under detention by forces loyal to former dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Undeterred by her history, Bachelet set about forging closer ties with the military a decade ago: she even took a course in military strategy after she observed that "the vision in my political world didn't give the required importance to defence policy and institutions." She went on to study military sciences at the War College in Washington, DC.
As defence minister, she continued the modernization of the armed forces, built up the country's war chest through new arms acquisitions, expanded Chile's presence in global peacekeeping and complied fully with international conventions eliminating minefields and mine stocks from Chilean soil.
The defence post was also a curious career twist for a woman who trained as a medical doctor and who served as health minister from 2000 to 2002. If elected president, she has pledged to maintain Chile's fiscal surplus and will work to provide social and employment benefits for the poor. Chile's recent vigorous growth – over 6% – could help her deliver on that promise.
Bachelet is a socialist who won the backing of the centrist Christian Democratic party, the powerful ally of her party in the governing coalition that has ruled Chile since its return to democracy in 1990. She became the coalition presidential candidate after her rival, Soledad Alevar, a former foreign minister, withdrew her challenge and instead pledged to back Bachelet's campaign, after realizing the latter's popularity. Indeed, Bachelet's appeal extends far beyond the party, and polls suggest she could win over 50% of December's vote – an enviable mandate by any standard.
ARAM AHARONIAM
Director-general, Telesur
Aram Aharoniam has spent his life resisting dictatorships. Exiled from his native Uruguay in 1973, this journalist, filmmaker and radical activist has sought to promote democracy and integration across a continent long characterized by military regimes and regional conflict.
But in 2005, he has trained his romantic vision on a different system of control: the so-called "media dictatorship", which he claims Telesur, Latin America's newest television station, will combat in the years to come. When he took up his post in July as the channel's first director-general, he said: "For 513 years we have been trained to see ourselves through the eyes of others. This is the first counter-hegemonic telecommunications project aimed against those who have no interest in freedom of the press."
It is a sentiment shared by Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, who has provided 70% of the channel's start-up costs and sees the project as a direct challenge to the continent's "pro-US" media conglomerates. Based in Caracas, and with the Venezuelan minister of information installed as company president, the new channel has been dubbed "TeleChavez" by the critics; but Aharoniam has been swift to assert his independence: "After many years of neo-liberalism, our states are now agreeing to support projects that serve citizens. Although Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina and Cuba are supporting the channel, it does not make it a channel owned by those governments."
Broadcasting news and independent productions across the continent, with particular emphasis on progressive social movements and domestic challenges to economic globalization, Telesur is the culmination of many years campaigning by Aharoniam and fellow Latin American intellectuals. But it remains unclear how the channel will fare should the "Bolivarian revolution" in Venezuela come unstuck. He has spoken of ultimately making Telesur financially independent, but may find that dependence on private-sector revenue will jeopardize the very editorial "independence" for which the channel was founded.
In the meantime, the former editor of the Encyclopaedia of Latin American Humour cannot contain his excitement at the potential political influence he could now exert, after so many years at the margins: "We will have something that can show to ourselves, and to the whole world, this continent's true diversity. It is the first step towards finding our own solutions to our own problems."
PEDRO PABLO KUCZYNSKI
Prime Minister of Peru
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's father was a German-Polish doctor who went to Peru in the early 20th century to treat tropical diseases. His son's academic and political career has been dedicated to alleviating a quite different set of afflictions: the plagues of economic volatility and social instability that have characterized Latin America in the modern era. Along the way, he's been accused of causing more problems than he has solved. Yet, in spite of his controversial past, Kuczynski finally made it to the post of prime minister of Peru in August this year, and a bid for the presidency remains a distinct possibility.
Educated at Oxford and Princeton universities, Kuczynski began his career at the IMF, followed by stints at the World Bank and the presidency of Haco Mining before a move into government in 1980 as minister of energy. His political career since then has not been without its troughs, most notably in 2002 when he was dismissed as economy minister, following days of riots and protests against his privatization agenda. Indeed, the permanently affable smile he wears in public fails to conceal a hard-edged liberal ideology that he has pursued in every public office he's held.
His unpopularity didn't prevent President Toledo restoring him to the finance portfolio in 2004, charged with reining in public spending and reassuring the international markets. Aided by high commodity prices and renewed economic growth, Kuczynski has completed a remarkable rehabilitation. After another bungled reshuffle this summer, Toledo promoted him to prime minister. With next April's presidential election looming, Kuczynski is seen as the most likely candidate of the right. He'll be hoping that the social and ethnic divisions on the Peruvian left which have sustained Toledo in power with approval ratings of just 10–20% can similarly hand him the top job. But with power will come the need to compromise.
He is an accomplished flautist; it remains to be seen whether he'll be able to play a neo-liberal tune.