By James R. Whelan on 6.24.09 @ 6:07AM
(Page 2 of 2)
After only a few months there, at the behest of a boyfriend, Michelle traveled to East Germany, joined by her mother shortly afterwards. She continued in that “gopher” role during the four years she spent in East Germany, the nerve center of rebellion for Chile’s far-left parties. There, she was again deeply involved in the party’s conspiratorial, underground activities. Indeed, in 1977, she traveled—obviously on party business— to Vietnam, a fact she let drop during her official visit to Hanoi for the Asian-Pacific Cooperation conference in November 2006.
She continued as an underground operative when she returned to Chile in 1979, moving in for a time with a high official of the Communist-sponsored, Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) terrorist organization. She herself was heavily involved with the radical wing of her party—a wing so radical, to quote two puff piece biographers, “it had no real problem with the policies of the armed wing of the Communist Party.” Until 1995, when she was elected a member of the party’s Central Committee, at no time was she ever given an executive post of any kind (in other words, taken seriously). While in the outskirts of Berlin, she likes to say that she resumed the medical studies interrupted by the 1973 revolution in Chile, but in point of fact, what she did was start (but not finish) a German language course that was a prerequisite to medical school. (She frequently fudges in the stories she tells.) She also married a would-be revolutionary like herself, and gave birth to the first of her three children. (The other two would be born out of wedlock in Chile, one of them fathered by a right-wing doctor.)
• She undoubtedly is smart—she graduated (in 1983) from Chile’s leading medical school, later specializing in pediatrics and public health medicine. But she is neither brilliant nor a strong leader. Nor a commanding presence: How could she be when she measures a mere 5 feet 2 inches—and is decidedly pudgy (indeed, a former finance minister raised her dander when he referred to her as “my fatso”). There is some real question as to how much of a leader, period, she is. As indicated, the party waited 25 years before naming her to a leadership role. In her only other try for public office before winning election as president last year, she ran for the city council of a suburban community in 1995 and won all of 2.35 percent of the vote.
• Her closest friends and advisers all come out of the hard left of Chilean politics. So, too, do her predilections: She recently sent shock-waves through the economy when she wondered aloud whether maybe the time had not come to “humanize” the market economy model that has made this country the envy of all of Latin America—indeed, of much of the world. (“Humanize,” in socialist parlance, means enlarge the role of the state, and shrink that of the private sector.)
AS IT IS, THE CHILEAN ECONOMY SLID in 2006, its growth rate falling from 5.7 percent in 2005 to 4 percent. That, despite sky-high prices for Chile’s principal export product, copper. In surveys of business leaders, confidence in her declined for four straight months, reaching a record low midway through her first year. She has a first-class economic team, and mainly defers to them, but in general has a reputation for leaning far more on her palace inner sanctum, a group that features two hard-core women Communists, bypassing her cabinet.
So it is, too, with her international outlook. Ever since girlhood, she has been an admirer of Fidel Castro, the longest-serving dictator in the history of the hemisphere (and the only totalitarian dictator). Inasmuch as she also claims to be a champion of human rights, her support for the hemisphere’s worst abuser of human rights requires fancy footwork. But, then, she chose to live in East Germany—the ugliest of the Soviet satellite states—and has never been heard to utter a single criticism of that ghastly regime—nor, for that matter, of the savage North Vietnamese regime. By contrast, though she never met the longtime dictator of East Germany— Erich Honecker, who lived in Chile the last two years (1992-1994) of his ghoulish life—she did meet his widow.
“I thanked her,” Bachelet said, “because while I was in East Germany, I had the chance to work in a hospital and study and form a family. They gave us much material support. For those of us who left Chile during difficult times, there we were welcomed and supported.” Bachelet did not mention that at that same time, life for East Germans was very hard—for those who escaped prison or death. Indeed, her very leftist mother, Angela, in another interview, was candid enough to observe that the Chilean revolutionaries in general fared better there than ordinary Germans. Angela toughed it out in Germany for only two years, before leaping at an opportunity in Washington. (Many, many other “Red” refugees—discovering the harsh reality of Communism—bailed out from the Iron Curtain countries. Michelle evidently had no such qualms.)
It needs be remembered—although she waffles on this, as she does on so many other subjects—that Michelle did not have to live there. She had already settled in Australia, and Belgium had also offered her a visa. There is, in fact, no doubt that many other countries would have welcomed her—Canada, Sweden, Spain, France—as they did thousands of other Chilean revolutionaries.
Until her Christian Democrat partners gave her a tough ultimatum, she leaned toward throwing Chile’s support behind Hugo Chavez in the Venezuelan’s high-powered campaign last fall for the Latin American seat on the UN Security Council. Chavez has, of course, made U.S.-bashing the centerpiece of his oil-funded international style. Though forced to back off, Bachelet continues to make plain her affection for Chavez. Gravitating to the Soviet orbit was, in fact, doing what came naturally for a woman who, from her earliest days, was immersed in propaganda portraying the U.S. as evil and predatory, and who spent years in terrorist organizations dedicated to hating the U.S. and all it stood for. Some of that venom was bound to stick.
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