LATINA LIFTOFF

For all its well-deserved reputation as the economic showcase of Latin America and a model of democratic rule, Chile has lagged behind most of its neighbors in the area of women's rights. As recently as 18 months ago, Chile had the dubious distinction of being the only nation in the Western Hemisphere that still banned divorce, and a law prohibiting sexual harassment in the workplace took effect only earlier this year. In a conservative society where the Roman Catholic Church still wields a lot of clout, Michelle Bachelet would seem at first blush to be a most improbable candidate to succeed the country's outgoing president, Ricardo Lagos. "As the old joke goes, I have all the sins together," the 52-year-old former Defense minister told NEWSWEEK in a recent interview. "I am a woman, socialist, separated and agnostic." But the single mother of three has a big lead in the polls going into the presidential election scheduled for December, and some analysts regard her victory as a foregone conclusion. "In the government I worked hard to build confidence in me," she said, "not as a woman minister, but as a minister who was working to achieve what was needed for Chile."

If the opinion surveys are right, Bachelet would become the first woman to be elected president in a major Latin American country. Her gold-rimmed glasses and frumpy two-piece suits may give her the air of a school headmistress, but Bachelet is in the vanguard of a generation of self-confident women who are staking their claims in the traditionally macho world of Latin American politics. Since 1991, 11 countries have enacted laws requiring political parties to nominate a minimum percentage of female candidates for legislative office, and in some instances the number of women lawmakers doubled between 1997 and 1999. A 12th nation, Colombia, passed a law in 2000 requiring that women occupy at least 30 percent of appointed decision-making posts in the executive branch. This year's key midterm congressional elections in Argentina will be dominated by the showdown for Senate seats between the nation's current First Lady, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and her immediate predecessor, Hilda (Chiche) Duhalde, in populous Buenos Aires province. "In the past 10 years there has been a tremendous increase in the number of women in positions of power, not just running for office but serving in ministries and as elected legislators," says Mala Htun, a political scientist at the New School for Social Research in New York who has written extensively about the subject. "It's opening up opportunities to women who are quite prepared and competent."

That represents a sea change from the bad old days. The region as a whole was a latecomer to the era of women's suffrage: no female had the right to vote anywhere in Latin America 80 years ago, a relic of discrimination that still prevailed in Colombia as recently as 1956. When Maria do Carmo Lara was elected to the legislature of Bra-zil's Minas Gerais state in the mid-1980s, she discovered to her astonishment that no bathrooms had been reserved for female lawmakers in the building where legislators met. When she became the first woman to be elected mayor in the industrial city of Betim in 1992, Lara found she had to win the hearts and minds of voters all over again. "People wanted to know where was the man who ran things," she recalls. "Others said I wouldn't last six months." Lara defied those predictions and is now serving her second term as a federal congresswoman for the ruling Workers Party.

Women like Lara have come a long way in Latin American politics in a relatively brief span. The main impetus behind the higher female profile has been a series of quota laws for the candidate slates of political parties, the first of which was passed in Argentina in 1991. The paucity of female lawmakers in the Argentine Congress in the early 1990s prompted President Carlos Menem to throw his support behind the world's first-ever gender-based quota law, and the quantum leap in the number of women elected to the national legislature in Argentina's ensuing election inspired female politicians in other Latin American countries to demand similar legislation. To date, Argentina and Costa Rica have achieved the most impressive results, with females constituting fully one third of the members in both chambers of the national congresses (women make up only 14 and 15 percent of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, respectively). In Mexico, one of the region's most notorious bastions of enduring machismo, women account for nearly one quarter of the members in the lower house of the National Congress. The Colombian Senate made history last month when a female member was elected president of the body for the first time.

Neither are the gains exclusively limited to the legislative branch. Women have held important portfolios in the cabinets of both Chile's Lagos and Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. The first women to be elected president came from Central America: Nicaragua's Violeta de Chamorro in 1990 and Panama's Mireya Moscoso nine years later. Evolving attitudes are also filtering down to the grass roots. According to a recent poll of residents in the Peruvian capital, Lima, 49 percent felt that women could govern the country better than men. A Gallup survey conducted in six major Latin American cities in 2000 revealed the widespread beliefs that women would be more effective in reducing poverty (62 percent), improving education (72 percent) and curbing corruption (57 percent).

Perhaps no one personifies the new breed of female politicians in Latin America better than Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner--or just Cristina, as she is universally known. Growing up in the Argentine city of La Plata, Cristina was inspired by the example of Eva Peron, the fiery wife of Juan Domingo Peron who championed the demands of the country's blue-collar workers and became a national icon when she died of leukemia at the age of 33. During her years as a university student, Cristina joined the Peronist Party's youth movement amid the wanton political violence that engulfed Argentina in the early 1970s and culminated in a military coup in 1976. The junta's brutal repression of left-wing Peronist activists like Cristina and her new husband, Nestor Kirchner, led the young couple to retreat to his native province of Santa Cruz in southern Patagonia. With the restoration of democracy in 1983, Kirchner and Cristina, both of whom were successful attorneys in their early 30s, began plotting their political careers.

But unlike that of her idol Eva Peron, Cristina's own rise to the pinnacle of Argentine politics was never primarily a function of her husband's star power. She became a national figure in 1995 when she was elected to the Argentine Senate, at a time when Nestor was a relatively obscure provincial governor and several years before he decided to run for president. With-in months Cristina had become a familiar figure on the country's top-rated political talk shows, denouncing illegal arms sales and the corruption that flourished under the government of President Menem, who also headed the Peronist Party at the time. Her outspoken criticisms eventually earned Cristina an expulsion from the Pe-ronist Senate caucus, a punishment that she attributes partly to her gender (sidebar). And after Nestor scored a surprise victory in the 2003 presidential election, she made a point of remaining in her assigned seat in the Senate cham-ber on the day he donned the azure-and-white sash inside the National Congress rather than join him on the podium. "My political career did not begin [on that day]," she told NEWSWEEK. "Before Kirchner became president, I had been a legislator, an activist, a politician."

Nestor Kirchner apparently regards his wife as a useful weapon in his ongoing battle to wrest control of the Peronist party from his immediate predecessor as president, Eduardo Duhalde. That may help explain why Cristina decided to run for the Senate this year against Duhalde's wife, Chiche, in Buenos Aires province, the longtime political fiefdom of the ex-president, instead of Kirchner's own Santa Cruz prov-ince. Cristina enjoys a commanding lead over Chiche in the polls, but other First Ladies have turned out to be major liabilities for their presidential partners. In recent years the free-spending habits of Mexico's Marta Sahagun de Fox and the abrasive style of Peru's Eliane Karp have caused their husbands no shortage of headaches.

Many women who have sought elected office in Latin America do not necessarily become aggressive advocates for the rights of their gender. Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner has never made much of a mark in that area during her 16 years as a senator and congresswoman, and experts have found no correlation between the heightened profile of women in politics and progress on issues like equal pay in the workplace or abortion (which has yet to be legalized in any country in the region besides Cuba). "It hasn't had that much of an effect for the most part," says Mark P. Jones, an associate professor of political science at Rice University. "Women legislators are first and foremost members of their parties, and party allegiance tends to dominate gender."

Much remains to be done to root out lingering vestiges of male chauvinism. In 25 of Mexico's 32 states an accused rapist can walk scot-free if he agrees to marry his victim, and in 8 of those states a woman applying for a job is still supposed to get her husband's permission. Brazil's nine-year-old quota law has been ineffectual, largely because there are no penalties in place for parties that fail to meet the 30 percent minimum of female candidates for the lower house of Congress. As a result, the Chamber of Deputies remains a sea of suits with only 44 women among its 513 members, and many male lawmakers continue to address their female colleagues in public as "honey" or "darling." "Brazilian politics is absolutely macho," fumes Denise Frossard, a noted criminal judge and first-term congresswoman. "It's like the Soviet Union, with pretend politeness that barely masks disdain for women."

That said, the status quo is still a big improvement over the not-so-distant past. It's not just a question of how many more women are now heading up ministries, legislatures or city councils. It also has to do with the changing self-image of Latin American women themselves: not even the most ardent female admirer of Eva Peron in Argentina today would likely agree with her pronouncement that "the first objective of a feminine movement which wants to do good for women... must be the home." For Chile's Michelle Bachelet, a woman's place should be in the cabinet, not the kitchen, and if elected president later this year she vows that half of the portfolios in her government will be held by women. "Chileans are looking for a new kind of leader-ship, one that a woman symbolizes," says Bachelet. "When you show your capacity, competence and leadership, this helps reduce the prejudices." The outlook for women in Latin America's corridors of power has never looked brighter.