page_title: Michelle Bachelet
section_title: Detention and exile
hierarchical_section_title: Michelle Bachelet / Early life and career / Detention and exile
caption_attribution_description: Gobierno de Chile: Presidenta Michelle Bachelet participa en la inauguración del Mural sobre Orlando Letelier.
context_page_description: Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria is a Chilean politician who served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018 for the Socialist Party of Chile, the first woman to occupy the position. After leaving the presidency in 2010 and while not immediately reelectable, she was appointed the first executive director of the newly created United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. In December 2013, Bachelet was reelected with over 62% of the vote, bettering the 54% she obtained in 2006. She was the first President of Chile to be reelected since 1932.
  In August 2018, the United Nations nominated her to become the next High Commissioner for Human Rights, replacing Zeid Raad Al Hussein.
  Bachelet, a physician who has studied military strategy at university level, was Health Minister and Defense Minister under her predecessor, Ricardo Lagos. She is a separated mother of three and describes herself as an agnostic. Aside from her native Spanish, she also speaks, with varying levels of fluency, English, German, and Portuguese.
context_section_description: Facing growing food shortages, the government of Salvador Allende placed Bachelet's father in charge of the Food Distribution Office. When General Augusto Pinochet suddenly came to power via the 11 September 1973 coup d'état, Bachelet's father was detained at the Air War Academy on charges of treason. Following months of daily torture at Santiago's Public Prison, he suffered a cardiac arrest that resulted in his death on 12 March 1974. In early January 1975, Bachelet and her mother were detained at their apartment by two DINA agents, who blindfolded them and drove them to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago, where they were separated and subjected to interrogation and torture. In 2013 Bachelet revealed she had been interrogated by DINA chief Manuel Contreras there. Some days later, Bachelet was transferred to Cuatro Álamos ("Four Poplars") detention center, where she was held until the end of January. Thanks to the assistance of Roberto Kozak, Bachelet was able to go into exile in Australia, where her older brother, Alberto, had moved in 1969. Of her torture, Bachelet said in 2004 that "it was nothing in comparison to what others suffered". She was "yelled at using abusive language, shaken," and both she and her mother were "threatened with the killing of the other." She was "never tortured with electricity," but she did see it done to other prisoners.
  In May 1975 Bachelet left Australia and later moved to East Germany, to an apartment assigned to her by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) government in Am Stern, Potsdam; her mother joined her a month later, living separately in Leipzig. In October 1976, she began working at a communal clinic in the Babelsberg neighborhood, as a preparatory step to continuing her medical studies at an East German university. During this period, she met architect Jorge Leopoldo Dávalos Cartes, another Chilean exile, whom she married in 1977. In January 1978 she went to Leipzig to learn German at the Karl Marx University's Herder Institute (now the University of Leipzig). Her first child with Dávalos, Jorge Alberto Sebastián, was born there in June 1978. She returned to Potsdam in September 1978 to continue her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin for two years. Five months after enrolling as a student, however, she obtained authorization to return to her country.
caption: Commemoration of Orlando Letelier, a former Chilean minister, who was assassinated by Pinochet's secret police in Washington, D.C. in 1976
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