Background and career
Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria (Spanish: [beˈɾonika miˈtʃel βatʃeˈlet ˈxeɾja]; born 29 September 1951) is a Chilean physician and politician who served as President of Chile from 2006 to 2010 and again from 2014 to 2018. A member of the Socialist Party, she was the first woman to be elected president of Chile and the first woman to serve as Chile's minister of health and minister of national defense. Bachelet entered politics as a member of the Socialist Youth and was detained and tortured by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet before going into exile in Australia and East Germany. She returned to Chile in 1979, completed her medical studies, and subsequently worked in public health and government. She served as Minister of Health under President Ricardo Lagos from 2000 to 2002 and as Minister of National Defense from 2002 to 2004 before winning the 2005–06 presidential election. Her first presidency included pension and social-protection reforms, the expansion of public services, and the creation of new institutions in areas including the environment and human rights, while also facing major political difficulties including the initial implementation of the Transantiago public-transport system and the aftermath of the 2010 Chile earthquake. After leaving the presidency, Bachelet served as the first executive director of UN Women from 2010 to 2013 and was again elected president in 2013, becoming Chile's first president to serve two non-consecutive terms. From 2018 to 2022, she served as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, where her office issued reports on human rights situations in countries including China and Venezuela. Since 2024, she has served as vice president of the Club of Madrid. In 2025, she was nominated by Chile for Secretary-General of the United Nations for the 2026–2031 term, but withdrew her candidacy in September 2026 after a troubled campaign that saw the incoming government of President José Antonio Kast, a critic of multilateral institutions, rescind Chile's backing, and her support subsequently collapse in Security Council straw polls.
Bachelet is the second child of archaeologist Ángela Jeria Gómez (1926–2020) and Air Force Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet Martínez (1923–1974). Bachelet's great-great-grandfather, Louis-Joseph Bachelet Lapierre (1820–1864), was a French wine merchant from Chassagne-Montrachet who immigrated to Chile with his Parisian wife, Françoise Jeanne Beault, in 1860, after being hired as a wine-making expert by the Subercaseaux vineyards in Santiago. His son Germán, born in Santiago in 1862, married Luisa Brandt Cadot, a Chilean of French and Swiss descent, and their son, Alberto Bachelet Brandt, was born in 1894. Bachelet's maternal great-grandfather, Máximo Jeria Chacón, of Spanish (Basque) and Greek heritage, was the first person in Chile to earn a degree in agronomic engineering. He founded several agronomy schools in the country and married Lely Johnson, the daughter of an English physician working in Chile. Their son, Máximo Jeria Johnson, married Ángela Gómez Zamora, and they had five children, with Bachelet's mother being the fourth. The Bachelet Jeria household has been described as liberal, secular and progressive for its time: General Bachelet, despite his conventional military upbringing, took part in domestic duties, and his wife pursued an independent professional career; the general also had long-standing ties to Freemasonry as a member of the Grand Lodge of Chile.
Bachelet was born in the La Cisterna district of Santiago, She was named after French actress Michèle Morgan. Bachelet spent many of her childhood years traveling around Chile, moving with her family between military bases, including Quintero, Antofagasta, and San Bernardo. In 1962, she moved with her family to the United States, where her father was assigned to the military mission at the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C. Her family lived for almost two years in Bethesda, Maryland, where she attended Western Junior High School and learned to speak English fluently. Returning to Chile in 1964, she graduated in 1969 from Liceo Nº 1 Javiera Carrera, a prestigious girls' public high school, finishing near the top of her class. She was class president, a member of the choir and volleyball teams, took part in a school theatre group, and co-founded a band, "Las Clap Clap", which toured local school festivals. In 1970, she entered medical school at the University of Chile, being admitted in the 113th position out of 160 applicants. She had originally intended to study sociology or economics but was persuaded by her father to study medicine, saying she chose medicine because it was "a concrete way of helping people cope with pain" and "a way to contribute to improve health in Chile". While at university, she was drawn into the Socialist Youth, influenced in part by young deputy Carlos Lorca, a fellow student leader at the medical school; her father, meanwhile, was appointed by President Salvador Allende in 1972 to head the Food Distribution Offices (JAP) tasked with combating shortages.
When General Augusto Pinochet came to power via the 11 September 1973 coup d'état, Bachelet's father, who had refused to join the plot, 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 took them to Villa Grimaldi, a notorious secret detention center in Santiago, where they were separated and subjected to interrogation and torture. A memorial to the victims of the dictatorship's repression stands today at the former Villa Grimaldi site. In 2013, Bachelet said she had been interrogated by DINA chief Manuel Contreras there. She was later 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 and her mother were verbally abused and threatened with the killing of the other; she said she was "never tortured with electricity", although she witnessed it done to other prisoners.
In May 1975, Bachelet left Australia and relocated to East Germany, where she was assigned an apartment in Am Stern, Potsdam by the German Democratic Republic. Her mother joined her a month later and lived separately in Leipzig. In October 1976, Bachelet began working at a communal clinic in the Babelsberg neighborhood. During this time, she met architect Jorge Leopoldo Dávalos Cartes, another Chilean exile and a member of the Socialist Party's Central Committee, and they married in 1977. In January 1978, Bachelet went to Leipzig to study German at the Herder Institute of Karl Marx University (now the University of Leipzig). She gave birth to her first child, Sebastián, in June 1978. She returned to Potsdam in September 1978 to continue her medical studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, enrolling under the name "Verónica Michelle Dávalos". Five months later, she obtained authorization to return to Chile.
After four years in exile, Bachelet returned to Chile in 1979 and settled in La Florida. Her medical school credits from East Germany were not recognized, so she had to restart her studies where she had left off. She graduated as physician-surgeon on 7 January 1983, but her request to work as a general practitioner in the public sector was denied by the military government on "political grounds". She subsequently received a scholarship from the Chilean Medical Chamber to specialize in pediatrics and public health at the Roberto del Río Children's Hospital (1983–86), completing the program with excellent grades but never sitting the final certification exam for financial reasons. Bachelet also worked at PIDEE (Protection of Children Injured by States of Emergency Foundation), heading its Medical Department from 1986 to 1990. Following the birth of her second child, Francisca, in February 1984, she and Dávalos legally separated. Between 1985 and 1987, Bachelet had a romantic relationship with Alex Vojkovic Trier, an engineer and spokesman for the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, an armed group that later attempted to assassinate Pinochet in 1986; her degree of involvement with the Front, if any, has been disputed, and Bachelet has denied ever collaborating with it. The affair became a minor issue during her presidential campaign. After Chile's transition to democracy in 1990, Bachelet worked as an epidemiologist for the Ministry of Health's West Santiago Health Service and later for the National AIDS Commission (Conasida), while consulting for the Pan-American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit. During this period she began a relationship with fellow physician Aníbal Hernán Henríquez Marich, who fathered her third child, Sofía, born in December 1992; the relationship ended a few years later. From March 1994 to July 1997, Bachelet served as an adviser to the Ministry of Health under President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle. Driven by an interest in civil-military relations, Bachelet studied military strategy at the National Academy of Political and Strategic Studies (ANEPE) in 1996, finishing first in a class of twelve. This achievement earned her a presidential scholarship to continue her studies at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington, D.C., where she completed a Continental Defense Course in 1998, before returning to work as senior assistant to the Defense Minister and completing a master's degree in military science at the Chilean Army's War Academy.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
