Chile Elects Female President

A Harvard professor and recent graduate both contributed to the successful campaign of Michelle Bachelet, who was elected as the first female president of Chile on Sunday.

Andrés Velasco, Sumitomo-FASID professor of international development, and Sebastian “Seba” Brown ’05, who are both Chilean, left Cambridge for Santiago last June. Velasco is on sabbatical from the Kennedy School of Government, and Brown is taking the year off before enrolling in Harvard’s Ph.D. program in economics.

Velasco wrote in an e-mail that nearly 200,000 people—most of them women—celebrated outside Bachelet’s headquarters Sunday.

“[There were] women of all ages and sizes and colors wearing Chile’s presidential sash (you could buy them for two bucks from street vendors)

screaming, ‘From now on, I can be president too!’” he wrote.

Brown cited the celebration as the most exciting part of the day.

“People were cheering and dancing until late at night all around Chile,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It is very rewarding to feel that people believe that the candidate I worked for can make their lives better.”

Velasco has been overseeing the planning of Bachelet’s government program, and the Chilean media have reported that he is on the short list to become Secretary of the Treasury.

Brown typically alternated between writing Bachelet’s speeches, working on the party’s platform, and performing economic analysis.

He will spend the next semester studying economics in Barcelona.

“It is sad to leave when the real work is about to begin,” Brown wrote. “It is going to

be interesting to be a witness of Dr. Bachelet’s government from abroad while I work on problem sets, although clearly less exciting than staying in Chile and working with her.”

—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can be reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.