MEXICO CITY: Chilean President-elect Michelle Bachelet embodies the rise of women into Latin American power circles, but in a region known for sexism women still face offences ranging from macho slights to assault, even by their husbands.

Bachelet's election last month as the first woman president in her country was seen as a major step towards making women equal political players and empowering female leaders across the hemisphere, such as presidential candidate Lourdes Flores in Peru.

Education and changing beliefs, largely among women themselves, have helped them win ground in politics, business and other areas. But great gaps remain, especially for the poor.

"For Latin machismo, and I say this as a man, (Bachelet's election) is an important symbol," Norberto Consani, director of the institute of international relations at Argentina's Universidad Nacional de la Plata.

"A woman president was unthinkable. It's an important opening, although there is a long way to go," he said.

In Latin America, more women are entering the labour force than in any other region, but many work for low salaries or for nothing on family farms or in businesses.

In poor nations, women bear the brunt of poverty. In Bolivia, for example, they die at high rates from cervical cancer and complications during pregnancy and childbirth that stem from inadequate health care and education.

Across the region, violence against women is widespread but often unreported and even tolerated, activists say. Until November, it was not a crime to rape your wife in Mexico.

"What women have gained is one thing. How we have been received is another," said Patricia Mercado, a fringe party candidate for Mexican president. "It's not with open arms."

Abuse of women going on

Bachelet, 54, a left-leaning doctor and single mother jailed under the government of General Augusto Pinochet, seems well aware that she ruffles Chile's conservative feathers.

"A woman. Separated. A socialist. An agnostic. All possible sins together," she jokes. Chile legalised divorce only in 2004 and relatively few women work outside the home.

Bachelet is the fourth woman elected to lead a Latin American nation, after Mireya Moscoso in Panama, Violeta Chamorro in Nicaragua and Janet Jagan in Guyana.

Unlike her predecessors, though, she did not follow a popular or powerful husband into the limelight. Today women's rising self-esteem may be giving them more clout.

"If I am able to get my family ahead, my business, if I am opening doors, then I also have more confidence in other women," said Mexican presidential candidate Mercado, who addressed a recent business forum and found she was the only woman in the room.

The question now, said Marina Castaneda, a Mexican writer and author of the book "El Machismo Invisible" ("Invisible Machismo"), is whether Bachelet can govern the country as a woman.

Abuse of women persists despite women's gains. Largely indigenous Guatemala, for example, faces a new wave of women's murders.

Maricela Ortiz sees the brutal face of sexism in hundreds of women raped, tortured and killed on Mexico's US border in the past 12 years, among them her 17-year-old goddaughter.

Ortiz, an advocate for families of more than 340 women murdered in Ciudad Juarez since 1993, says a backlash works against women in her city, which brings together poor women seeking factory jobs, would-be migrants and drug traffickers.

Women's advocates hope education can change things.

Source: China Daily