Given political history in Chile, it seemed to me that there was a critical task of consolidating a democracy and creating healthy civic-military and political-military relationships.
By including women in decision-making, city governments will be in a better position to fulfill their responsibility to ensure the safety of their residents, especially women and girls.
I was not born in a home where there were stereotypes. So that was very useful because it gave me the sense of possibilities, of flying, if I may say, of making my hopes and dreams a reality.
During my lifetime, I realized that discrimination was not accidental, that there were structural roots and causes to it. So if we wanted to change women's lives, we need to deal with those root causes.
When I'm speaking of love, when I'm speaking of reversing hate, I'm speaking not only of reconciliation - even I don't use that word - I use another word in Spanish, that's called 'reencuentro' - it's not reconciliation.
Because I'm a doctor, I know when you have an injury it will heal if it's clean enough to heal; if your injury is dirty, it won't heal. And so when you are talking in societies, we are also talking in healing processes, and for a good healing process, you need to make things right.
We have had scarce investment in women... One of my tasks is that everyone spends much more on women.
It was said that Chile was not ready to vote for a woman, it was traditionally a sexist country. In the end, the reverse happened: the fact of being a woman became a symbol of the process of cultural change the country was undergoing.
The possibility of my presidential candidacy emerged spontaneously in public opinion polls. For my part, I noticed people's affection when I was doing work on the ground. I think the important thing is that my candidacy was born from citizens themselves, driven by the people and which the parties picked up favorably.
Having experienced personally and through my family the tragedy of Chile is something always present in my memory. I do not want events of that nature ever to happen again, and I have dedicated an important part of my life to ensuring that and to the reunion of all Chileans.
Chile has done a lot to rid itself of poverty, especially extreme poverty, since the return to democracy. But we still have a ways to go toward greater equity. This country does not have a neoliberal economic model anymore. We have put in place a lot of policies that will ensure that economic growth goes hand in hand with social justice.
As a doctor, when I was minister of health and would go somewhere, little girls would come up to me and say, 'I want to be like you one day, I want to be a doctor.' Now, they tell me, 'I want to be president just like you.' All of us can dream as big as we want.
There has been a cultural shift. It is difficult to measure all that right now, but Chilean women have seen my presidency as a source of pride. Women are performing in jobs in Chile now that 20 or 30 years ago nobody would have dared to imagine.
There's full consensus in the military that women shouldn't be in person-to-person combat. I don't know if we have enough experience to know whether this is the right approach. But women can be elsewhere. We have mandatory military service in Chile. I pushed for women in all areas.
In artillery exercises, women always win because they're more accurate.
I'm working for the women in the world, today; that's my essential issue.
People see I am a mother and head of a household. Today in Chile, one-third of households are run by women. They wake up, take the children to school, go to work. To them I am hope.
You all want to know what is my dream? Very simple. To walk along the beach, holding the hand of my lover.
As women politicians, we talk about the most difficult themes of state security, foreign relations and development models, then ask, 'How do you make it work with your husband?' The interesting thing is that these women - most of them - don't lose the perspective that the focus is not the position but the job at hand.
The current global landscape is quite different from the not-too-distant past. The process of globalization has intensified, and the world is moving towards new forms of governance.
