Chile’s election takes place this Sunday, and voters are expected to take the country back to the Left by returning the popular and charismatic ex-president Michelle Bachelet to office.  She is promising to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for education and healthcare, and to rewrite the country’s constitution, a relic of the Pinochet fascist dictatorship.

Bachelet was Chile’s first female leader and left office in 2010 with record high approval ratings.  At least one recent poll suggests the physician-turned-politician and single mother could get more than 50 percent of the vote this weekend, which would make a run-off election unnecessary.  Chile does not allow consecutive presidential terms.  Her promise to continue the economic growth propelled by Chile’s copper mining while making the country more fair resonates with a lot of voters.

Her conservative opponent is Evelyn Matthei.  As daughters of Air Force officers, the two played together as children.  But when the murderous Pinochet dictatorship began rounding up leftists in the 1970s, Bachelet and her father were victims of torture, while Matthei's father was a general in the dictatorship's junta.

Also running for offices are Chilean student protest icons Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson.  Vallejo is running for office from the working class southern Santiago neighborhood “La Florida”.  She’s focused her campaign on tax reform, and supporting a full overhaul of the Chilean Constitution that was written and approved by dictator Augusto Pinochet’s goons in the late 1970s.

Both Jackson and Vallejo want to de-privatize education, a condition also set-up by Pinochet which sparked a series of massive protests by students who say quality higher education is reserved for only the children of the wealthiest, while public school suffered.