Henry Kissinger is the greatest living war criminal in the world today with the blood of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and Chile and East Timor on his hands. He will never appear in a court or be behind bars.

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.

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.

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.

I was born in ancient times at the end of the world in a patriarchal Catholic and conservative family. No wonder that by age five I was a raging feminist - although the term had not reached Chile yet so nobody knew what the heck was wrong with me.