Usually, the United States should be “first.” Just as the first country putting a man on the moon or the first one on golden medals in the Olympics; or the first and biggest economy on the planet or the first in technological development. But in political culture, and giving women the opportunity to lead the nation, the facts in the continent’s recent history places them, surprisingly, not in the first place but, paradoxically, in the last one.

If Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected as President of the United States this November 8^th, the most powerful nation in the American Continent would finally choose the first woman to be in charge, 22 years after another woman, Geraldine Ferraro, reached for a moment the appearance in an election as second in charge on Presidential Candidate Walter Mondale’s ticket, in 1984.

From Evita to Hillary

But it will only be in 2016 on the 21^st Century, 40 long years after such a phenomenon took place in Latin America. It was there where the first woman reached the executive office in 1974, more than 25 years after the end of the 19^th Century. She was the wife of Argentina’s President Juan Domingo Perón: María Estella Martínez de Perón, or Isabel Perón, who was sworn in as President the 1^st of July 1974, becoming the first female president in the world.

The shadow of Evita Perón – Juan Domingo’s first wife – was still projected in the Argentinian society, 22 years after her death.

But it was in the 90’s when an almost consecutive series of female elections happened in South America, in an interesting political phenomenon that remains till this day, when some of them are still in charge and their election is no longer an exceptional phenomenon, how it will surely be for the United States.

The first one was in Nicaragua, where the widow of a murdered journalist managed to expulse in 1990, an in a democratic way, the Sandinist Revolutionaries that took the power by force from Anastasio Somoza’s hands.

Violeta Chamorro, first Female President of Nicaragua, would be followed, as a formula of political concord, by almost a dozen woman, from Equator to Brasil and then, once again, Argentina, just like Panamá, Costa Rica and even Guyana.

The following articles not only show the hard and controversial path that Hillary Clinton had to follow as the first woman to launch her name in a presidential election in the United States, in a bloody verbal contest against a republican candidate systematically accused of using his economic power to abuse the opposite sex. They also review the recent history of Nations South of border where women are pioneer in political power. An additional article shows the European experience, where the election to the executive office preceded, for decades as well, what it could exceptionally occur in the United States in the next two weeks.