Early life of Néstor Kirchner

Néstor Kirchner (25 February 1950 – 27 October 2010) was an Argentine politician who served as the 54th President of Argentina from 25 May 2003 until 10 December 2007. He was born in Río Gallegos, and moved to La Plata to attend university. As a student, he was very politically active, but left the city and returned to the Patagonia at the start of the Dirty War.

Néstor Kirchner was in the third generation of the family living at Río Gallegos. His great-grandparents had moved from Interlaken in Switzerland to Patagonia by the end of the 19th-century, during the big waves of immigration at that time. At the time Río Gallegos was a sparsely populated city. His grandparents established a warehouse named "Kirchner y Cuiñas", selling wood and metals. They had five sons, one of them was Néstor Carlos. Néstor worked as mechanic and at a local cinema. He developed a mail friendship with a Croatian-Chilean from Punta Arenas, María Juana Ostic. They married and had three children: Alicia, María Cristina, and Néstor Carlos Kirchner, who was named after his father.

The Kirchner family moved from their home in 1955, to another house where María Ostic lived until her death in 2013. Kirchner started elementary school the following year, and was forced to understand politics even at such early age. Because of the political turmoil of the country in those years, children were usually asked if their family was made of peronists or antiperonists, and had to be careful with their answer. His teacher Digna Inés Martínez Pérez would say years later that Kirchner was a good student.

Kirchner took part in his first political activities during high school, becoming president of the students' union. He organized a strike in support of a fired teacher during a visit of Juan Carlos Onganía to the city. During this time he developed strabismus, but refused to be treated. He considered his affected eye part of his identity. He could not become a teacher because of his poor diction. He joined a basketball team for some time, but was not successful at that either.

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