By Bryan Weiner
“Todo lo que falta lograr, todo lo que nos falta hacer sólo se puede hacer en democracia” – Everything we have yet to achieve, everything we still need to do, can only be done with democracy.
Kirchner recently published this quote as a meme on her Facebook page, in front of an image of her standing between two Argentinian flags, raising her hand. A large part of the image that she has constructed of herself harkens back to her student days in the Peronist youth movement and her vision of herself as a revolutionary, fighting for a brighter, democratic Argentina.
What incited this revolutionary spirit within her? To understand this question and many of her current attitudes, it is important to go back to certain events in her youth. In her biography of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, titled La Presidenta: Historia de Una Vida, the author Sandra Russo described one of the rare discussions that she had with the notoriously guarded president that shed light on some of the formative events of her childhood.
One of the key critical stories that she tells is about how the Coup of September 16, 1955, where President Juan Domingo Perón was overthrown and replaced by a transitional military government. Her lower-middle-class family had benefitted from Perón’s rent control law but after the coup, her family was forced to move houses as the rent went up. She described this as a traumatic experience for her at the time.
Another one of the key stories from her childhood that she described in the same interview was the political divide in her family. Her grandfather was a Peronist and her mother worked at a union, but her father was vehemently anti-Peronist. She recounted the story of the death of a very close uncle of hers in the fighting between Peronist and anti-Peronist forces in her neighborhood in 1963. The uncle was shot in the back by police forces after having crossed through a police roadblock. Her father blamed the incident on Peronist “guerillas” for having led to the situation that caused these policemen to shoot, even though the uncle had no connection to the Peronists. In the interview, she describes how her relationship with her father was always very distant and how she felt much more affectionate towards her grandfather. She never goes into great detail about either her father or her grandfather and she mentions her love for both of them, but in this rare discussion of her early childhood, she paints her father and grandfather into two opposing political camps, the Peronists and the anti-Peronists ,and uses this to clearly demonstrate her political understanding. She concludes with a nostalgic story of her grandfather holding her on his lap and reading to her “La Razón de Mi Vida”, the autobiography of Eva Perón. It seems highly likely therefore, that it was her grandfather’s influence that made her align with the Peronists.
In analyzing her social media presence over the course of the past 6 months, I have noticed that she rarely discusses elements of her personal life. On the rare occasions that she does discuss her personal life on social media, she always manages to connect it to politics; she has managed to merge the personal and the political in her life. However these early glimpses from Kirchner’s childhood (in the interview mentioned above) are authentic, formative events in the young woman’s life, and clearly each of these events has some connection to her present political persona. These events are examples that begin to show her early radicalization and the emergence of her revolutionary spirit. It would be useful even necessary to go back into her childhood to understand how she became the charismatic leader that she is today, fighting for a democratic Argentina.
