Rudy Ulloa Igorthe former driver of Nestor Kirchner, released an autobiographical book about his life and friendship with the former president. It was last Thursday, September 8 at the NK Athenaeum in San Telmo together with the goalkeeper unionist Víctor Santa María. The book is called “My friend, the president” and it is “a chronicle in the first person about the militancy, the project and the legacy of Néstor Kirchner”.
Ulloa, of Chilean origin, traces in this book a brief summary of his childhood and youth, and his life since he met Kirchner. “I met a basic unit with my mom. It was in 1974, in Barrio Del Carmen, where she lived. My family was a member of the Eva Perón Basic Unit. That’s where I met Nestor,” says Ulloa.and remember that at that time he was around 14 years old.
What he does not explain in any part of his work is how from such a humble origin, and even from his later condition as Kirchner’s driver and secretary, he later became a millionaire journalistic businessman and multiplied his fortune thanks to the abundant official publicity that the provincial and then the national government of the Kirchners he injected his santacruceño multimedia. A case of quick fortune, like that of Lazarus Baez.
One of the book’s strongest points is in the chapters that speak of Kirchner’s death. Ulloa recounts, in detail, the moments before the funeral. “The sad debate was about how he should be dressed. The protocol opinions for his investiture indicated the range of black, dark blue and gray tones, dark colors, because bright colors – they explained to us – distance themselves from pain and sorrow for loss. There was talk of how the sleeves of the shirt should be, his arms crossed, with a rosary and the shroud, “says Ulloa and adds that at that moment” something was tightening “inside him.
“I felt the need to express it: ‘Noo!! It’s not Nestor!! He would never have wanted that. The shirt he liked best was a red checkered one; that’s the one he would choose.’ There was no debate, and so I began my task of dressing him. How do you dress the body of your best friend? It is a heartbreaking moment, unimaginable. Tears, the responsibility of becoming strong and facing the sad moment for Nestor’s mother, his sisters, his wife and his children “.
After after the funeral, Rudy says that he had a hard time falling asleep and sometimes he even avoided going to sleep so as not to dream about his friend. At times he thought he was going crazy and wondered if he needed professional help.
The book is not in chronological order, but he comes and goes in time, with the topics he intends to write about. About the years of her childhood, Ulloa says that her first jobs were as a shoeshine boy and a bobblehead, and she even boasts of having had a business vision for aiming to work for ABC1 clients.
“Some shoe shiners worked as a complement in hairdressing salons, others covered social gathering centers such as bars and tearooms. My strategy was to focus on ABC1 clients, I knew their movements, they had very good shoes and boots, they came out impeccable every morning, to the nines, and they had the resources to pay for a shine and buy a newspaper, so I combined my two businesses.”
Media
The paperboy role was Ulloa’s first approach to the media. There is not much on this point, but it only tells the story of FM del Carmen, a community radio station in Río Gallegos and the launch of The Southern Newspaper, his newspaper that circulated free of charge in Santa Cruz, south of Chubut and sometimes reached Buenos Aires. In the book he says that the newspaper was always financed entirely by advertising revenue.
After Kirchnerism left power, it stopped appearing on paper and only the portal remained. There were other media businesses which he did not want to refer to, such as the magazine he published with the publisher Publiexpress called Attitude or Channel 2 of Santa Cruz. Nor about a production company with which he tried to put together a political debate program on Channel C5N.
Much less wrote about the intention to buy, in 2008, the Telefe channel, which at that time was in the hands of the Spanish from Telefónica. Ulloa, during the Kirchner years, went from having some low-profile media outlets to wanting to buy one of the most important channels in the country. Even if he looks at his life from much further back: from shoe shiner to Kirchner’s driver and then to millionaire businessman, the jumps are much more abysmal.
Its most important cultural investment are the NK Athenaeums which are in Río Gallegos and Buenos Aires. For the inauguration of the Patagonian branch they were Daniel Scioli and Carlos Zanniniwhich they took advantage of to give a campaign speech, but at that act there was also a timid Máximo Kirchner who used the meeting as a kind of officialization of his then deputy candidacy for Santa Cruz.
The other Ateneo NK is in San Telmo. These cultural bars aim to preserve and transmit the legacy of Nestor Kirchner. In both places there is a sculpture of the former president sitting at a table in a plaid shirt with which militant-tourists can take a picture.
Lineage
Ulloa belongs to the group closest to the former president who, after Kirchnerism came to power, had a resounding change of life, not only economically, but also socially. He began to rub shoulders with Buenos Aires political figures with whom before, from Río Gallegos, he had no dealings. With Daniel Munoz, Lazaro Baez, Osvaldo “Bochi” Sanfelice and other businessmen, are the Kirchnerist “success stories” in terms of social advancement. Of course, the dialogue between them was never friendly. With Lázaro Báez he has a terrible relationship. His great Patagonian friend is Ricardo Echegaray, the former head of the AFIP during the Kirchner regime.
On Cristina Kirchner there are few chapters and it barely mentions some historical details about when they met Kirchner in October 1974 and how CFK returned to college to finish her law degree after giving birth to her son Máximo. “Cristina postponed her career for a while and it was only on July 6, 1978 that she would request her reincorporation into university life in these terms: ‘I am the mother of a child and I collaborate with the tasks of my husband, a lawyer in Río Gallegos.’ She finished her degree on the first day of October 1979, the date she took her last subject: Private International Law”, says Rudy.
Kirchner’s former driver he paid tribute to his friend in life by naming his son after Nestor’s son. “When my son was born, I didn’t think about giving him a family name to perpetuate generations or keep the memory alive. The name Máximo for my son was inspired by the name of the son of my boss and friend at the time. It was a thank you to who, more than a job opportunity, gave me the opportunity to fulfill myself personally”.
Ulloa was also one of Máximo Kirchner’s main supporters during the first years after his father’s death. In those years, CFK’s eldest son was not actively involved in politics and even lived in Río Gallegos. While Cristina Kirchner held the presidency, Ulloa accompanied her son.
The reasons why Ulloa decides to tell his story are not clear. He wanted to record his “contribution” in the life of Néstor Kirchner and tell in the first person what it was like for him to be a “privileged student and witness to the birth of a political leader”. Two years ago he gave a friendly interview to his own medium. Apparently, he had some questions left in the pipeline and now he decided to publish them.
