RIP Nestor Kirchner

Whilst I wish to express my sadness for the death of Nestor Kirchner, I hope that people in Argentina and abroad don't allow themselves to look upon his political activity with rose-coloured spectacles.

The big question now is what effect Nestor Kirchner's death will have on the presidency of his wife, Cristina. Only now will we find out which of the presidential couple truly wielded the most political power.

Reading the BBC's list of Mr. Kirchner's achievements-including leading Argentina to unprecedented economic growth and bringing human rights abusers from the 1978-1983 dictatorship to justice- one could be forgiven for believing that he had performed a miraculous job since coming to power in 2003. However, the reality is that neither his government before 2007, nor his wife's present-day administration did anything structurally to reduce inequality in this country.

Indeed, instead of reducing poverty, the government concentrated on buying the votes of the most marginalised members of society by spending millions on the bread-and-circuses policy of providing inhabitants of the poorest shanty towns with giant TV screens in order to watch the world cup, whilst children continued dying of starvation and families begged for food outside of supermarkets.

Far from being left-wing champions of the oppressed and marginalised, the Kirchners are multi-millionaire property developers who have done their mathematics-they know that by appealing to the country's poor majority through populist measures, without ever doing anything to improve this unfortunate majority's life chances in a structural way, elections will always be theirs to win.