Isabel Perón was born María Estela Martínez Cartas in La Rioja, Argentina, on 4 February 1931.
María Estela Martínez Cartas, who would later be known to the world as Isabel Perón, was born on 4 February 1931 in the provincial capital of La Rioja, Argentina. She was the youngest of five children in a modest, provincial middle-class family.
Little in her early upbringing suggested the extraordinary and turbulent political trajectory that awaited her. She received a limited formal education, studied piano and French, and as a young woman worked as a dancer under the stage name 'Isabel,' a nod to her devotion to a favorite aunt, which she would use for the rest of her life.
Her early life in La Rioja and later Buenos Aires gave no indication that she would go on to become the first woman to hold the presidency of a nation in the Western Hemisphere. It was a chance meeting with the exiled former president Juan Domingo Perón in Panama in 1955 that set in motion the events that would eventually place her, decades later, at the center of Argentine and world history.
Her birth is significant primarily in retrospect: it marks the origin point of a woman whose ascension to and fall from the highest office in Argentina remains a landmark case study in twentieth-century Latin American politics and the barriers facing women in executive leadership.