Latin American music icon, Nelson Ned died

Known as “the little giant of the song,’ Nelson Ned, passed away yesterday at age 66, and after a career of 62 years, due to clinical complications caused by pneumonia, an acute respiratory infection and bladder problems.

“I was born happy,” said Nelson, who was born with dwarfism that prevented him to exceed  the 1.12 meters in height, during an interview in the month of December.

Nelson Ned Dvila Pintos began at an early age to participate in singing competitions. He began his career at four and won a radio contest in Uba, his homeland. His talent was recognized even in regional television, giving music to dozens of TV soap operas with just 16 years old. In 1968 Ned was consecrated  as an artist with the song ‘Todo pasara,’ winner of the Song Festival of Buenos Aires and recorded in forty languages.

In the United States, he became the first Latin American artist to reach the one million copies sold with his albums. He sung with idols such as Julio Iglesias, Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett, in the most prestigious theatres of New York like the Madison Square Garden and Carnegie Hill.

After a life of excess, of drug use and sexual promiscuity, Ned became an  evangelist in the nineties. His first work in the gospel genre reached the first places in the list of religious songs.

He married twice and has three children, all with problems of dwarfism. The artist left his last wife in 2003, after suffering a cerebral vascular accident (CVA,) the same that left sequelae such as loss of vision in his right eye or having to travel in his later years with the help of a wheelchair, plus diabetes, hypertension and early-stage Alzheimer.