The son of Ernesto Ottone Fernández, an adviser to President Ricardo Lagos, and Patricia Ramírez, Ernesto Ottone left Chile at a young age, months before General Augusto Pinochet's 1973 coup d'état against the government of Salvador Allende, because that February his father, in that militant communist era, had been appointed vice president of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, based in Budapest. He grew up with his sister Soledad in Hungary and later lived in Paris, a city to which his father moved in 1982 after resigning from the Communist Party. For his work at the UN, Ottone Sr. moved with the family to Vienna in 1984, where they remained until the beginning of 1986. They spent a year in Uruguay, returned to Paris for another two years, and finally returned to Chile in 1989.