by Barnes, John
Shortly after Perón moved into Apartment ‘B’ in Calle Posadas, Apartment ‘A’ replaced the presidential palace as the centre of power in Argentina. His kitchen cabinet — army cronies and men he had appointed to key positions in the trade unions — met there daily, and Eva’s involvement in these sessions went a great deal further than brewing the maté and pouring the whisky.
As a girl from the pueblo, she knew there was a source of power in the land that had not been tapped since the days of ‘bloody’ Rosas. He had been the first gaucho among gauchos. But now the men of the plains had poured into the cities. Nearly a third of Argentina’s population of approximately 14 million lived in and around Buenos Aires by the early 1940s, and well over sixty per cent, of those people were poor, many of them living in the villa miserias, the squalid shanty ‘towns of misery’ that had sprung up on the outskirts of the capital. For years, electoral fraud had deprived them of any say in the running of the country. What Perón had to do, Eva insisted, was to become their leader, to become, in the style of Rosas, the first worker among workers.
The two of them criss-crossed the country, holding mass meetings in the great granary centres of Rosario and Santa Fé, in the new industrial city of Cordoba, the vinyards of Mendoza, and out into the remote rural regions, provinces like Salta and Corrientes, where dark-skinned mestizo peasants lived a life of poverty that had hardly changed in a hundred years. In Buenos Aires, they spent evenings visiting working class neighbourhood barrios — the old docklands of La Boca, which Eva knew so well, and the slaughterhouse district of Avellaneda as well as some of the roughest and grimmest of the villa miserias. After back-thumping abrazos with new-found friends in the boliches, the neighbourhood bar/restaurants, they drank vino común, cheap, throat-rasping red wine, and talked and argued politics until the early hours of the morning. Industrial workers, many of them toiling fourteen-hour days in desperation to feed and clothe their families, suddenly found, for the first time in their lives, powerful people who would not only listen to them but would actually do something.
From his Ministry of Labour, Perón decreed minimum wages and decent living conditions for the country’s agricultural workers, raising them, at the stroke of a pen, from their feudal peonage. This, naturally, provoked howls of outrage from the wealthy estancieros, who had to pay the increases from their pockets. But Perón was unmoved. He later wrote: ‘The unrestricted ambitions of the conservative classes to keep everything for themselves blinded them to the evidence: whoever wishes to keep everything will lose everything.’ More decrees streamed from his office. White collar workers, shop assistants, and factory hands obtained wage increases, some of 50 per cent or more. He gave them four-week holidays, sick leave, protection from arbitrary dismissal, all unheard of before In Argentina. And he invented the most popular of all perks, the aguinaldo, the thirteenth month wage handed to every worker just before Christmas.
Employers grumbled bitterly. But, as Perón well knew, they were not about to go bankrupt. Leaving aside the fact that they had exploited their workers for far too long, both they and the nation as a whole were enjoying a wave of unprecedented prosperity. The country’s export trade was booming with postwar Europe willing to pay any price for Argentina’s beef and wheat. As larger and larger credit balances piled up month after month, the peso became one of the world’s strongest currencies, a prosperity reflected in the boom-town atmosphere of Buenos Aires with its crowded stores, restaurants, theatres and nightclubs. In the summer resort town of Mar del Plata, the world’s largest casino (with fifty-six roulette tables) kept its wheels spinning day and night to mop up the money of wealthy free-spending Argentines.
But for the first time this wealth was also beginning to seep down to ordinary working people, thanks to Perón. Understandably, bus drivers, lorry drivers, wine workers, sugar workers, metal workers, road workers flocked into the unions Perón formed under one giant umbrella organisation, the Confederacion General del Trabajo (CGT — the General Confederation of Labour). Trade union leaders who failed to fall into line were unceremoniously packed off to concentration camps in Patagonia. At least 130 socialist and communist union bosses were jailed, and union members who demonstrated and struck in protest were threatened in no uncertain terms by Perón that they would join their leaders if they did not mend their ways. They soon did. By mid-1945, Perón could safely boast that he had an army of four million workers at his back.
Even the obstreperous meat packing house workers fell in love with Perón. Their case was one of the grimmest among the oppressed poor of Argentina. They had struggled for decades to improve their pittance wages and abominable working conditions in the stench of the slaughter yards. They had hoped that the nationalistic military regime would help them in the battle with their British and American employers. But not even the military was willing to interfere with an industry so vital to the nation’s economy. It was the country’s biggest industrial employer by far. Yet its 60,000 workers possessed neither economic or political strength.
The top union leader of the meat packers Jose Peter, a brilliant and forceful communist, angrily exposed packing house companies that ignored the few labour laws that existed and laid off workers without reason. Union organisers were black-listed and beaten up. But what incensed the workers most was the method by which the companies paid them. Called the ‘standard’ system, workers had to perform a set amount of labour or be fired. After they had reached that daily standard, they were then paid on a declining scale. When productivity rose, as it did because of the workers’ desperate efforts to earn enough to keep their families alive, the companies simply raised the minimum level for payment. It was a classic treadmill — no matter how fast they went, it did them no good in the end.
Perhaps more than anything else the ‘standard’ explains why the Peróns captured the imagination, support and fervent loyalty of the working people of Argentina. In many ways it typified an essential element of Argentine society — the casual, brutal lack of sensitivity by employer towards employee. As Jose Peter described the horror of it: ‘It converts the workers into much less than a machine; because a machine is given rest, it is oiled, it is cared for and repaired, while only illness and unemployment are left to the worker after the standard … has extracted his last drop of energy and ruined his health. The standard system has managed to make the worker lose even the faculty for thought. Not to be able to read, except with a great deal of effort. To lose interest in life. Not even to want to go to the movies, or take a walk. To await the horrible hour of work in agony. To beg for the hour of payment. To lose the possibility of sleep, because the barbaric rhythm of the standard takes over the nerves . . . The labourer is turned into a shadow of his former self. Tuberculosis, rheumatism, insomnia, mental ruin, a permanent picture of misery and helplessness, a tenement house, hungry children, a consumptive wife. This is what the standard signifies.’
So the meat packing workers struck, and human blood flowed through the gutters of the slaughter-house district south of the Riachuelo River as police and employers combined to crush the strike. Then something happened that the workers could hardly believe. In the midst of the fighting and sniping, Colonel Juan Perón, the country’s Vice-President, walked through the streets of Avellaneda arm-in-arm with his pretty girl friend, Eva Duarte, whom they had all heard on the radio, and their own Cipriano Reyes, a burly, young union organiser. Word spread through the district: ‘Perón is with us.’ The next day, he brought the strike to a compulsory end, ordering the packing houses to re-employ every worker they had fired and to increase wages by 30 per cent with a guaranteed 60 hours of work every two weeks, thus putting an end to the hated ‘standard’ system. The workers showed their gratitude by deserting their old communist leader, Jose Peter, for Perón’s friend, Cipriano Reyes, and his new union, the Federation of Labour Unions of the Meat Industry, which for the first time brought all the industry’s workers together into one pro-Perón organisation.
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/> EVA TO THE RESCUE
The early months of 1945 were not good ones for Perón and Eva. They finally realised they had picked a loser in Nazi Germany, and their humiliation was rubbed in by Winston Churchill who commented: ‘They have chosen to dally with evil but not only with evil but with the losing side.’ Their country stood friendless in the world. And, understandably, relations with the Americans were the worst they had ever been; President Franklin D. Roosevelt pointedly remarked on ‘the extraordinary paradox of the growth of Nazi-Fascist influence and the increasing application of Nazi-Fascist methods in a country of this hemisphere at the very time that these forces of aggression and oppression are drawing ever closer to the hour of defeat.’ In undiplomatic language, the US Ambassador to Argentina, Spruille Braden, referred to the military regime as one ‘which in common honesty no one could call anything but fascist, and typically fascist.’ Angrily, Perón responded: ‘Some say that what I am doing follows the policy of Nazism. All I can say is this: If the Nazis did this, they had the right idea.’ When his hero, Benito Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans, he defiantly eulogised him: ‘Mussolini was the greatest man of this century, but he committed certain disastrous errors. I, who have the advantage of his precedent before me, shall follow in his footsteps but also avoid his mistakes.’ To make sure the Argentines did not get ideas about one precedent, Perón banned all newsreel film that showed Mussolini’s body hanging by the heels alongside that of his mistress.
The sympathy of the country’s middle-classes, numbering at least five million in Buenos Aires alone — had been overwhelmingly on the side of the Allies, no doubt because of the country’s historic ties with Britain and France, which proved far too strong to be broken by their government’s pro-Nazi propaganda. In fact, the end of the war triggered such a powerful tide of sentiment for democracy in the press, in the universities, and on the street that it threatened to swamp Perón.
On the day Japan surrendered, bringing World War II to an end, thousands of Argentines marched cheering through the centre of the city, only to be waylaid by several hundred armed soldiers, shouting their own slogans, ‘Long live Perón!’ ‘Death to democracy!’ and ‘Down with the Jews!’ Two students died in the clashes, which Perón promptly blamed on the country’s tiny Communist Party.
However, public resistance seemed to grow. Thousands of young students — in Buenos Aires, Cordoba, La Plata, and Tucuman — barricaded themselves in their universities and held off tear gas attacks by riot police for over a week. As each campus fell, youngsters fought from room to room, using desks and chairs as weapons. In Buenos Aires, the boys were dragged off to interrogation centres and the girls to San Miguel Prison, which was normally only used for holding prostitutes. By the beginning of October, the number of political prisoners topped the four thousand mark and was still rising as busloads of detainees swept daily into Buenos Aires’ Villa Devoto Prison, the military gaol on Marin Garcia island in the River Plate, and the bleak Neuquen Prison in the Andean foothills. When the gaols bulged so they could take not more, the police requisitioned private houses, packing prisoners into tightly shuttered mansions in the suburbs.
The threat of civil war still hung in the air. Eva Duarte took to carrying a grenade in her handbag, while her lover defiantly proclaimed: ‘Everybody is demanding my head, but thus far no one has come to get it.’
He spoke too soon. Some of his fellow officers had finally had enough. But, ironically, it was not Perón’s heavy-handed dictatorship which provoked them into plotting his downfall. They simply could not stand his girl friend. They had watched with mounting embarrassment and anger as Perón turned more and more to Eva Duarte for political advice. As soldiers, they were supposed to be running a military dictatorship. Yet a woman pulled the strings. It outraged their sense of dignity and their masculine pride. No Argentine dared laugh at them, of course, at least not to their faces, anyway. But they were uncomfortably aware that ribald cartoons undermining their authority had appeared in the newspapers of neighbouring countries.
The final indignity, as far as they were concerned, came when Eva arranged for her mother’s latest boy friend, a postal clerk named Oscar Nicolini, to become Director of Posts and Telegraph, a position once held by her first military lover, Colonel Imbert. No sooner had Nicolini taken over his new job, than Eva moved right in to the office next to his. There was no doubt in the minds of senior army officers that Colonel Perón’s mistress had deftly placed herself in control of all of the nation’s communications. They were not going to tolerate it. She had to go.
On October 9th, two senior generals arrived at his War Ministry office shortly before mid-day. One of them was an old friend of Perón’s, Carlos von der Becke, whom he had appointed Army Chief of Staff, promoting him from Brigadier General to General of Division. But on this morning, Perón had no time for the usual courtesies between friends. Bluntly, he asked him what the decision was. Von der Becke stuttered, shuffled his feet and abruptly turned and walked out of the office, leaving it to his colleague, General Juan Pistarini, the Minister of Works, to break the bad news that someone finally had come to get his head, that his friend whom he had placed in the Casa Rosada had betrayed him and gone over to the enemy.
‘The President feels that you should resign,’ said Pistarini nervously. Perón did not blink, though the shock must have been considerable. He summoned his ADC. ‘Bring me a sheet of paper to write out my resignation.’ Then he wrote: ‘His Excellency the President of the Nation: I hereby resign my position as Vice-President, Minister of War and Secretary of Labour and Welfare, with all of which Your Excellency has deigned to honour me.’ He signed and handed the note to Pistarini. ‘I’ve written it in my own hand,’ he said, ‘so all can see that my hand has not trembled.’
The news flashed around the world. ‘Perón resigns all powers after Argentine army coup’ headlined the New York Times. In Washington, the State Department refused comment ‘pending confirmation’. But in Buenos Aires, thousands of porteños made their comment as they streamed through the central streets of the city, shouting’ ‘We want his head!’ Champagne flowed over at Naval Headquarters, where the hatred of Perón went much deeper than anything felt by the army. The senior Navy man, Vice-Admiral Hector Vernengo Lima, Chief of Naval Operations, believed strongly that Perón’s downfall provided a timely opportunity for the military to get out of politics. But the Army had its doubts about that.
As the country’s top military leaders met in continuous session at the presidential residence in Olivos to sort out their country’s future, it quickly became obvious that the generals were terrified of what could happen to them if civilians regained political power. They feared that the army would be exposed to reprisals, or at least to measures aimed at ensuring that military revolutions like that of 1943 would never happen again. General Avalos, the leader of the coup against Perón, considered it imperative that the next president should be an Army man. As he had just appointed himself Minister of War in Perón’s place and was clearly the man with the power, his army colleagues felt he should be the next president. They brushed aside Navy suggestions that the government be turned over to the Supreme Court until the election of a civilian president. But while they quarrelled over the spoils of victory, they forgot to keep a watch on the man they had removed from vower.
Perón left the War Ministry right on the heels of Generals Von der Becke and Pistarini and hurried home to Eva’s apartment on Calle Posadas, finding to his surprise that she was there waiting for him. She already knew what had happened. For news travels fast in Buenos Aires, sometimes faster than the event. In fact, she had found out in a most unpleasant way. Turning up for work at Radio Belgrano, she had been called into the office of a contented-looking Jaime Yankelevich.
‘Your boy friend has been sacked,’ he told her, brutally drawing a finger across his throat. ‘You’re out, too,’ he added. Eva did not wait to hear any more. She fled. She was still seething when Perón arrived.
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br /> ‘That son of a bitch,’ she kept on repeating. ‘And after all I’ve done for him.’ But she quickly turned her attention to the real cause of her crisis — her lover’s downfall. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. Peron shrugged. There was not much he could do, he told her. He certainly was not going to start a civil war, even if his friends in the army were prepared to do battle for him, and he was not so certain of that any more as some of those friends, like Becke and Farrell, had already deserted him. Perón was ready to give up. But Eva was not prepared to let him.
Above: Juana Ibarguren who gave birth to five illegitimate children, the youngest of whom was Maria Eva.
Below: A pampas rancho, typical of the one-room home in which Evita was born.
Above: First Communion: Evita is on the left. Sister Elisa is next to her; sister Blanca is in the centre at the back, and brother Juancito is on Blanca’s left.
Below: Evita, aged 14, a picture taken from her sixth grade class photo.
Above: Her first big picture. Feuding on the set resulted in Libertad Lamarque having to flee into exile when Evita came to power.
Below: A scone from Circus Cavalcade. Everybody who saw Evita act agreed that she was a terrible actress.
Above: The young star posing.
Below: A little light music in the apartment she shared with her next-door neighbour, Col. Perón.
First, she screamed at him, telling him to pull himself together and act like a man. Then she got to work on the telephone. Within an hour, scores of young captains and colonels, all men promoted by Perón, began streaming in to the apartment, past the heavy guard that had been thrown up around the building by a loyal detachment of officer cadets from the Military College. Eva had calculated that with the army divided in its loyalties and with the chain of military command hopelessly confused at the top, it was the junior officers, the men who actually controlled the troops, who counted. They owed their careers to Perón, she reminded them, and now it was time for them to show their loyalty, not only to Perón but to the ordinary people of Argentina who had finally found someone willing to work to lift them from their poverty and misery. She played on the themes that make a young officer’s heart race — heroism, patriotism. The very destiny of the nation was in their hands, she told them. It was a performance of skill, emotion, and warmth — all qualities she had so lacked on the stage — from a beautiful, impassioned woman. Not a single officer left that apartment without first pledging his allegiance in ringing tones.