by Barnes, John
But the dirty tricks were not totally one-sided. In fact, Perón and Eva came close to serious injury, possibly death, during one of their trips to the interior. Their train jumped the tracks just after midnight on February 10, as they were leaving Rosario, the granary city of Argentina, on their journey back to the capital. It was discovered that the axle of the rear coach had been neatly sawn to the point where it was bound to break sooner or later with the swaying of the moving train. All that saved those aboard from disaster was that the train was travelling slowly instead of its normal 40 to 60 miles an hour when the axle finally did go. Perón and Eva were eating in the dining car when the brakes were jammed on, the whistle shrieked, and the coach bucked wildly. Fearing an ambush, the Peróns’ bodyguards, armed with sub-machine guns, jumped off and disappered into the darkness. Everybody on the coach, except for the Peróns, flung themselves on the floor. But Juan Perón gripped his wife’s hand across the table, grinned at her, and then told everybody not to be so foolish and get back to their seats. The damage was minor and the train was soon on its way again.
Apart from that incident, the trip had been a dazzling success. A large, enthusiastic crowd had seen the train off from Retiro Station in Buenos Aires after youngsters swarmed all over it, chalking campaign slogans on the coaches and roofs. As it steamed slowly across the pampas towards Rosario, it passed waving, cheering groups of country people at every small station and farm along the route. Most of them were young, farm workers, their wives and children, the women shrieking, the men waving their shirts, some even chasing the train, grabbing the rail of the guard’s coach at the back and running with it for a few yards. In Rosario, industrial labourers crushed each other in the mad scramble to touch Juan and Eva’s hands through the coach window as the train eased to a halt. Secret police protecting the candidate and his wife hauled a fainting woman through the window at Perón’s command and Eva helped to give her first aid while the Rosario police battled to clear a path so that the two of them could leave the train.
It was a stiflingly hot and humid summer’s night with the huge, sweating crowd packed tight into the city’s main plaza. Women and children fainted by the hundreds. Gauchos in their baggy bombacha trousers, flowing shirts and high-brimmed hats sat astride their horses in the throng, singing Perónista songs. Swarms of locusts blanketed the night sky, clinging to clothes and faces, crunching beneath thousands of feet, adding their own peculiar stench to the sweat of the people. Palm trees and banana trees in the square swayed with the weight of young men and children. Every viewing point, from lamp-posts to narrow ledges on the sides of all the buildings facing the square, was occupied. Thousands more unable to fight their way into the plaza stood in the side streets listening to the speeches booming out over the loudspeakers. Encircled by a company of armed sailors, the Peróns slowly edged their way to the speakers’ platform. Now, for the first time, the chanting had a double-barrelled sound to it, not just ‘Pay-ron’ but ‘Pay-ron, Ay-vita.’
Eva did not speak that night. But the women in the crowd in the plaza and along the side of the railway tracks gaped and sighed in pleasure at the sight of the lovely young blonde in her beautiful clothes and jewellery who stood with such commanding assurance at the side of their hero. Perón only spoke for half an hour. But that did not matter. It was the event that counted, that people who led such brutally impoverished and barren lives could actually see, and some could even touch, the man who was not only promising but actually bringing them a better life. On the six-hour journey home to Buenos Aires in the dawn light, teen-age girls ran in relays alongside the train together with whooping gauchos whose galloping horses raised clouds of yellow dust that blotted out the flat plains of the pampas. As the train crawled into the capital, the crowds thickened, arms outstretched in supplication.
Jose Tamborini could never match that kind of adulation. He was a plump, little man, 60 years old, honest and uninspiring, a Radical politician in Congress since 1918. He was then young and vigorous and bursting with the ideals and dreams of the middle-class Radical revolution. Now he was rather elderly, not very radical, and rather tired, bewildered and not a little frightened by the tumultuous, angry tempo of the election. His support ranged from Communist to Conservative, and, inevitably, with that odd melange, the Democratic Union campaign focused on what it was against rather than what it was for, and what it was against was Juan Perón, fiend incarnate to all those Argentines who were not convinced Perónistas.
But even those whose hatred of him never wavered admitted that he had all the charisma. He was good-looking, had a nimble wit, a ready smile, could talk in the slang of the city barrios or the dialect of the provinces, ate his barbecued beef with a razor-sharp knife like the gauchos, and was always ready to while away an evening in a dockside bar, drinking raw wine and swapping jokes. And he could tap the emotions with the skill of an orchestral conductor, rousing crowds to patriotic fervour one minute, then hushing them to silence, the tears streaming down his face as he talked about his dear mother. But to most political observers and to all the foreign correspondents in Buenos Aires for the election, such demagoguery, as they called it, could not survive a secret ballot box election. Tamborini, the democrat, was a firm favourite to beat Perón, the fascist dictator. On the eve of the vote, Cortesi wrote in the New York Times: ‘All that can be said is that the turnout for the opposition candidate in most of the large cities visited by both indicates that the Democratic Union should triumph if tomorrow’s election is even approximately fair and honest.’
Perón went down with the flu on election day, February 24, with Eva acting as his nurse in their Calle Posadas apartment. But they both managed to get to the local polling station, and then he went back to bed. The city was as quiet as a cemetery. All the bars were shuttered as were the theatres and cinemas. The Buenos Aires commuter trains, normally packed to bursting, ran virtually empty throughout the day. Long lines waited patiently outside the polling stations from early morning until the polls closed. There were no incidents. With the ugly campaign over — more than 100 people had been killed — Argentines voted peaceably and democratically for a President for the first time in many years. Troops with fixed bayonets escorted the ballot boxes to the national Congress building in Buenos Aires and to the provincial capitals in the interior. But the counting did not begin until March 6.
First, the ballot boxes were checked to make sure they had not been tampered with, and Argentines also took time off for the annual celebration of Carnival. Then, under the eye of delegates from both parties, the counting began. On March 28, it was announced that Juan Domingo Perón had been elected President of Argentina for a six-year term. In voting terms, it had been fairly close — 1,527,231 to 1,207,155. But even so, it was a nation-wide victory of overwhelming proportions. Perón won the Governorships of all 15 provinces, all 30 Senate seats and an overwhelming majority in the lower house of Congress with 109 deputies to 49. In Avellaneda, where the revolution of October 17 began, Perón won a lop-sided 68 percent of the votes. Even the city of Buenos Aires with its large middle-class gave him 54 percent of the votes.
The Peróns won not simply because he was a demagogue and she controlled the country’s major radio stations but because they did the job that their democratic opponents should have been doing — going to the people with a programme of economic justice. In the rural provinces of the interior, Perón chalked up sweeping victories among peasants whose lives were brutish and short, where infant mortality rates were high, and disease — malaria, tapeworm, tuberculosis, goitre, influenza —-and malnutrition had bred generation after generation of anaemic, impoverished people. Even in the country’s capital, a private medical study had shown that 30,000 Buenos Aires children did not attend school because of malnutrition. Perón also addressed himself to the fact that half of Buenos Aires’ workers’ families lived in one room. He also stressed and promised to remedy the inequitable system of Argentine land-holding — two thousand landlords owning the rich
est fifth of the land while 70 percent of the farms were run by sharecroppers who paid half their income out in rent.
In the last few days of the campaign, Perón was handed an election issue which had nothing to do at all with economics or social justice. To his delight, the United States took that particular moment to add yet another chapter to its unhappy record of Big Stick diplomacy in Latin America. The State Department, in a move to influence the election, published a handbook reviewing Perón’s record of fascism and collaboration with Nazi Germany in World War II. Primly titled Consultation among the American Republics with Respect to the Argentine Situation, but better known as the ‘Blue Book’, it was the work of Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden, whose brief ambassadorship in Buenos Aires the previous year had been marked by the blunt, undiplomatic manner with which he had publicly attacked Perón and the Argentine Government. Braden was determined to stamp out the vestiges of Nazism in the southern continent, even though Nazism had already been replaced by Communism in the American mind as the enemy of world peace and democracy.
The other Latin American nations recognised the ‘Blue Book’ for what it was — an attempt by the Americans to go on fighting a war that was over — and they ignored it. Perón and many Argentines, not all of them Perón supporters, looked upon it as unacceptable meddling in their country’s internal affairs. Eva quickly took advantage of such a marvellous propaganda gift for those final days of the campaign. In her radio broadcasts, which went out to every town and village in the country, she called on all Argentines to repudiate the threat of ‘Yanqui’ imperialism with the cry of ‘Perón yes! Braden no!’ It was an unbeatable slogan and almost certainly won the votes of many indignant patriotic Argentines who would otherwise have voted for Tamborini.
However, Perón himself felt that the election had been won long before the American intervention. Like others, he recognised that the campaign until then had been entirely, for or against him. As he put it, ‘the opposition shouts “Death to Perón”. My supporters shout “Long Live Perón”. We are for a better life, and they are for a moribund one. Those two words — “muera” and “viva” — symbolise the difference.’
On June 4, 1946, Juan Domingo Perón became the twenty-ninth President of Argentina. Restored to his army commission and promoted, he wore the blue dress uniform of a brigadier-general as he stood before the newly reconstituted Congress and took the oath of office, swearing by ‘Almighty God’ to uphold the constitution. Exactly three years to the day after his band of colonels seized the Government, he pledged ‘respect for the country’s traditions and institutions.’ Then, to the notes of martial music and the cheers of a million Argentines, he drove along Avenida de Mayo to the Casa Rosada.
Never in Argentine history had there been such tumultuous crowds. Police and troops tried desperately to keep the cheering mob from sweeping over the presidential limousine. But it took over an hour to make what would normally be a five minute journey to the palace. There, in the White Salon, grenadiers in uniforms dating from the time of Napoleon — red pompon-topped shakos with gold chin-straps, red and gold epaulets, and white cross belts on blue tunics with red-striped trousers — lined the walls of the magnificent state room. Under a huge chandelier, whose light was reflected from gold ornamentation on ceilings, cornices, and doors, the room dazzled with the plumage of diplomats, high-ranking military officers, and their wives. British scarlet blended with the purple of two Cardinals. Rows of medals gleamed from the breasts of multi-coloured uniforms. General Farrell, like President Perón, wore a dark blue uniform with the broad blue and white sash of the presidency across his chest. The transfer of power took only three minutes. General Farrell handed President Perón a mace resembling a marshal’s baton and then placed the colours of office across his friend’s shoulders. ‘I wish you personal success and success for your new administration,’ General Farrell said, with tears streaming down his face. The two men embraced. Beside the President stood Argentina’s new First Lady, Señora Maria Eva Duarte de Perón.
6
EVITA - FIRST LADY
Argentines, among the most socially conservative of all Latins, had never seen anything like it. For them, a lady’s place — and that went for the First Lady — was in the home. But from the moment of the inauguration, Eva Perón changed all that. She encouraged the public to call her Evita in a land where nicknames are restricted to the closest friends. Larger than life pictures of the country’s First Lady blossomed all over the country, carrying her words: ‘I prefer to be simply Evita if this Evita is used to better conditions in the homes of my country.’ Her own home, once an adobe shack in the poorest of rural pueblos, was now the most luxurious residence in the country — the old Palacio Unzue on fashionable Avenida Alvear. It looked out across the wide avenue towards the trees of Palermo Park and the river beyond. Furnished in sombre, ornate nineteenth-century style, its manicured lawns and flower beds of blue jacaranda and magnolias provided an oasis of tranquillity in the heart of the noisy, bustling city.
The Peróns lived there rather than in the more traditional presidential residence in suburban Olivos because they both worked a brutally demanding dawn-to-dark routine. Up at 6am, breakfast together at 6.30, then Eva was off to work with an escort of police motorcyclists, sirens wailing to clear the way and wake her wealthy neighbours on the avenue. In her sumptuously furnished office on the fourth floor of the Central Post Office, surrounded by a battery of secretaries, she would spend her mornings receiving delegations of workers and trade unionists, who came from every corner of the land to pay their respects, and, more often than not, seek her support for a wage claim. Nurses and teachers joined the throng, eager to hear the views of the nations’s foremost feminist, who promised to liberate Argentina’s women from the shackles of their macho society. Senators, congressmen, mayors, even Cabinet Ministers rubbed shoulders in the corridors, waiting their turn to push a cause or seek a favour.
After a quick lunch back at the residence with the General, she was off again, visiting factories, schools, slum neighbourhoods, flying off on quick trips to rally the Perónista faithful in distant towns. Among her duties, she took over the president’s traditional role of acting as a godparent for all seventh sons, in recognition of the family’s contribution to the country’s much-needed population growth. Evita, of course, always made sure that her godmotherly missions received nation-wide publicity. Before the baptismal ceremony of a seventh son in Avellaneda, trucks equipped with loudspeakers announced her presence and urged the local meat packing house workers, her descamisados, and their families to turn up in force. The lucky family would receive a new home; a gift from Evita. For the neighbours, there were clothes, shoes, toys, schoolbooks, and even peso notes.
Not surprisingly, wherever Evita went the crowrds scrambled and fought to get close to her. When she travelled to Tucuman Province in the north-west of the country, where the sugar workers lived in abject poverty, seven people were crushed to death in the rush for gifts, which were always accompanied by a pep talk that could be guaranteed to be full of rousing melodrama.
In Tucuman, the death of the seven sugar workers prompted her to cry out that ‘I, too, like our companion workers, am capable of dying and of ending the last moment of my life with our war cry, our cry of salvation, “my life for Perón”.’ On another occasion, she promised her audience that ‘embracing the patria, I will give my all, because there are as yet in this country those who are poor and unhappy, without hope and sick. My soul knows it. My body has felt it. I offer all my energies that my body may be stretched out like a bridge towards the common happiness. Cross over it with a firm tread and head high towards the supreme destiny of our new patria. Not fatigue, nor fasting, nor sacrifice can be of importance when you are trying to put an end to the fatigue and suffering that dwell in the country’s organs.’
Understandably, sophisticated Argentines shuddered when they heard such emotional rhetoric. But it was not easy to avoid. Not only
were her sayings splashed across the nation on billboards, it was impossible to turn on a radio anywhere in Argentina without being bombarded by the thoughts of Evita on just about everything from tips to combat inflation to lessons on the duties and privileges of citizenship, which were always accompanied with constant reminders that all the wonderful things happening in Argentina were being brought about through the devotion and idealism of their beloved leader, President Perón. Those nightly fireside chats were carried live by the state radio network, and local radio stations throughout the country were forced to hook in by order of the director of the Department of Posts and Telegraph, Oscar Nicolini, who worked in the next office to Evita under her direct supervision. Just what some Argentines thought of their president’s wife and her pearls of wisdom they kept to the privacy of their cocktail parties, although bawdy limericks about her soon began to appear on walls around the city.
Evita was not particularly concerned about what the wealthy, the oligarchs as she contemptuously called them, felt about her. Even without the sniggering, she had a lot of old scores to settle with them, scores that went back to her earliest childhood memories, and she intended to settle them. As a matter of fact, she felt quite confident that the matrons of porteña society would be forced to accept her whether they liked it or not — and she knew perfectly well they did not. She intended to claim all the social honours normally bestowed on the president’s wife in Argentina. So, throughout most of her first year in the Casa Rosada, she waited impatiently to be offered the traditional presidency of the Sociedad de Beneficiencia, the country’s most exclusive charitable organisation, run by the ladies of Argentine society under the patronage of the Catholic Church. It never came.
But Evita was not the kind of person to ignore such a snub. She sent an emissary to the society’s organising committee to enquire why she had not heard from them. With the smoothness and charm that distinguishes the well-bred South American, the ladies responded that, alas, she was too young, the rules of the charity required a woman of more mature years as its leader. With equal silkiness, Evita then suggested that they should make her mother Dona Juana, president. The thought of that plump, little peasant woman, who could hardly read or write, who had given birth to five illegitimate children, as their president may or may not have amused the good ladies. But the answer was the same — no. From then on it was total, constant war. In her fury, Evita set about destroying the society women and their organisation.