by Barnes, John
But first she still had some organising of her own to do. She began putting her family in positions of power. Her brother, Juancito, she placed in the Casa Rosada as her husband’s private secretary, controlling all access to the President, quite a sudden rise in fortunes for a not particularly successful Junin soap salesman. But then Evita was very fond of her big brother. He was a handsome young man in the Argentine mold of the period — jet black hair greased back and pencil-thin moustache — and he soon became well known around Buenos Aires as an escort of the prettiest girls in town. Evita was always having to rescue him from financial and emotional scrapes. But now she had a use for him — to make sure that no one got to the ear of her husband without her knowing about it. As for the rest of the family, she promoted her mother’s friend, Oscar Nicolini, to Minister of Communications. Eldest sister Elisa took over political control of Junin while her husband, Major Alfredo Arrieto, was elected through Evita’s influence to the Senate. Sister Blanca’s husband, Dr Justo Alvarez Rodriguez, a lawyer, became in quick succession the Governor of Buenos Aires Province, a key position as the province contained over half the country’s population, and then a member of the Supreme Court. Even Arminda’s husband did well. He was the lift operator in the town hall at Junin. But one push of the button from Evita and he was on his way up to Director of Federal Customs.
Evita did not forget herself. She moved her office from the Central Post Office to her husband’s old stamping ground, the Ministry of Labour and Social Welfare. Taking over the management of the descamisados, the linch-pin of Perón’s power, she quickly won their love with mammoth pay increases. She was not the Secretary of Labour — in fact, she never held any post in the Government, elected or appointed — not that it mattered. Jose Maria Freire, a glassblower by profession, who was Labour Secretary, soon found himself shunted aside. When the railway workers called and asked for a 40 percent rise, Evita offered them 50 percent. Then the telephone workers put in a request for 70 per cent, hoping for half, but collecting the lot. Understandably, there was soon hardly a single union left outside the protective embrace of Perón’s General Confederation of Labour (the CGT) as workers discovered that pay raises went to those unions which did as Evita suggested. Before long, over five million of the country’s seven million-strong labour force had joined the CGT. The crowds that gathered in Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace now cried Evita’s name with every bit as much fervour as they did her husband’s. And it was her voice which reverberated through the loudspeakers and around the plaza with the message that she was just ‘one more descamisada, the most insignificant of General Perón’s collaborators.’
The General did not think so. He confided to a friend that ‘Evita deserves a medal for what she’s done for labour. She’s worth more to me than five Ministers.’ Of course, he had not been entirely idle himself during those first few months in office. On his first day, he arrived at the Casa Rosada at 7am, surprising employees who were accustomed to the leisurely habits of former presidents. But even before he put on the sash of office he had begun making revolutionary changes.
By decree, the Government seized control of the six great Argentine universities, putting in its own Rectors and ordering an end to student political activity on the pain of expulsion. The banks were taken over. So was the Buenos Aires Stock Exchange —- all first tugs on the noose that slowly had begun to snuff out individual freedom in Argentina but carried out within the legalistic framework of constitutional government.
The federal bureaucracy was put under close scrutiny. Everyone ‘not imbued with the revolutionary ideals or imbued with the precepts of social justice’ soon found themselves without a job. Perón also settled an old score with the Rural Society, the organisation and stronghold of the landed aristocracy. His name had been booed the previous year at the society’s internationally-famed cattle show. Now, as the nation’s president, it was his duty to turn up in top hat and tails to open the show, and he was determined to be cheered, not booed. So, under pressure, the society’s executive committee obligingly resigned and a pro-Perón committee was appointed.
At the same time, he moved against a much more important target — the nation’s Supreme Court. Perón had scores to settle there, too. During his period as Secretary of Labour, the court had overturned a number of his labour and welfare decrees on the grounds that they were unconstitutional, and it had also released several army officers and federal judges who had been thrown in jail by Perón. So, naturally, when the Strongman was briefly toppled from power in the turbulent October days of 1945, many Argentines turned to the Supreme Court with the suggestion that it take over the reigns of government on a temporary basis. But as the generals and admirals argued, Perón vaulted back into the saddle before the move could be made. However, he did not forget what might have been. In his inaugural address, he made it clear that the judges would have to pay for their emnity.
‘I place the spirit of justice above the judicial power,’ he warned, adding that the court did not ‘speak the same language as the other branches of the government.’ Within days, the Perónista-controlled Congress set out to impeach the entire Supreme Court. With fine irony, the judges were charged with having betrayed their office by recognising the regime that had been set up by Perón’s colonels in June of 1943. The chief justice resigned but all four other justices were duly impeached. They, and other judges throughout the country, were replaced by lawyers willing to allow the judiciary to be as completely controlled by Juan and Evita Perón as the other branches of Government. As Chief Justice Roberto Repetto left office he warned his fellow countrymen that ‘a new state power has been instituted above the constitution and above the law. This power has risen on the ruins of public liberties.’
But those Argentines who listened were in no position to do anything about it. The only power that could possibly have done so was the army, and Perón saw to it that the army stayed in line with lavish wage increases for officers and men. Indeed, most of Argentina’s 16 million population was living better than ever as their country prospered from a war-ravaged world’s desperate need for its wheat and beef. Perón certainly showed no compunction in holding up hungry nations to ransom. ‘Either you pay our prices or you don’t eat,’ was the blunt, initial negotiation remark of his economic czar, Miguel Miranda, when he first met a British commercial mission that had arrived in Buenos Aires to arrange a new trade agreement. The British, who were Argentina’s oldest and best customers, were told they would have to pay a 200 per cent increase in price if they wanted Argentine’s meat. The United Nation’s Relief Agency, responsible in those early post-war days for feeding much of starving Europe, was also told that it would not get its promised wheat, corn, and linseed oil until it paid an extra 100 per cent on the purchase price.
As for the Americans, the wily Perón had already seen advantages for Argentina in the fast-growing cold war between the US and the Soviet Union. So when the State Department pressed its demand that Argentina hand over the top 100 Nazis who had fled there at the end of the war, Perón curtly refused, remarking that he would just as soon as do business with the Russians if the US continued that kind of pressure. To drive the point home, he had the Russian trade delegation seated prominently at his inauguration, while his descamisados vociferously booed the American ambassador and the US delegation. Later, Perón gleefully told an Argentine banker, ‘You’ll see, the Americans will soon be down here with satchels looking for business.’
He was quite right. American President Harry S. Truman sent a new ambassador to Buenos Aires, James Bruce, with instructions to ‘go down there and make friends with those people.’ Right behind the flag swarmed the American businessmen just as Perón had predicted. In fact, one of the first big business deals, put together by a Cleveland company, was with an Argentine-German industrialist named Ricardo Staudt, who had been the number two Nazi in the State Department’s ‘Blue Book’. The American company’s comment about that was ‘the war is
over and finished.’ But despite American overtures, Perón never missed an opportunity to make it clear that Argentina had no intention of becoming an ally of the ‘Colossus of the North’ in its cold war with the Soviet Union.
Defining his country’s Third Position’, Perón stated: ‘There is in the world at the present time a conflict between capitalists and communists and we do not wish to be one thing or the other;’ and on another occasion: ‘We will not defend capitalism, in fact, we are dismantling it bit by bit.’ That was not exactly true. But Perón was dismantling foreign capitalist control over Argentina’s economy, a revolutionary and immensely popular move in a country where foreigners controlled close to 60 percent of all industrial investment, and where a third of all profits earned from the sweat of Argentine brows disappeared overseas in the form of dividends.
The British were the main targets for Perón’s economic revolution. They controlled two-thirds of all foreign investment in Argentina. They owned nearly all the public utilities — the Americans had the rest — and they held a virtual stranglehold on the economy through their domination of the meat packing industry, shipping, banking, and insurance. One story, no doubt apocryphal, which could always be guaranteed to drive an Argentine nationalist to fury concerned the Duke of Windsor when he was Prince of Wales. A frequent visitor to the British-owned estancias and polo fields of Argentina, he was reputed to have joked on returning to England after one such trip that ‘I don’t mind what part of the Empire we give up as long as it isn’t Argentina.’
Perón was detemined to wipe that colonialist smirk from British faces. To underline his determination, he travelled to Tucuman, a provincial city in the heart of Argentina where in 1816 General Jose de San Martin, the nation’s George Washington, fathered the formal proclamation of Argentine independence. On the same spot, Perón signed the ‘declaration of economic independence’, promising the Argentine people that he would ‘break the dominating chains which have bound them to foreign captialism.’ Evita added her own endorsement to that with a warning to foreign governments who might try and prevent the loss of their investments that ‘the days have passed when our destinies can be settled thousands of miles from our shores; today we Argentines are the architects of our own destiny.’
Soon enough, the gasworks, the electricity companies, the telephone system — all British or American owned — were in Argentine hands, bought with the fat profits from the sale of the country’s meat and grain. But what the Peróns wanted most of all were the railways, the most conspicuous example of the country’s colonial economic status. All Argentines rode on them to get anywhere in the vast spaces of their land, and nearly all of Argentina’s rich agricultural produce moved by rail. Yet this vital sector of the nation’s economy had been neglected and allowed to run down for years. There were 27,000 miles of track, owned by nine different British companies, and Perón was determined to make every last mile of it Argentine, as Britain’s trading mission quickly discovered when they arrived to buy meat. The British were in no position to pay Argentina the £190 million they still owed for wartime meat purchases. So Perón simply wiped £150 million from the British debt and took over the railways.
For Argentina, it was a day of celebration with patriotic ceremonies, speeches, and firework displays in plazas large and small across the nation. In Buenos Aires, church bells, factory whistles, and train sirens pealed and hooted noisily throughout the day and evening. The architects of everybody’s joy, however, were missing from the celebrations. Perón had been operated on the day before for emergency appendicitis. But he was not one to miss any opportunity to take a bow, even from a hospital bed. In a husky voice, carried by radio and loudspeakers to a vast crowd gathered outside Retiro, the main Buenos Aires railway station, he told his countrymen how happy he was that the railways were theirs. A few seconds later another now familiar voice surged over the airwaves. ‘Comrade Evita was also unable to be with you today because she had to stay at the bedside of the lider of the workers. But you can be sure that both the General and I were with you from here because our heart is permanently at the side of our beloved descamisados who are really forging the greatness of our country. Descamisados mios: I send you an affectionate embrace.’
Evita with her lover a year before their marriage.
The young marrieds in 1946 at their country quinta outside Buenos Aires.
Evita distributing gifts to her descamisados on a whistle-stop tour into the interior provinces.
On the balcony of the Casa Rosada, Evita and Perón greet the cheering crowds in the plaza below.
A glance of love and affection on a formal occasion.
The Rainbow Tour: On a Madrid street with Señora Franco.
Above: Arriving in Rome, brother Juancito by her side.
Below: With President Franco and the matadors.
They made a good team. While Perón handled the diplomats, the politicians and businessmen, Evita looked after the voters who brought them to power — her descamisados. The country’s Indians, so abused in the past, were the first to seek her help. Several hundred of them marched into Buenos Aires after a 1,000 mile trek across the pampas from the sugar fields in the north. They represented some 75,000 Indians living on the fringes of white Argentina. Their ancestors, unlike the fierce araucanian Indians of the pampas, were peaceful farmers who had been quickly absorbed by Spanish colonists for use as labourers in the fields. They no longer even owned the land they lived on. It had been sold by shrewd land dealers to absentee landlords at the turn of the century. Now the owners were trying to move the Indians out.
The evictions, accompanied by the burning of homes and even bloodshed where the resistance was violent, provided Evita with an opportunity to dramatise the sincerity of one of her vote-catching slogans — ‘the land belongs to him who works it.’ So she inspired the march, telling the Indians when she spoke to them from the balcony of the Casa Rosada that the government had stopped the evictions and was in the process of passing new laws that would make the land theirs again. For the landowners those Argentines who had for so long treated the country as one vast estancia, their worst fears about that woman were already being realised. But to the Indians and to all Argentine’s rural workers, Evita’s words were proof enough that her promises made were promises kept.
However, she wielded a hatchet with the same dexterity that she waved her angel’s wand. Even the most senior of Peronista politicians found out that to cross the 27-year-old wife of the president was tantamount to committing political suicide. The first to learn that painful lesson was the head of the Peronista majority in the Senate, Vicente Eli Saadi. He was the son of Syrian immigrants, a true descamisado who had shot up through the ranks of provincial Peronistas via a combination of intelligence, charm, and good looks. But that jump from local Deputy in rural Catamarca to running the upper house of the national Congress must have gone to young Saadi’s head. For he could not possibly have been thinking properly the day he rose during a closed session of the Senate to object to the presence of an ‘outsider.’ The outsider, of course, was Evita. She just smiled, apologised for her error, and left.
A few days later, Senator Saadi was called in to the Casa Rosada, where the President and his wife congratulated him on having been chosen personally by them as the strongest possible candidate to run for Governor of Catamarca Province. As modesty was not one of the Senator’s best-known qualities, he saw no reason to quarrel with that assessment. So he left his Senate seat, returned home and easily won election as Governor. But it was not long before he started hearing rumours from the capital suggesting that he was under investigation for corruption, an investigation ordered by Evita Perón. The word was that he could expect to be removed from office any day. With that knowledge, Saadi came up with an astute ploy to save himself. He assembled his legislature, submitted his resignation as Governor, then had the deputies re-elect him to his old seat in the Senate, where he guessed it would be too politically embarrassing for the Peró
ns to remove him. But Evita was too quick for him, as she was for all her enemies. She persuaded her husband to ‘intervene’ in the Province of Catamarca, which meant putting it under federal control and dismissing both the Governor and his legislature. The intervention was back-dated 24 hours prior to Saadi’s resignation. Immediately afterwards, he was thrown out of the Peronista Party and then jailed for showing disrespect to the president.
Evita’s enemies had a way of disappearing like that. Her memory was a long one for past insults, real or imagined. As her General too liked to play the the role of the goodhearted, lovable uncle, she took care of his enemies with equal gusto. When she could not jail them, she harassed them, often making life so miserable that many fled across the river to the tranquillity of neighbouring Uruguay.
One of their most vocal critics in those early days was one of the country’s leading academics, Dr Bernardo Houssay. He had been jailed briefly during the purge of opponents the previous September, and after the presidential election he became one of the many hundreds of anti-Perón educators ousted from university posts. But then, much to the Government’s embarrassment, he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine. Evita was furious, livid with rage, the more so as the Perónista press for weeks had been campaigning for the award of the Nobel Peace Prize for her husband. So, despite the fact that the award was undoubtedly an historic honour for both Argentine medicine and the nation, the Perónist press embarked on a venomous campaign of personal abuse against Dr Houssay, whom La Epoca, one of the most strident of the papers, called ‘that gland detective‘.