Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  Such vindictiveness caused no concern to ordinary working class Argentines. They worshipped Evita because for the first time they were winning the praise and the awards. When Delfo Cabrero, a Buenos Aires fireman, won the Olympic marathon in London, he wired home dedicating his victory to the Peróns. He returned a hero, and Evita not only gave him a brand new house but got one of the town’s best furniture dealers to furnish it in style. Then she persuaded the dealer to tear up the bill as a patriotic gesture.

  Even the opposition newspapers could not avoid a good human interest story like that, although they inevitably embroidered it with sarcastic comment. But that did not matter. For within a year of her husband becoming president, Evita owned or controlled the four principal radio stations in Buenos Aires and, through her influence over the Ministry of Information, exercised virtual censorship rights over the news content on all of Argentina’s 33 radio stations. She owned two large Buenos Aires daily newspapers — Democracia and El Mundo — bought through the generous help of business friends, and there were many other Perónista newspapers throughout the country which marched to the beat of her drum. But more important than that, she knew how to use radio and newspapers in a way they had never been used before anywhere in Latin America.

  There was never a day when Democracia did not run at least five pictures of La Señora Presidenta in the paper, all of them taken by her own personal photographer who never left her side from early morning until she returned home at night. She also knew how to extract the last possible drop of propaganda value from situations that normally would be regarded as bureaucrat-ically dry and colourless.

  When the national census was taken in 1947, she and Perón devoted several days to popularising the work of the small army of census gatherers by going out themselves into the slums of the city. In each home they visited, the President would take down the statistical details while his wife distributed gifts among the women and children who swarmed around.

  It was hardly any wonder that working people looked upon her as a beautiful goddess. Wherever she went in Argentina men knelt in the dust to spell out Evita in flowers for her to walk upon. She appeared before them at monster demonstrations, a young woman in her twenties, dressed in the latest Paris fashions, draped in mink and glittering in diamonds. ‘You, too, will have clothes like these some day,’ she promised them. From the balcony of the Casa Rosada, she harangued them with a torrent of words that made them ready to die for her. ‘I speak in the name of the humble, the homeless, to cry out against the old evil days,’ her voice would blast out across the packed plaza in front of the palace. Her political philosophy was simple: love for the poor, hatred of the rich. It was no matter that her enemies sneered at the demagoguery of it all. There were millions of Argentines who believed that she was passionately, sincerely determined to give them something they had never known before — respect, dignity, and a place in the Argentine sun.

  It was a respect she demanded for herself, and those who failed to show it were ruthlessly pursued. The unbending bluebloods of the Sociedad de Beneficencia were soon to pay for their refusal to make her their president. Their charity was forced to close down when the Government cut off its annual subsidy, which was then turned over to Evita who had started her own welfare organisation with £500 of her own money. To those rich ladies who had little else to do other than devote their lives to ‘good works’, it was the most disgraceful thing that had ever happened, and worse, their husbands, whose words were once law in the land, had actually allowed that woman to get away with it. Their husbands could only shrug.

  Power no longer went hand-in-hand with money in the new Argentina of the Peróns. Men accustomed through birth, education and family tradition to govern now humiliatingly watched their tongues in front of their maids and farm workers. Hostesses at dinner tables fixed frozen smiles on guests who criticised the Peróns in the presence of servants. The same discretion had to be observed in taxicabs, trolley cars, and offices. Everybody earning a wage in Argentina were Perónistas, it seemed. Cooks put up portraits of Evita and the General on the kitchen wall. Chambermaids listened to him on the radio. Gardeners, factory hands, and office workers joined in demonstrations for him and his wife. It was a time for discretion by people who thought otherwise.

  For the first time since the days of the bloody tyrant Rosas, Argentines looked over their shoulders before expressing critical opinions. They had good reason to. The gaols were full of people who had failed to take precaution, even though Perón had publicly ordered a general amnesty for 14,000 political prisoners on the day of his inauguration. Only a few were actually released, however, and a month later he quietly rescinded the amnesty. But just in case there were still Argentines around who were blind or foolish enough to think that their friends were unduly paranoiac in their fear of eavesdroppers, one of Perón’s closest confidants, Rear Admiral Alberto Teisaire, casually admitted one day that ‘we know that many people express opinions against us even in cafés.’ Asked how he knew this, the Admiral replied: ‘We have people informing us.’ Each week, newspapers in Buenos Aires published lists of the café arrests — those people who had talked too much in their cups. The oyentes, as the listeners were called, did not restrict themselves to bar-room chatter. They tuned in to telephone conversations as well, and the Government made no secret of that, either. After months of speculation about telephone-tapping, the Casa Rosada issued a statement admitting it with the justification that telephones ‘may not be abandoned to the thoughtless or irresponsible. Employing the telephone to insult or offend is a crime which deserves punishment by justice. The long arm of the law and the Department of Posts and Telegraphs watch over the use of the telephone, that its noble and social purpose should not be misused. Such irresponsible criminals will be punished.’

  In the general atmosphere of fear, Argentines were still able to joke about their situation — though they usually did so in the privacy of their homes and only among the closest of friends. One favourite story floating around the cocktail circuit poked fun at Perón’s secret police, the pervasive army of men in gaberdine raincoats who were always conspicuous wherever Argentines gathered. Apparently a tramcar passenger foolishly gave vent to his feelings about a ‘government of petty politicians, rogues and fools, incompetent, corrupt, and costly,’ As he got off the tram, he was tapped on the shoulder. ‘I must arrest you,’ said one of his fellow tramcar passenger, producing a federal police badge from his raincoat pocket. ‘It’s not permitted to speak about our Government that way.’ Thinking quickly, the other passenger angrily told him his hearing was defective, that he had been talking about the American Government. For a second policeman was silent. Then he smiled grimly: ‘No,’ he said, ‘you are not getting away with that. There aren’t two governments like the one you’ve described.’ There was a similar story about the Chilean dog and the Argentine dog. The Chilean dog, underfed and disease-ridden, decided to go to Argentina where there was always plenty to eat. On the Andean mountain pass frontier between the two countries he met an Argentine dog, well-fed and healthy-looking, who was going the other way into Chile. That surprised the Chilean dog who wanted to know why he was going to Chile when the food was so good in Argentina. ‘Simple,’ said the Argentine dog. ‘I want to bark.’

  These stories were harmless enough. But there was one joker who managed to turn both Peróns apoplectic with rage. One morning a sign was found hanging from a lamp-post near their Alvear Avenue residence. Written on it were the words: ‘This post is waiting for President Perón.’ What made the message more chilling was its exquisite timing. It came right after a bloody revolution in Bolivia, which borders Argentina to the north. The President there, Gilberto Villarroel, who had gained power through an Argentine-engineered coup d’etat, was dragged from the presidential palace and hung from a lamp-post in the city’s main plaza. It had been a damaging blow to Argentine pride, undercutting its influence in the hemisphere, and particularly annoying to Peron who had played a majo
r role in putting his good friend Villarroel into Bolivia’s presidential palace in the first place. But there was nothing he could do about it —- his South American neighbours, not to mention the US — were watching Argentina too closely for that, though he might well have been tempted to follow the example of Queen Victoria, who, after being severely provoked by a Bolivian dictator who had manhandled her ambassador and finding there was nothing her mightly imperial empire could do about it, took a pen and crossed the mountainous country off her map.

  But Perón certainly reacted to the hint that some Argentines wanted him to suffer the same fate as President Villarroel. From his presidential balcony he growled that if anyone in Argentina was thinking of starting a revolt he himself would ‘act the week before,’ and he warned that he had the ‘necessary force’ to do so. ‘It is all a matter of giving a few feet of rope to my descamisados and then we will see who hangs.’ To a roar of agreement from the throng massed in the plaza below, he claimed that he had 500,000 workers behind him and, ‘as Napoleon said, with me at the head that amounts to one million.’

  Such indulgent boasting was not Evita’s style. With blunt directness she told her descamisados how to deal with enemies: ‘Whoever speaks ill of the Government, give him what he deserves. Let’s not try and convince him.’ So when naval cadets coughed loudly during a newsreel of Evita, twenty of them were immediately expelled from the Naval College, and when an opposition Deputy introduced a bill in Congress to forbid public activity by officials’ wives — an obvious attack on her — she had him stripped of his Congressional immunity and thrown in jail.

  She embarked on a vendetta against La Prensa, the finest of Argentina’s newspapers. With a circulation of 460,000 a day and 570,000 on Sundays, the paper under the editorship of its owner, Alberto Gainza Paz, the head of one of Argentina’s leading families and an oligarch of the old school, spearheaded the opposition to the Perons. Defiantly, it editorialised ‘we do not need mentors or tutors or prophets or redeemers or protectors or saviours.’ As for La Presidenta, it refused to mention her by name, referring to her in news columns when it had to as ‘the wife of the President,’

  But as was so often the case in battles involving Evita, it was something much more personal that sparked her relentless, uncompromising war with a paper that over the years had earned an international reputation for excellence. And, as with the ladies of the Sociedad de Beneficienca, it was a social snub that aroused her fury. As the wife of the President she expected the city’s major newspapers to automatically cover any social event, cocktail party or diplomatic dinner, she held in the Residence or the Casa Rosada. But even the most glittering of receptions went unmentioned in the society pages of La Prensa, an insult that placed Gainza Paz, as far as she was concerned, in the same category as the rest of the country’s oligarchs who so bitterly despised her.

  ‘I will make them pay for all the suffering they caused the poor — to the last drop of blood left in them,’ she cried as she poured out the bitterness of her feelings from the balcony of the Casa Rosada. Sure enough, La Prensa soon began to pay for its opposition. In January of 1947, pro-Perón demonstrators attacked La Prensa’s gray building on Avenida de Mayo and started fires which were put out by the staff. For a while it looked as though the paper would suffer the same fate as Critica, which during the turbulent October days of 1945 had been attacked with machine guns and bombs and set on fire by Perónista mobs. The editor fled to Uruguay and the owner, a widow, had promptly sold out to Perón. But Gainza Paz was made of sterner stuff. He held on although the verbal attacks continued. Meanwhile, Evita had not yet finished with the ladies of the Sociedad de Beneficiencia. For suddenly a god-sent opportunity for revenge presented itself. The society’s leader, its most aristocratic member, Dona Maria Unzue de Alvear, died at the age of 88. Among her good works she had built and endowed a church, and the family expected to bury her in its crypt. But Evita dug up an ancient sanitation ordinance which prevented the old lady from being buried anywhere except in a cemetery. The family ignored it. But when the cortege set out, it was stopped by the police and turned back. So, with the satisfaction of having pursued her vengeance to the grave, Evita set off on a trip to Europe. Soon she was to be as famous (or notorious) around the world as she was at home.

  7

  EUROPEAN ADVENTURE

  Evita’s enemies — she called them her super-critics — said she was a resentida, meaning she had a chip on her shoulder, that everything she did was motivated by jealousy and hatred for the class who had treated her like dirt as a child. She felt sufficiently sensitive about the charge to dispute it in her autobiography. ‘I fight against all the privileges of power and wealth. That is to say, against all the oligarchy, not because the oligarchy has ill-treated me at any time. On the contrary. Until I arrived in the position I now occupy in the Perónista movement I owed them nothing but attentions, including one group representing the ladies of oligarchy who offered to introduce me to their highest circles. My special resentment does not come from hatred at all.’ Understandably, those who remembered her bitter battles with the ladies of the Sociedad de Beneficiencia, could only smile. They believed she not only hated those women but was determined to make them aware every second of the day that she was going to be wealthier, more powerful than they ever had been or could ever hope to be. Evita’s European Tour made that point.

  The yearly trips to Europe formed part of the lifestyle of most well-bred Argentine families. Although Spain was the ancestral home of many of them, they usually left out Madrid and headed straight for Paris, where they soaked up the culture and spent lavishly on the latest fashions. Evita’s chance to follow in their footsteps came in April 1947 when Spanish dictator Francisco Franco awarded her a high decoration. He announced that ‘wishing to give a proof of my esteem to Dona Maria Eva Duarte de Perón, I hereby grant her the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabel the Catholic.’ Some cynics promptly attributed General Franco’s sudden show of affection for Señora Perón to his country’s urgent need for Argentine wheat. True or not, he soon found out that both the gesture and the wheat were going to prove a little more expensive than he had anticipated. He received word from his ambassador in Argentina that the President’s wife intended to pick up the honour herself.

  Perón’s Foreign Minister, Juan Atilio Bramuglia, had advised against the trip on the grounds that Argentina was currently trying to mend fences with the United States and a visit at that time by the wife of Argentina’s President to fascist Spain would not be looked upon with favour in Washington. But Evita ignored the advice, and Bramuglia was later to pay dearly for having given it. The only other voice raised openly in protest was a mysterious phantom who somehow managed to cut into President Perón’s ceremonial farewell broadcast which was being carried live on a nation-wide radio hook-up. Using a clandestine transmitter which zeroed in to the state radio frequency, the broadcaster interrupted Perón to denounce ‘those who proclaim themselves supporters of a false justice’ before signing off with the words, ‘Death to Perón.’

  But her descamisados made up for that indignity. One hundred and fifty thousand of them turned up at Moron Airport the next moring to bid her a noisy, emotional farewell. ‘I go to the Old World with a message of peace and hope,’ she told them tearfully. ‘I go as a representative of the working people, of my beloved descamisados, with whom, in going, I leave my heart.’ Then, with one final embrace for her husband, she climbed aboard a Dakota of Spanish Iberian Airways, luxuriously refitted for the journey with a special bedroom and dining room.

  Like the oligarchs she used to watch those summers of her childhood getting off the train at the dusty Los Toldos railway station surrounded by a small army of family retainers, Evita took along maids, her hairdresser, dressmaker, doctor, secretaries, and her Jesuit confessor, Father Benitez. Her brother Juan went, too. She also took along 64 complete outfits, several fur coats, and a magnificent selection of jewellery.

  For a girl who had never
been further from Argentina than the occasional weekend trip across the river to the Uruguayan beach resort of Punte del Este with lovers during her early actress days, Evita was certainly travelling in style. An escort of 41 Spanish fighter planes accompanied the Dakota across the coast on the last stage of the journey into Madrid Airport. Guns boomed out a salute as the plane taxied along the runway to the red carpet where General Franco, his wife Carmen, and the entire Spanish Government stood waiting to greet their guest from Argentina.

  There were another 200,000 ordinary Spaniards out there on the airport tarmac who had stood for hours in the blazing sun in the hope of catching a glimpse of the woman whose fame was already legendary. To poor Spaniards, who were among the poorest people in Europe, she was, as she was to poor Argentines, the Dama de la Esperanza, the Lady of Hope from the land of opportunity where so many of them still dreamed of living one day. They caught only a glimpse of her that evening at the airport — a flash of her blonde hair piled high in pompadour style and the shimmer and sparkle of her silk dress and jewels —- before she was whisked off to General Franco’s residence.

  The next day, shops and offices were closed so that Madrilenians could gather in the plaza in front of the Palacio Real to listen to the loudspeakers broadcasting the ceremony in the Throne Room as Franco, in his uniform of Captain General of the Army and wearing the collar of the Order of San Martin that Peron had sent him, presented Evita with the highest decoration Spain can bestow, the diamond-encrusted Cross of Isabel the Catholic. Then, with the Generalissimo and his wife on either side, she moved out on to the balcony to greet the vast throng below. Her hosts were startled by the size and enthusiasm of the crowed. As Evita moved towards the microphones on the edge of the balcony, she turned to Franco with a smile: ‘Any time you want to attract a crowd of this size, just give me a call.’ Then she blew a kiss to the people below and spoke. ‘I come as a rainbow between our two countries,’ she told them. The crowd roared its appreciation and thousands of arms stretched out towards her in the falangist fascist salute. Evita, her shoulders draped in a mink coat despite the sweltering heat of a Madrid summer’s day, responded by returning the salute. It was probably no more than a spontaneous gesture, done without thinking. But, as it turned out, that salute was to cost her nothing but trouble on the rest of her European tour.