Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  As he finished, the chant went up: ‘Evita, Evita’, and the slim, tiny figure with burning eyes and blonde hair, wrapped in mink and glittering with diamonds, stepped forward to the microphones, her arms outstretched to the people below. She spoke faster than Perón, whipping her audience with the shrillness of her voice into a frenzy of loyalty and devotion. As always, she humbled herself before the man she publicly worshipped as a wise, benign, semi-divine king. ‘He is a god to us,’ she cried. ‘We cannot conceive of heaven without Perón. He is our sun, our air, our water, our life. I want nothing but to be the heart of Perón. Because though I do my best to understand him and learn his marvellous ways, whenever he makes a decision, I barely mumble. Whenever he speaks, I hardly utter a single word. Whenever he gives advice, I scarcely dare make a suggestion. What he sees I hardly glimpse. But I see him with the eyes of my soul . . . And I have pledged myself to collect the hopes of the Argentine people and empty them in the marvellous heart of Perón so that he may turn them into realities.’ Then she turned to her husband. ‘The humble people, my General, have come here to prove, as they have always done, that the miracle that happened 2,000 years ago is happening again. The rich, the learned, the men in power never understood Christ. It was the humble and the poor who understood, because their souls, unlike the souls of the rich, are not sealed up with avarice and selfishness.’ Down below the crowd roared their agreement: ‘Uno-dos-tres-quatro/tenemos Perón para rato’ — one, two three, four/We want Perón for evermore.

  If Evita’s words sounded close to heresy in a country as catholic as Argentina, then so be it as far as she was concerned. In her autobiography she wrote: ‘God who could not conceive heaven without his mother, whom he liked so much, will forgive me because my heart cannot conceive it without Perón … I am certain that, by imitating Christ, Perón feels a deep love for humanity and that this, more than anything else, makes him great, magnificently great.’

  No one who knew her doubted she meant it with every taut muscle in her tiny body. There was a mysticism, a ferocious fanaticism about her, and she admitted it. ‘I have dedicated myself fanatically to Perón and Perón’s ideals,’ she often said. ‘Without fanaticism one cannot accomplish anything.’ And she would chide those around her who didn’t display it. ‘We don’t want shame-faced Perónistas; we do not want political neuters,’ was her constant refrain. Her husband, more tolerant and relaxed, seemed content to allow her to pursue her ambitions. At the start of his Presidency, he had given her a desk and few chores to do at the Ministry of Labour. Within two years she was virtually running the country.

  She controlled her own political army of five million workers, her descamisados, members of the General Confederation of Labour, the CGT. Its General Secretary, Jose Espejo, a squat, black-moustached little man, had been the hall porter in her old Calle Posadas apartment when she plucked him out to become her trade union push button. As an intimation of what his function would be, he remained silent during the press conference to announce his appointment while Evita answered all the questions. From then on he spent most of his time, not at CGT headquarters, but at the Labour Ministry where he was at the Señora’s beck and call. She ruled the unions through him. Those that failed to cooperate did not get pay rises. They were closed down, their leaders jailed, replaced by brand new unions led by hand-picked Evita henchmen, the fate of the office workers union in Cordoba, the municipal workers’ union in Buenos Aires, and the farm truckers’ union.

  The taxi drivers of Buenos Aires had been members of an anarcho-syndicalist union that had a history of telling Argentine governments to go to hell. They tried it with Evita. She formed an opposition union, put pro-Perón drivers at the wheel of opposition cabs. When the anarcho-syndicalists still resisted her embrace, the Government instituted petrol rationing and issued cards only to members of the pro-Perón union. Within a few weeks all the cab drivers were members of Evita’s union. They were then able to share in the very real benefits — doubled, often trebled wages, paid holidays, bonuses, rest homes, and holiday camps — which CGT workers were enjoying for the very first time in Argentine history, thanks to their benefactress.

  To those five million workers who would for ever worship Evita, she added four million women, liberated by her from shackles of their traditional subservient place in Latin society. They had possessed few rights, civil or political, until then. In the words of one angry, bitter feminist of the time, they were ‘intellectually deadened by the actions of a society which thinks it dangerous … for them to be able to read and write . . . strongly dominated by religious beliefs, moulded by archaic prejudices, impregnated by a spirit so Spanish that it led man to treat woman with gallantry and at the same time to deny her personality; to value her grace and her beauty but to exploit her weakness and her ignorance, and to have no confidence in her intelligence; to fight a duel when he thought his own woman offended . . . but to shower any woman he passed in the streets with insolent remarks.’ Those were exactly the prejudices that Evita had fought all her life.

  ‘Because I have seen that women have never had material or spiritual opportunities — only poetry took them into account — and because I have known that women were a moral and spiritual resource in the world,’ she said, ‘I have placed myself at the side of all women of my country to struggle resolutely with them not only for the vindication of ourselves but also of our homes, our children, and our husbands.’

  First she had to convince her husband who had lived for half a century without ever having shown any deviation from normal Argentine macho attitudes. In fact, his 1943 revolution had issued a stern call to the nation’s womenfolk to concentrate on family life. For it was a period when office jobs, particularly in government ministries, had just begun to open up for women. But the military government summarily put an end to that. Indeed, such were the attitudes that President Farrell could indignantly complain that demonstrations against the government had been led by ‘persons of the opposite sex who impeded the work of the police, exploiting the circumstance that the latter were gentlemen.’

  With Perón’s old-fashioned charm, there’s little doubt that he would have echoed Farrell’s shocked grumble. But Evita apparently changed all that. When he became President, she saw to it that woman’s suffrage stood high on the list of the government’s legislative programme. But there were plenty of Argentines, Perónistas among them, who showed a marked lack of enthusiasm for the prospect of emancipated women turning their way of life upside-down. The suffrage bill somehow seemed to linger in Congressional committees while other bills speeded through. So, shortly after Evita returned from her European tour, she marched into Congress and told the deputies that she would not leave until the bill had passed. With the Chamber’s gallery packed with women and thousands more outside surrounding the building, the shaken legislators quickly did as they were told. Two days later, one hundred thousand Peronistas flocked into Plaza de Mayo to hear Perón promulgate the new law and to hear Evita assure the women, as well as the men, that a new era had dawned for Argentina.

  The next step was to mobilise the power she had unleashed. On July 26, 1949, Evita brought into being the Peronista Feminist Party. As always now in Argentina, her presence completely dominated the packed Cervantes Theatre in Buenos Aires where 1,500 women had gathered. They were uninterested in the introductory remarks by the only man present, Governor Domingo Mercante of Buenos Aires Province. But they burst into wild cheering with cries of ‘Evita! Evita!’ when she arrived, wearing a business-like grey suit with black velvet collar and carrying a red-lined briefcase. She spoke for two hours, her words constantly interrupted by chants of ‘Our lives for Evita’. She was named President of the Party, of course, and she took all the other executive offices as well. Within days, party offices were springing up all across the country. Even in the smallest of towns, the clubhouse of the Perónista Feminist Party was instantly recognisable by the giant portrait of Evita, bathed at night in neon-light, her face graciously
inclined, a gentle smile on her lips.

  But her hold over the Argentine people went much deeper than the women who owed her their vote or the workman his latest wage increase. It had everything to do with what her enemies called the most gigantic protection racket-cum-slush fund the world had ever seen — her Social Aid Foundation. She had started it with £500 of her own money to compete against the charity run by the haughty, aristocratic dowagers she hated so bitterly. Within three years their charity had vanished because the government, at Evita’s behest, had cut off the subsidy which had been its principal means of support. In the same period, her foundation’s income soared to £50 million a year and had become the country’s biggest single enterprise.

  Every person in Argentina — ambassadors, chambermaids, multi-millionaires — contributed ‘voluntarily’ to the fund. Members of the CGT, controlled by Evita, gave her two days of their pay each year. There was such a howl of protest from the volunteers in the first year that Treasury Minister Ramon Cereijo announced that the foundation would return the money. But at the same time word was leaked that a hurt and angry Evita would be thinking twice about granting any more union pay rises. By magic, the protests ceased and CGT General Secretary Espejo at a special ceremony in the Ministry of Labour told Evita that the country’s workers had unanimously refused to take their money back. Graciously, she told him that she accepted their ‘magnificent gesture’, adding that ‘I had expected no less from my beloved descamisados. I accept their contribution with profound emotion.’ From then on she also accepted a percentage of the wage increases she awarded them, making the rise retrospective for one month with half of that month’s increase going to her foundation. The unions also fell over themselves to make special fund-raising contributions to keep in her good graces — £334,500 from the railway workers, £195,125 from the municipal workers, £167,250 from the tramcar workers.

  Evita also creamed 20 per cent off the top of the national lottery. She received millions of pesos of public funds in the form of state contributions authorised by the Perónist-controlled Congress. Big business gave generously, too, after firms discovered the penalty for not doing so. The Massone Institute, one of South America’s leading manufacturers of bio-chemicals, refused to contribute to the foundation because Arnaldo Massone, the company’s president, loathed the Peróns and was not prepared to give a single peso to Evita Perón. Under pressure he still refused. Retribution was swift. He and other directors of the company were indicted on charges of falsifying the chemical inscriptions of a number of biochemical products. They were sentenced to three months’ imprisonment and the institute was fined £13,567. As was usual in such cases, the police gave Arnoldo Massone sufficient time to pack his bags and flee across the river to join the growing band of Argentine refugees.

  They were soon followed by the directors of the Mu Mu sweet company. She had asked them for 100,000 packets of sweets. They sent an emissary with a message offering to sell them at cost. Back came the reply that she expected them free. When they refused, a government inspector appeared at the factory. His report, published in all the Perónista newspapers, stated that he had found rat hairs in the caramel mixture. The factory was closed and a heavy fine was imposed on the company for operating an unhygienic plant. The judge who handled the case thoughtfully passed the proceeds of the fine on to the foundation. After that, whenever one of Evita’s collectors visited a company that was proving difficult, he simply took out a sweet from his pocket and chewed reflectively in front of the directors. He rarely had to make a return visit.

  There never was any accounting for the money. Fleur Cowles, wife of an American publishing tycoon, visited Evita in the Casa Rosada, and asked her how she kept track on the money pouring into the foundation’s coffers. ‘I put the question to her carefully, saying I presumed she kept a very strict accounting of every dollar spent. “How else will history give you credit for your charitable efforts?” was the way I put it. She brushed history and the accountants aside without blinking an eye. “Keeping books on charity is capitalistic nonsense,” she said. “I just use the money for the poor. I can’t stop to count it.”’*

  Just how much she siphoned off for herself no one will ever know — enough anyway to pay for her priceless collection of jewellery and to fill a number of Swiss bank accounts. But Argentina’s poor certainly benefited in a way they never had before. She built them one thousand schools, poured millions into medical services that had never been available for the poor before. In fact, there were only 57 hospitals in the whole of Argentina when Perón came to power. By the end of 1949 there were 119, most of them bearing the imprint of the Eva Duarte de Perón Social Aid Foundation. Her nursing schools trained 1,300 nurses every year who .went out into the slums and the countryside to staff the clinics that were being opened at a rate of one a week. She operated her own Red Cross, sending emergency aid and medical teams to the scene of disasters not only in Argentina but throughout Latin America. After the 1949 Ecuador earthquake which killed 800 people, Evita poured in relief — doctors, nurses, blood plasma, medical supplies, food, clothing. The young state of Israel received shipments of food and clothing for its immigrants. So did a Washington charity, much to the embarrassment of Americans.

  She built homes for unmarried mothers, homes for the aged, parks and recreation centres, whole holiday resorts by the sea for workers. There was a hotel for working girls arriving homeless in the Big City for the first time, just like Evita not so many years before. She built orphanages for the ‘thousands of little ones, without schooling, without hygienic care, without any home life, herded together in sordid huts and falling ready prey to illnesses of every kind.’ At Christmas time she remembered her own deprived childhood. Through the foundation, every post office in the country gave away a bottle of cider, a loaf of traditional sweet bread, and toys for every family that called in on Christmas Eve. Each package carried a picture of Evita and her husband with a Christmas greeting from them to their ‘beloved descamisados’.

  One of her great joys was a model children’s village which she built in a Buenos Aires suburb. It contained small-scale houses, shops, a church and a bank, plus luxurious dormitories, dining rooms and playrooms. There were supposed to be at least 200 children between the ages of two and five living in the village. But it always seemed to be as deserted as a ghost town whenever Evita took guests there from abroad, which she loved to do. Sniffed Fleur Cowles after Evita had given her the grand tour: ‘It reminded me of a set for a ballet — not for human occupancy. Quantities of expensive toys, most of them bigger than any occupants, were arranged carefully in corridors, in playrooms, in bedrooms. But they seemed nailed to their positions; certainly they were never to be moved by children at play. Beautifully hand-made little dresses and coats were dusty on their hangers in the bedroom closets which Evita opened so proudly to show me. The beds were almost totally untouched. No children scampered through the toy houses, shops, library and school through which Evita trailed us; our heads stooped to squeeze inside the miniature buildings set on the front lawns. “All the children are out on a huge picnic today,” Evita explained.’ Another visitor, a diplomat’s wife, commented afterwards: ‘It’s the wish fulfillment of a little girl who had never had a doll’s house of her own.’

  Wish fulfillment it may have been. But the schools, hospitals, clinics, orphanages were not so easy to sneer away. As one of the more intelligent of her enemies remarked: ‘If we had done for the workers a tiny fraction of what Evita had done, there never would have been a Perón and she would still be a bad actress.’ But they had not. Indeed, no one else had the right to say as she did, proudly, that ‘I spend every hour of the day looking after the needs of the descamisados to show them that here, in the Argentine Republic . . . the gulf which had separated the people from the government no longer exists.’

  The routine of her life never changed unless she was out of town. Up at 5.30, breakfast with her husband at 6.30, audiences in the residence at 8.00, i
n her office at the Ministry of Labour by mid-morning. It looked out over Hipolito Irigoyen Street, only a few blocks from the Casa Rosada. Four vases filled with fresh flowers daily stood on a long mahogany table against the wall. There were three telephones on it as well, one of them ivory coloured — a direct line to her husband in the Palace. It was a small room, 15 feet long by 10 feet wide, with a sofa and three easy chairs, not that anyone ever seemed to sit down in them. For Evita usually spent her morning flitting from reception room to reception room in the Ministry, meeting delegations that poured in throughout the day from around the country. For each there was a battery of photographers, one of them from her own newspaper, Democracia, which published eight pictures of Evita on the average each day, and reaching as many as 25 on her return from Europe.

  On one random morning, she saw the Workers’ Association of the National Grain Elevator Commission, Labour and Social Organisation of the Indoor Workers of the Jockey Club, Society of Cinema Cashiers, Workers’ Protective Association of the National Schools, Food Workers’ Union of Buenos Aires, Lithuanian Catholic Association, and the Argentine Musicians’ Federation. By then her personal secretary, Isabel Ernst, was trying to rush her home for lunch with her husband. He looks after her very carefully. She works so hard. But he insists that she eat regularly. He’s been waiting for her for luncheon since 12.15, and, look, it is now 12.45. He gets very impatient.’

  Both she and Perón usually took a long midday break. But at around 5 o’clock, she would be on her way back to the Ministry to play her greatest role, that of Lady Bountiful. Milton Bracker of the New York Times was there one afternoon and sent his newspaper a fascinating report of her performance: