Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  But there was no benediction for her enemies, nor a spark of forgiveness for the conspirators she saw behind every lamp-post. General Sosa Molina’s obsequiousness during his luncheon for Evita did not save his job. He was kicked upstairs as Minister of Defence. Theoretically, he was still in control of the armed forces but in actual fact he no longer had personal contact with any of them.

  Foreign Minister Juan Bramuglia lost his job, too, though no one ever knew just why Evita hated her husband’s oldest friend so violently. Perhaps the international praise for his statesmanship — he played a major role in settling the Berlin crisis of 1948 — provoked the Señora’s jealousy. But most knowledgeable Argentines felt that it was an old score Evita was settling — that she believed Bramuglia had not moved quickly enough to help Perón when he was temporarily ousted from power in October 1945. There were some who believed it was the other way around — that after Perón’s arrest, Evita had pleaded with Bramuglia to help get her out of the country, that he had told her to pull herself together, and he had then roused the meat packers to march into the city and restore Perón to his Casa Rosada balcony.

  Such heretical re-writing of one of the classic stories of Peron mythology possessed some credence. Evita’s old actress friend, Pierina Dealessi, claimed that Evita had hidden in her house during those tempestuous days. ‘She thought they had killed Perón and would probably kill her, too,’ recalled Pierina. ‘I’ll never forget her look of terror when she came to my house.’ Whatever the truth, Evita saw to it that Bramuglia’s name was never mentioned in the Perónista press, not even when he met US President Harry S. Truman or signed a new Argentine accord with Italy. He had to go, and in the end he did.

  Even Miguel Miranda, Perón’s economic czar and the man in charge of the country’s industrialisation programme, found himself hurriedly packing a bag to catch a boat across the river because he had provoked the wrath of the Señora. They had been business partners. In fact, Miranda was the money man behind Evita’s newspaper and radio purchases. But that did not save him. He had made the mistake of confiding to a group of wool exporters that it was not his fault that they were getting such poor prices from the government for their wool. It was Señora Perón who set the price of wool, he told them, as she did everything else in Argentina. As Argentina’s farmers hated Miranda, anyway, for bleeding them dry to keep his industrialisation programme going, they had little compunction in passing on the contents of that conversation to the Señora. Twenty-four hours later, Miranda was resting in a hotel room in Montevideo.

  Others were not so lucky. Eighteen reporters were sacked and blacklisted by their newspapers after the eagle-eyed Presidenta had spotted their failure to applaud her husband’s speech at the State opening of Congress. A young porteño was jailed because he publicly refused to hand over his jack-pot radio quiz show winnings to Evita’s foundation. Even suave, handsome Jose Maria de Areilza, Count of Motrico, the Spanish Ambassador to Argentina, found out what it was like to get on the wrong side of the Señora. When negotiations with Spain for a new trade agreement turned out badly for Argentina, he was peremptorily summoned to the Residence, where he was kept twiddling his thumbs in the hall for two hours. Finally, he heard Perón yell to Evita, wanting to know who it was downstairs. ‘That mierda de gallego,’ yelled back Argentina’s First Lady. As mierda means shit and gallego is the crude Argentine name for Spaniards based on the assumption that they all come from the province of Galicia, Ambassador de Areilza called a servant over and smilingly asked him to inform the Señora that the gallego had to leave but the mierda would be staying. He caught the next boat back to Spain, and that was the end of the three quarters of a million pounds which Franco had invested in Evita’s visit to Madrid.

  Evita did not have a sense of humour, as the Count of Motrico obviously knew when he made his parting remark. But then humour is not a national characteristic of the Argentines, perhaps because of their almost painful obsession with dignidad, a quality which New York Times reporter Milton Bracker once described as a two-way variable, approaching all pride at one extreme and no sense of humour at the other.

  Time magazine, after constant blacklisting, found itself on Evita’s permanent banned list with a story about the ceremonial return to Argentina of the remains of the parents of General Jose de San Martin, the national hero. The story described the solemnity of the rites and ended by quoting a remark by a youthful onlooker: ‘Next year they’re going to bring back his horse.’ To the Argentines it was a national insult. The Ambassador in Washington protested. Demands were made for the expulsion of the Time correspondent in Buenos Aires. Finally, to wipe out the stain, the National San Martin Institute publicly laid a wreath on a monument, not of San Martin, but of George Washington in order to close the incident in a manner best befitting the dignidad of Argentina. But Time, along with Newsweek, Life, and other American publications, were seized at the airport whenever they were found in passengers’ baggage.

  There is no room for a free press in a dictatorship. As Argentina is rarely without the latter, there have been few periods in the country’s modern history when it has enjoyed a truly free press.

  Through her hand-picked minions in the Ministry of Information, Evita had closed nearly 100 newspapers and magazines by 1951. Most of them had died a ‘legal’ death. Some were closed because they failed to observe a government decree that obliged all newspapers to carry at the top of each page — ‘the year of the Liberator General San Martin’. Others criticising the Peróns — like the small daily El Intransigente in the northwestern town of Salta which always called the President ‘the nazi colonel’ — were strangled by a newsprint squeeze, which the government operated because it controlled all supplies of newsprint. But there were other ‘legal’ ways. Los Principios, an influential catholic daily in Cordoba, was closed because the paint on its walls was not fresh enough and some of its windows had broken panes, Sometimes the reasons were more personal. Que, a weekly news magazine, published a cover story on Libertad Lamarque, the actress who once slapped Evita’s face. She had fled to Mexico after the Peróns came to power, and her movies were banned in Argentina. So it was somewhat provocative of Que to put Libertad’s face on its cover. The printers refused to permit the distributors to remove the issue from their plant. It was Que’s last magazine. No printer would handle it after that.

  But Que was a minor matter compared to the Peróns’ onslaught on the country’s largest and most famous newspaper, La Prensa of Buenos Aires. From its grey granite building on Avenida de Mayo, La Prensa had been a thorn in the side of dictatorial governments in Argentina since its first issue in 1869, although Perón had a different view of that, too. ‘For a hundred years,’ he thundered, ‘La Prensa has pontificated with endless lies and imbecilities.’ The first shots in the battle were fired in 1944 when Perón, then Minister of War, closed the paper for five days for ‘distorting the truth and misleading public opinion’. A year later, he briefly jailed La Prensas owner-editor, Dr Alberto Gainza Paz, along with Dr Luis Mitre, the elderly owner of La Nacion, another leading opposition paper.

  La Nacion tried to steer a cautious, non-aggressive line after that. Not so La Prensa. Consequently, nine months after Perón’s inauguration as president, he publicly turned the Perónista mob against the paper. He had four enemies, he shouted from his balcony, the oligarchy, opposition politicians, communists, and La Prensa. As far as Evita was concerned, two of those — the oligarchy and the newspaper — were one and the same. In saying this, she was not far wrong. The editorial policy of the wealthy Paz family and the interests of the land-owning aristocracy usually coincided when it came to deciding the national interest. And La Prensa had never campaigned against the feudal peonage of the country’s peasants or against the appalling low wages and working conditions of city workers! That in itself was enough to doom the paper in Evita’s eyes. But there was a personal grudge to settle as well. The Paz family, like other well-to-do Argentines, simply could not stomach
the thought of that woman as the nation’s First Lady. Her name was banned in the news columns (she was referred to as the president’s wife) and no matter how distinguished her guests, her dinners and parties never made the paper’s society columns. Her pride was outraged and this was a strong reason for harassing La Prensa.

  She appealed for a ‘patriotic’ boycott of the paper. Her Ministry of Information plastered the city with posters reading ‘La Prensa against the country’, and the State radio attacked it three times a day for 28 days. But to Evita’s dismay, she found out that as much as she attacked it so its circulation increased. She embarked on tougher measures. The paper was told that long lines of would-be advertisers blocked traffic. Two boilers in its rotogravure plant were condemned and the paper was forced to close down while they were replaced. A new customs duty, back-dated twelve years, was levied on its imported newsprint. Citing a national shortage, the government removed thousands of tons of newsprint already in the paper’s warehouse. For the same reason it ordered a cut in the number of pages each day, first to 16 pages, then to 12. Armed federal police raided the newspaper’s editorial offices after it published a story on the torture of political prisoners. Perón sued it for libel. Evita decreed restrictions on classified advertising, the paper’s lifeblood. Houses could only be advertised on certain days. On others, only job seekers could buy space. Government employment advertisements had to be run free. And to further intimidate La Prensa readers, people who wanted to place advertisements in the paper had to get government permission, which meant that their names would go down on police files as being anti-Perónista. But Gainza Paz still refused to stop his attacks on the government, and the paper’s circulation continued to soar from a pre-war 250,000 to over half a million. When Evita cut its newsprint supply yet again, porteños passed each day’s copy from hand to hand. In the end, thanks to Evita’s war on it, La Prensa, for all its faults, had become a symbol of embattled freedom, a rallying point for the government’s enemies. It had to die.

  The fatal blow fell during the course of a railway strike early in 1951, the government’s second major conflict with the unions in two years. Evita had settled that earlier newspaper strike by importing printers from the provinces, and many of those strikers permanently lost their jobs. But the railway workers were a tougher breed. Defying CGT orders, 180,000 of them launched a series of strikes that threatened to cripple the economy of the country. Evita talked and pleaded with them. Orlando Martinez, a retired railway worker, remembers Evita climbing aboard a handcart with him to pump their way along the tracks five miles outside Buenos Aires to convince railway workers to abandon the strike.

  ‘When we got there,’ he recalled, ‘she stood up perspiring heavily and said that Perón had sent her to ask them to return to their jobs. They cheered her wildly and the strike was broken. The two or three bolsheviks were left there standing alone.’ That’s how Perónistas fondly remember those days. But it was not quite like that.

  The strike did not end right there and then. But the trains did stop running, and on the walls in poorer parts of Buenos Aires, normally solid Perónista territory, scrawled signs said ominously ‘Viva Perón Viudo! (Long Live the Widower Perón).’ Evita’s newspapers angrily blamed the strike on communists. But strikers on the picket lines shouted: ‘We’re not communists. We’re hungry Perónists.’

  Not only was that true, but La Prensa discovered that the strike had been triggered by a serious conflict between followers of Evita, on the one hand, and her husband on the other. That was dangerous news. But the paper decided to go ahead and print it. However, that issue of January 26, 1951, never reached the streets of Buenos Aires. Acting on Evita’s instructions, the news vendors’ union, a CGT affiliate, struck the newspaper that night. The vendors, who were not employees of the paper but independent businessmen, presented Gainza Paz with impossible demands — 20 per cent of the paper’s classified advertising income, the abolition of home subscriptions, and the turning over to the vendors of the entire press run of each issue. That, of course, would have placed La Prensa firmly under Evita’s control. But the publisher refused to knuckle under. Nor would his workers, though most of them were union members themselves. Thirteen hundred of them — editors, reporters, printers, machine-room men, drivers, and clerks — issued a statement saying that they had no quarrel with their boss and they wanted to go back to work. ‘This adhesion to the paper is determined fundamentally by the ideals of liberty and democracy which inspire the orientation of La Prensa . . . We have no conflict with the paper.’

  By the end of February it was obvious to La Prensa’s workers that Evita was not going to allow the strike to end. So they tried to march back to work through the picket line set up by the CGT. The pickets opened fire, killing a printer and wounding 14 other La Prensa employees. Two months later, Congress expropriated the paper and handed it over to the CGT. A neon-lighted placard went up over the main entrance, proclaiming ‘Ahora es Argentina! (Now it is Argentine!)’ On top of the building, La Prensa’s famous torch of freedom was covered by giant tinted portraits of Perón and Evita. From his balcony at the Casa Rosada, Perón told crowds still as large as ever in the plaza below that: ‘This newspaper, which for so many years exploited the workers and the poor, which was a refined instrument serving national and international exploiters in the crudest treason to our country — this newspaper shall make up for its crimes by serving the workers and defending their gains and rights.’ The ‘arch-criminal’, Alberto Gainza Paz, fled across the river to Uruguay just one step ahead of the federal police. All newspapers in the United States, Canada, and Latin America (except in Argentina) flew flags at half-mast in mourning for La Prensa. Evita, with the opposition securely muzzled now, moved ahead with her plans to become Vice-President of Argentina.

  12

  ‘MY LIFE FOR PERON’

  Two one-legged men, one minus his right leg, the other his left, rode bicycles from Sunday to Friday. Another man drove his car around his neighbourhood for 123 hours and 10 minutes without stopping. A chauffeur from the Ministry of Education topped that by driving continuously for 129 hours and five minutes. A third motorist made a shorter run — backwards. Mario Aldo Tordo and his wife, Delia, carried their baby daughter, Maria, on foot over one-fourth the length of Argentina. He wore a sweat shirt inscribed ‘Perón Keeps His Promises‘; the front of her shirt read, ‘Evita Dignifies’. One man walked across the pampas with a bag of wheat on his shoulder. And Juan Martin, a municipal employee from the town of Santa Fé walked atop a rolling barrel from the city of Rosario to Buenos Aires — a distance of 222 miles. All of them had one thing in mind — they wanted to publicise their wish that Evita should become Vice-President of Argentina.

  The date of the election had been brought forward from February, 1952, to November 11, 1951. The months were rolling by and still the Señora had not publicly announced her willingness to accept the honor her descamisados wanted to confer on her. Troubles with the raiiwaymen — several hundred were goaled and a number tortured before that strike came to end — did not seem to have diminished her popularity. And her schedule was as killing as ever. During one three-day period, she drove to Rosasio, 190 miles from the capital, made three speeches, opened a railway workers’ housing project, and drove home; the next morning she flew to San Juan, 750 miles away, to attend the funeral of the Governor. On the third day she was up at 5.30 as usual, held an audience at the residence at 8 o’clock, was in her office by 11 o’clock, attended a meeting of brewery workers in the afternoon and a meeting of railway workers in the evening. Then at 11 o’clock that same night she set off on a five-day trip deep into the interior — attending the inauguration of the Governor of Tucuman, opening a new school and a children’s clinic in Jujuy, another school in Catamarca, and distributing gifts to children in a park in Cordoba.

  She was on the move so much that she said her husband had begun to scold her for keeping such impossible hours. One of the reasons for this was that she
preferred to drive home from long trips with her bodyguards rather than fly, often getting back to the residence in the small hours of the morning. Then she usually invited the lads in for a drink (she drank little herself and did not smoke although she had her own carmine-tipped cigarettes) and they would talk politics until an angry President yelled down the stairs at them: Get rid of those damned atorrantes (bums)!’ At that point Evita would shoo them out of the front door with a ‘Raja muchachos (hurry up boys), the old man’s getting mad’.

  Such was the pace of her life that her blonde beauty had taken on a glacial withdrawn quality, giving her face more and more the appearance of a mask. Fleur Cowles, when she saw her, thought she had a strained, tired look — ‘the greenness of her skin could only be some sort of warning. I thought she must have had a touch of jaundice … the gossip in Paris by Argentine friends was that she was dangerously ill with leukaemia.’ If so, she gave no hint of it in the fierce pace of her life. When a US Assistant Secretary of State visited Argentina, Evita almost caused him to have a heart attack as she raced him up and down seven flights of stairs to show him every last room in a new 600 bed hospital built by her foundation.

  She also found time to march into the Casa Rosada at the head of a small army of her Perónista Woman’s Party to present her husband with a gold watch and a demand that he run for President again. He thanked her, but did not say anything about the Vice-Presidency. After all, the country already had a Vice-President, 74-year-old Hortensio Jazmin Quijano, although he was a sick man and in hospital. He did not want to run again, and there was some talk among a few top Peronista officials that Perón’s old friend and army colleague, Colonel Domingo Mercante, the Governor of Buenos Aires Province, should get the nod. But Evita’s loyal allies in the CGT had different ideas. They announced plans for a monster rally to be held on August 22 in the 450-foot wide Avenida Nueve de Julio and they promised that two million Argentines would be there to proclaim Juan Perón and Evita Perón as their candidates for the nation’s two top jobs.