Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  But there were indications that the country was not unanimous in its mourning. At the University of La Plata, not far from Buenos Aires, students burned a crepe hanging in front of their dining room door. When the dean directed that as an act of penance all students wishing to use the restaurant, which had special low prices, would have to wear black ties and armbands, the students simply stayed away from school for a week — a pretty mild and harmless expression of protest. But anything more outspoken would certainly have drawn down the wrath of outraged Peronistas on their heads. As it was there were numerous examples of petty nastiness against those who did not show sufficient respect or fervour in their mourning. Carlos Aloe, the fanatical Governor of Buenos Aires Province, fired an employee who refused to wear a black tie. A Buenos Aires youth was arrested for laughing on a street car. The director of one of the city’s major hospitals was dismissed for lack of respect because he had continued to work during the mourning period. ‘Attitudes like these are anti-social,’ said Aloe.

  But the frenzied scenes around the Ministry of Labour had apparently scared even many devoted Peronistas. When the body was moved August 9th to the National Congress Building, a great segment of the city’s populace stayed away from the mile-long processional route. At regular intervals, the State Radio pleaded with its listeners to get out on to the deserted streets and watch the mournful parade. Evita, in fact, was being given all the full military honours that normally in Argentina are accorded to a president who dies in office. As an army band began to play Chopin’s Funeral March, troops lined two deep along the 14-block route from the Ministry of Labour to the Congress presented arms. Behind a detachment of mounted grenadiers, three files of men and women workers in white shirts and black trousers drew an ancient gun carriage on which was mounted the tiny, silver-encrusted, mahogany coffin. Following right behind, President, Perón led the cortege of mourners — Cabinet Ministers, members of Congress, labour leaders, and senior officers of the armed forces. On each side marched files of cadet nurses from the Eva Perón Foundation, students, workers, and leaders of the Peronista Feminist Party.

  Evita remained at the Congress Building for only one day, a Snow White-like figure, dressed in a flowing white tunic, her blonde hair resting neatly on a small white pillow, looking as though all she needed was a kiss from one of her faithful descamisados to bring her to life. The next day the workers came for her. But first the nation’s top political leaders delivered themselves of a final outpouring of oratorical grief. Interior Minister Angel G. Borlenghi described Evita as the ‘martyr of labour, protecting saint, haven for the humble, sun of the aged, and good fairy to the children.’ Always considering herself as the equal of the most humble, Señora Perón fought to improve their lot and gave not charity but justice to the poor, he continued. ‘In the orchestra of government, Eva Perón was the diapason of justicialist purity — the pure gold. She was the tuning fork to sound any government measure. If she was happy with it the people would be happy with it, too. If she was mild so also the people. If she rejected it the people would reject it. She was the quintessence of the people’s feeling.’ With her passing the task that had devolved upon the people was to serve General Perón unconditionally, Señor Borlenghi declared. Placing a hand on the coffin and gazing down at the still figure, he concluded: ‘We swear for our fatherland and you, Eva Perón, to continue struggling to be loyal to Perón and to give our lives to Perón.’

  Other speakers were equally flowery. Dr Rudolfo Valenzuela, speaking for the Argentine Supreme Court, described Evita as having possessed ‘the unbreakable faith of the missionary, the unbending courage of the fanatical soldier, the overwhelming passion of the politician and the suave tenderness of the woman in love.’ Argentine justice would be guided by the tenets she held and demonstrated, he promised. Then Juana Larrauri, Evita’s right-hand woman in the Feminist Party, sobbed out: ‘For us you have not died. You are the eternal burning torch, guiding us on our way.’ Finally, the small coffin was once again carried out into the street, mounted on a gun carriage and drawn by fifty workers through two miles of the city’s main streets to the headquarters of the National Confederation of Labour near the waterfront. Unlike the day before, this time the route was lined by hundreds of thousands of sorrowing, weeping Argentines. Two CGT floats bearing flaming torches and the slogan, ‘The flame of your memory will forever live in our hearts’, preceded the coffin with the workers on them strewing flowers and petals in front of the wheels of the gun carriage. Yet more flowers rained down from the packed windows of the buildings lining the path of the cortege. As it drew up to the wreath-covered entrance to the labour headquarters, a 21-gun salute thundered out and Lincoln bombers and Meteor jets streaked low overhead.

  As Juan Perón, his face etched with the lines of grief, handed over the body of his wife to CGT Secretary-General Jose Espejo, he must have known as he looked down at her that he was parting with her share of his power. If he did not, then Espejo made it clear right then and there. On the steps of the magnificent union headquarters that Evita had built, Espejo promised: ‘Upon receiving the remains of Eva Perón, I swear to be their custodian today, tomorrow and forever.’ Anyone knowing Espejo knew that this was more a threat than rhetoric. His words carried the plain implication that from now on, anyone, including President Perón himself, who sought to curb the CGT leadership and the spoils of the Eva Perón Foundation would have to take on the guardians of Evita — the theory being that in a crisis her corpse could generate far more political magic with the Argentine people than a living Juan Perón. He had inherited a myth which in the years to come he was going to find impossible to live with.

  14

  SAINT EVITA?

  On August 1, 1952, the union of food workers cabled Pope Pius XII asking ‘in the name of 160,000 members that Your Holiness initiate the process of canonisation of Eva Perón.’ To support this request, the union told of a little girl paying her last respects, who said: ‘Eva was a saint. I know because she cured my mother.’ It added: ‘Many sick are now well, many sorrowful are happy because of her.’ The Vatican response was quick, smooth, and predictable. ‘While in the case of Señora de Perón the civic virtues were practised in an evident way,’ said a Vatican spokesman, choosing his words carefully, ‘nothing is known about her religious virtues, and, at first sight, there seems not to have been any of the heroism required by the church in such matters.’

  The church, it appeared, did not seem to believe that a woman who had known as many lovers as Evita before marriage was quite suitable material for sainthood. But it did not really matter. She already was a saint to hundreds of thousands of elderly Argentine women around the country who had set up shrines to her in their homes. The government, too, was planning a shrine — the world’s biggest. Her embalmed remains were to be kept permanently on view in a crypt patterned after Napoleon’s tomb which was to be topped by a 450-foot statue of a descamisado in Carrara marble. But while Italian sculptors chipped away on that four-year project, in Buenos Aires the Evita legend seemed to be quietly but rapidly receding into the mists of history. More than two months after her death, the Association of Friends of Eva Perón’, founded in the first hour of grief by high-placed Peronistas, had yet to hold its first meeting. The film Evita Immortal, released shortly after her death, had been withdrawn from circulation after only a short run. Press and radio had drastically reduced the amount of time and space devoted to her. The President himself never mentioned her name in public speeches anymore. It looked as though the widower in the Casa Rosada was trying to exorcise the ghost around him.

  Nine months after Evita Peron died, her brother, Juan Duarte, her adored Juancito, was dead, too, found in his bedroom with a bullet in the brain, a gun beside him. Officially it was a suicide. But when his mother, Juana Ibarguren, heard the news she screamed, ‘He has murdered my two children.’ Word of her outburst spread like lightning through the city. There was no doubting at whom she was pointing the finger. Only three d
ays before, Peron had forced his brother-in-law to resign as his private secretary after publicly stating that he would imprison any dishonest official even if it happened to be his own father (who had died when he was a child).

  There was no Evita to protect Juan Duarte this time, or to save the other men she had so carefully placed in positions of power. Jose Espejo was already gone from the CGT, fired within weeks of his emotional outburst over her coffin when he swore to be the custodian of her bones for ever. Hector Campora, her loyal servant in Congress, had been forced to resign as President of the Chamber of Deputies. Jose Maria Freyre, her hand-picked Minister of Labour, had also been ousted. And Evita’s enemies were returning to positions of power even as Dr Ara put the finishing touches to her immortality in his laboratory at CGT headquarters.

  In fact, Duarte was doomed from the moment that the new CGT General Secretary, Eduardo Vuletich, arrived at a Cabinet meeting arm-in-arm with Minister of Defence, General Sosa Molina, who had never forgotten or forgiven his humiliation at Evita’s hands. Vuletich complained about the corruption spreading through the country and accused the President’s private secretary of using the power of his position to enrich himself. When another Cabinet minister offered a timid defence of Duarte, General Sosa Molina ordered him to shut up. Then, for the next couple of hours, Perón was given a detailed account of how his brother-in-law had put together a fortune worth twelve million pounds according to some estimates — quite an accomplishment for a man who only nine years earlier had been earning £12 a month as a soap salesman.

  Above: Voting for her husband from her sick bed in the Presidential election, November 11, 1951.

  Below: Evita’s last public appearance as Juan Perón takes the Presidential oath of office, June 4, 1952.

  Queueing in the pouring rain to see Evita’s body lying in state in the Ministry of Labour after her death, July 26, 1952.

  The whole nation seemed crazed with grief.

  Flowers piled 20 feet high up the side of the Ministry’s walls.

  For 16 years Evita’s body lay in this Milan grave.

  Reunited: Juan and Evita side by side in the Presidential chapel in Olives, December 10, 1974.

  Finally laid to rest, October 22, 1976, in the Duarte tomb in Recolete cemetry, Buenos Aires.

  Evita: in life and death.

  Perón expressed shock and fury, though he had only himself to blame if he really was ignorant of what had been going on. With the press muzzled and criticism a passport to gaol, a dictator only hears what the men around him want him to hear. But Perón must have known what Duarte was up to. Dr Ivan Ivanessevich, an old friend who had taken out his appendix and had also written his party’s marching song, the ‘Perónista Boys’, recalled twenty years later how he had resigned as Minister of Education and had taken the boat to Uruguay when he discovered that businessmen had to bribe Juan Duarte in order to see the President. But Perón had not been at all shocked when he told him at the time. ‘Look Ivan,’ the surgeon remembered his President telling him, ‘the British Empire was built by good men and pirates and I’m going to build the Argentine empire with good men and pirates.’

  But Juan Duarte was a pirate whose time had come to walk the plank. For Perón had a score to settle with him. Soon after Evita’s death, the President discovered that his wife had for three years before her death systematically dispatched suitcases full of jewellery and cash worth possibly six million pounds to a bank vault in Switzerland. He sent Duarte off to Europe, either to find the key of the bank vault or to persuade the Swiss to transfer the fortune to his name. Under Argentine law, he was supposed to divide that wealth with Evita’s mother. Duarte, however, carried with him a power of attorney from Perón — a document signed by the President of the Supreme Court certifying that Evita’s mother had waived all rights to her estate. Accompanied by Hector Campora, he was gone a month, but returned without any apparent success. Then, in April of 1953, just 24 hours before the Cabinet confrontation, Duarte was betrayed by a jilted girl friend, Maliza Zini, one of the many actresses whose company he kept in Buenos Aires. She got word to Perón that his brother-in-law had ‘liquidated’ a great deal of Evita’s jewellery while in Europe. She added bitterly that he had given a temporary girl friend a gem worth £2,500 while staying at the Excelsior Hotel in Rome.

  Perón demanded and received Duarte’s resignation during the Cabinet meeting. Reading the signs, Evita’s brother decided it was time to clear out. He drove to the airport to catch a plane to Spain. But the police were waiting for him and took his passport away. Then he tried in vain to rent a motor launch to escape across the river to Montevideo. The next evening he had friends in for dinner at his apartment: Dr Raul Margueirate, chief of protocol at the Foreign Ministry, Raul Apold, sub-secretary of Press and Information, and his personal doctor. They stayed with him until 12.30. The next day, at 7 o’clock, the Minister of Industry, Rafael Amundarain, arrived at Duarte’s apartment and found him lying across his bed in a dressing gown, a bullet through his skull.

  The medical examination by the police established that death was caused by a .45 automatic, a weapon used by the army and police. He had died sometime between 12.30 and 2 am. Perón was told at 10 o’clock and paid a short visit six hours later to the bier of the man who had been his private secretary for seven years. But Juan Duarte’s mother was not at the wake. Nor was her name mentioned in the official condolences. The official announcement that the death was a suicide was made later that day, and the next morning Duarte was buried. It was only then that a police surgeon quietly let it be known that the bullet had been fired from such a distance as to rule out suicide. Another bit of information slipped out: the dead man’s office had been ransacked on the morning of his death by federal agents. No reasons were given. Presumably the agents were looking for the keys of Evita’s vault in Switzerland.

  The President did not attend Juan Duarte’s funeral. He had other crises to cope with — high prices, meat shortages, corruption. The country was sinking deeply into an economic quagmire. And without Evita he was lost. He could still produce the words in that deep, rich voice, vibrating and echoing around the plaza. In earlier days that would have been enough to send the crowds away laughing and contented. ‘Corruption,’ he snorted, ‘the administration has always had these small abnormalities of disposing of more revenue than has been estimated.’ High prices! ‘Look,’ he lectured, ‘I can’t have enough police to take care of eighteen million dunces who let themselves be robbed.’ But the rhetoric was not enough. He could not talk away the discontent, although he tried wilder, more hysterical demagoguery, and his police filled the gaols with those who complained.

  But now his enemies were doing more than just complaining. The weekend before Juan Duarte’s death, two bombs exploded in the Plaza de Mayo as the President spoke to thousands of his faithful descamisados massed below. Six people were killed by the blasts or were crushed to death in the stampeding, terrified crowd. Perón pleaded with them to stay calm. But then he seemed to be carried away by the frenzy of the moment. ‘Go out and club them, hang them,’ he shrieked. Obediently, his supporters poured through the city streets. No one died. But the Jockey Club, the palatial five-storey building on Calle Florida, the symbol of the country’s aristocracy, was burnt to the ground, wiping out one of the finest art collections and libraries in the nation and a wine cellar considered South America’s best. The headquarters of the opposition Radical and Socialist Parties were also set to the torch, the petrol supplied by teams of brown-shirted youths wearing the arm-bands of the fascist National Alliance while federal police looked the other way.

  That was not Evita’s style. She preferred to humiliate the aristocracy, getting her beloved descamisados to hoot with laughter with her as she stank the members of the Jockey Club out of their fortress by placing a fish stall in front of the club in the height of summer the year before she died.

  But it was more than her street-wise guile that was gone. She had ruled the Casa
Rosada and the country with a fierce passion. Even in her last illness, she had still been able to summon up short bursts of the temper that had made Cabinet Ministers tremble. She even raged at Perón at times. Whenever he feels down in spirits, I kick him up,’ she once said. She fought his natural indolence and her driving spirit forced him on. Without her, he became in no time at all an old fashioned run-of-the-mill Latin American military dictator, relying on the violence of his followers to curb his enemies while he indulged in the pastimes he had been forced to abandon from the day he met Evita.

  He had cut his Presidential office duties to the morning hours and was usually on his way home to the Olivos residence by noon. He had turned the eucalyptus-shaded estate into a recreation centre for high school girls. ‘Just call me Pocho,’ he told the girls. Crews of workers added tennis and basketball courts, a swimming pool, open-air theatre and riding stables. So that the girls could go to the nearby river beach without crossing a busy street, Perón had a costly tunnel dug.

  He spent hours watching the girls play basketball, and he would ride around the grounds with them on scooters, which for ever after in Buenos Aires were known as pochonetas. He also let them use the mansion as a clubhouse. ‘It’s too big for a lone man like me,’ he said. He was not lonely for long. A pretty thirteen-year-old brunette named Nelly Rivas caught his eye and she soon became his mistress in a love nest he had built in the basement of the Olivos mansion. He showered her with jewels and built a small concrete house in the suburbs for her parents (years later when friends asked him how he could have defiled the memory of Evita with a thirteen-year-old, he joked, ‘So she was thirteen. I’m not superstitious’).