by Barnes, John
Rumours of sex orgies behind the high walls of the presidential mansion spread like wildfire through the country. Perhaps more than anything else the stories shocked middle and upper class Argentines into a determination to rid themselves of Perón. However, there was little they could do as long as the army supported the President. But then Perón made an error that eventually proved to be fatal. He attacked the Roman Catholic Church, whose faithful numbered ninety per cent of Argentina’s population. It was a move that Evita never would have allowed. Although she had never had any love for the church, she respected its power. She had always seen to it that a priest was on hand to deliver the invocation at rallies of her descamisados. She had pushed legislation to make catholic religious instruction compulsory in the schools, and she never went anywhere without her priest, Father Benitez. But after her death, many young Argentine priests had joined anti-Perónist organisations in protest against increasing repression. What particularly incensed Perón, however, was that catholics had begun to play bigger roles in the trade unions. He bluntly warned the church to lay off. And he followed this with more specific reprisals. He put through legislation legalising divorce and prostitution in a manner calculated to cause maximum affront to the church. His police arrested dozens of priests for desacato, disrespect, and he suspended religious teaching in the schools.
Events moved rapidly towards a confrontation. In defiance of a government ban, 100,000 catholics marched into his own Plaza de Mayo, which the Casa Rosada shares with the city’s main cathedral. As mounted police charged the crowd, groups of priests in ranks of four and five deep on the cathedral steps chanted, ‘Long Live Christ the King.’ On the following day, Perón, in a countrywide radio address, called the ecclesiastic hierarchy a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’. He added: … ‘I do not know if this patient Argentine people may not one day . . . take justice into its own hand.’ Two bishops, accused of organising the catholic march, were hustled aboard a plane for Rome. On Thursday, June 16, 1955, the Vatican answered by imposing on Perón the most dreadful spiritual penalty within its power: excommunication for him and all others in his regime who had ‘trampled’ on church rights and ‘used violence’ against a bishop.
News of the Vatican action reached Buenos Aires at about 11 am. Within two hours, Argentina’s bloodiest revolution in over half a century had started. It began dramatically as noonday crowds strolled in Plaza de Mayo. A wave of aircraft dived out of an overcast sky and dropped their bombs on the Casa Rosada, which Perón had left a few minutes earlier for the Army Ministry building a few blocks away. Then rebel sailors who had gathered in the nearby Naval Ministry attacked the Casa Rosada with machine gun fire. As army trucks filled with khaki-clad troops loyal to Perón rolled into the plaza, the planes swooped over again, dropping another load of bombs that landed in the plaza. But the revolt was all but over.
Only an hour later a white flag fluttered up over the Navy building. Most of the dead were civilians caught in the crossfire and the bombing. Their bodies, 400 of them, lay scattered across the plaza. That night, in revenge, Perónista mobs swept through Buenos Aires, setting fire to catholic churches.
Three months later, on Friday September 16, rebellion broke out again at several points in Argentina, beginning in Cordoba where students and revolutionary army units battled loyal Perónista regiments. Simultaneously, the Navy steamed out of its bases and sailed on Buenos Aires, threatening to bombard the city if Perón did not surrender. Four days later, he fled to sanctuary aboard a Paraguayan gunboat undergoing repairs in Buenos Aires harbour, pencilling a goodbye note to Nelly Rivas: ‘My dear baby girl … I miss you every day, as I do my little dogs . . . Many kisses and many desires. Until I see you soon, Papi.’ ‘He loved me,’ Nelly insisted. ‘He could have been my grandfather, but he loved me. He always told me I was very pretty, but I’m not really, am I?’
Anti-Perónistas, silent, pent-up for ten years, burst out into the streets waving flags, embracing one another, laughing, cheering, chanting ‘Long live liberty,’ repeating the phrase again and again as though they hardly believed it was true. Perónista party centres were attacked and pictures of the hated dictator and his dead wife were ripped off walls and buildings and burnt. Statues of Santa Evita were toppled and dragged through the streets to be kicked and spat upon. Two thirty-ton marble statues of Juan and Evita on top of the new Grecian-style Eva Perón Foundation (handed over to the university of Buenos Aires) were covered in black cloth and then cut up for use by students. The site of Evita’s crypt and monument was dynamited and turned into a children’s paddling pool. The provinces of Presidente Perón and Eva Perón reverted to their original names of El Chaco and La Pampa. Eva Perón City once again became La Plata. In the seaside resort of Mar del Plata, crowds destroyed a flower bed dedicated to Evita and arranged as a clock set at 8.25, the time she died. They attacked and wrecked the Seventeenth of October Hotel, which she had built for workers’ holidays, and tore down a giant portrait of her in the foyer. Political prisoners were released from gaol, and the new military government dispatched a cruiser to Montevideo to bring home the exiles.
There was no resistance from the workers, although they had promised Evita to give their lives for Perón and two weeks before the revolution an order had gone out from CGT headquarters that ‘in the event of a revolt and the defeat of General Perón, a general strike will be implemented, effective until restoration.’ Evita’s newspaper, Democracia, in its final issue warned the military that ‘the people will wait with passionate confidence for the banner of that October.’ But it was meaningless rhetoric. The workers did not march into Buenos Aires as they had on that October 17th ten years before. They were unarmed and they faced soldiers prepared to kill. So, instead, the workers obeyed the military government which ordered all of them to be at their place of work as usual or be declared saboteurs, subject to the penalties of martial law, which included death. In the working-class barrios and slums, women contented themselves with the thought that ‘Evita’s tears’ — the worst thunderstorm in living memory — helped Perón to escape capture and almost certain death as he slipped through the military cordon around the city docks to board the Paraguayan gunboat that took him into exile.
He found a haven in a succession of Latin American dictatorships — Alfred Stroessner’s Paraguay, Anastasio Somoza’s Nicaragua, Marcos Perez Jimenez’s Venezuela, and Rafael Trujillo’s Dominican Republic — before settling in Francisco Franco’s Spain. The military leaders who replaced him in Argentina swore he would never come back. To discredit him in the eyes of his followers, they opened up his homes for public viewing so that Argentines could see for themselves how the leader of the descamisados had lived. The treasure trove included Evita’s breathtaking and priceless collection of jewellery, his 16 custom-built sports cars of every famous foreign make, his 240 scooters, and cupboards crammed with hundreds of suits and uniforms. Police said they had found £5 million in cash in various safes in the two Presidential mansions, the San Vicente quinta, and two apartments, one of them a love-nest with bedrooms lined with mirrors and carpeted with white bearskin rugs. Over a well-stocked bar was written the mocking slogan: ‘Someone always gets assaulted when a poor man has some fun.’ To further disgrace Perón, a military court tried him in absentia for his love affair with Nelly Rivas, stripping him of his rank of general for ‘conduct unworthy of an officer and a gentleman’. Delivering their verdict, the judges wrote ‘It is superfluous to stress the stupor of the court at the proof of such a crime committed by one who has always claimed that the only privileged in the land were children.’
Discrediting Evita was much harder. The new regime displayed her jewels, and her dresses and furs. But that made little impression on Argentine workers because she had never hidden them. In fact, she had flaunted them, knowing that she was the glittering Cinderella princess of the descamisados, the embodiment of their hopes and dreams. The generals worried that her body, lying in CGT headquarters, would become the cent
re of a Perón cult in the way that bodies had become national symbols before in Argentine history. Some senior officers suggested it should be burnt and the ashes thrown into the Riachuelo River. Others wanted to drop the body from a naval aircraft out over the Atlantic. However, Dr Ara, Evita’s embalmer, who had made himself the guardian of the body during the turmoil of Perón’s overthrow, told the army that it was imperishable. It could not be burnt or drowned. But three months after the revolution the body disappeared. It was not seen again for sixteen years.
Even without the body — or perhaps because of its very absence — the mass of Argentine people did not forget. The cult of Saint Evita flourished, dooming every attempt by the nation’s generals to return the government to stable civilian rule. Posters of an ethereal Evita plastered the walls of every town and village in the country. Working-class families kept her picture in their homes, although doing so was grounds for arrest. The wall signs demanded ‘Return Evita to us’, and the generals responded with repression. They purged — even executed — leading Perónistas. They outlawed Perónism as a political movement and demolished the Perónista trade unions. They never hesitated to cancel a ballot or stage a coup whenever Perón’s supporters won elections, which they always did when given the chance to vote for their own candidates.
No matter what course the generals followed — repression or persuasion — they could not root out the memory among millions of Argentines that it was Perón and Evita who had given them a place of respect in their country. As a building worker remembered it: ‘In this country under Perón a worker spoke as loudly as the factory manager. Now,’ he added, ‘we have nobody to defend us.’ Reminded that Perón was a corrupt demagogue who ran a police state totally lacking in basic democratic freedoms, Perónistas responded that they had enjoyed the highest standard of living working people had ever known in their country’s history. When I got married in 1948, my wife and I were so poor that a sip of milk was a luxury,’ recalled Saturnino Astorga, a stockyard worker, who spoke to Newsweek magazine reporter Milan J. Kubic in 1964, nine years after Perón’s overthrow. ‘We couldn’t spare a few pence each month for a bus ride to visit her parents. Then came Perón. Evita gave me this house. My salary jumped fivefold. We lived like people. Thanks to the Peróns’, Astorga said, ‘he was able to buy furniture and a refrigerator, his sons went to government-built schools and ate cheap lunches at government-subsidised cafeterias, his whole family enjoyed a fifteen-day paid holiday, and their medical bills were paid by the state. None of the politicians who followed Perón have done anything for me,’ he said. ‘I am 100 per cent Perónista and always will be.’
A succession of military governments could not reduce that stubborn faith. The years passed. The signs scrawled on the walls got larger — ‘Where is Eva Perón’s Body?’ ‘Give Back the Body of the Beloved Señora.’ The paint stayed fresh. Terrorists killed in her name. Bombs exploded like firecrackers on the anniversary of her death. A former President, General Pedro Aramburu, who had taken power soon after Perón was overthrown, was kidnapped and murdered in a vain attempt to make him tell where Evita’s body had been hidden. The nation hovered on the brink of civil war. The economy crumbled. Shops went bankrupt. Unemployment skyrocketed, and coup followed coup as one military moustache (as Argentines sardonically call their generals) followed another through the revolving door of the presidential palace. Finally, in 1972, the generals capitulated and decided it was time for Perón to come home. But first they gave him back the body of his wife. In Lot 86, Garden 41 in Musocco Cemetery in Milan, Italy, the body of Maria Maggi, an Italian woman who had died in Argentina, was exhumed. The coffin’s black wooden casing was rotting. But the corpse was in excellent condition. It was the embalmed body of Evita Perón.
It had wandered far and lain in strange places over the years. On that December evening in 1955 when it disappeared, the head of the Argentine army’s intelligence service, Colonel Carlos Mori-Koenig led a detail of troops into CGT headquarters on a mission for which they were all sworn to secrecy. They found what they were looking for in room 63. The body lay in total darkness on a bier covered with a blue and white Argentine flag. Colonel Mori-Koenig told the marine guards on duty that he had been ordered by President Aramburu to give it a Christian burial. It was put into a cheap wooden coffin and carried out to an army truck. There it remained, parked overnight, while the colonel waited for further instructions. But President Aramburu had still not made up his mind what to do with the body. He told the army intelligence chief to keep it hidden. For a while it was kept in the apartment of Mori-Koenig’s deputy, Major Antonio Arandia.
Perónistas, aroused to fury by the disappearance of their saint, sent out their own agents on a clandestine hunt for the body. Fearful that the secret of his silent guest might leak out, the major took to sleeping with his service revolver under his pillow. One morning, before dawn, he was awakened by strange noises in the corridor outside his bedroom. He shot twice at a form that appeared in the doorway, killing his pregnant wife who had gone to the bathroom. After that, Evita’s body was moved to the fourth floor of military intelligence headquarters and dumped in a packing case labelled ‘radio sets‘.
At that point, Colonel Hector Cabanillas, the head of the Casa Rosada secret service, took over responsibility for the body, the President having finally decided to send it abroad until passions in Argentina cooled. In September of 1956, the body, still in its packing case marked ‘radio sets’, was shipped to the Argentine Embassy in Bonn, where it was kept in the storeroom, unknown to the Ambassador. It was then put in a coffin and shipped to Rome, where it was met by a lay sister of the Society of St Paul named Giuseppina Airoldi, who had been told that the body was that of an Italian widow who died in Argentina having left instructions for her burial in her home town of Milan. There, under the name of Maggi, Evita was laid to rest.
On September 2, 1971, a man describing himself as Carlos Maggi, brother of the fictitious Maria, appeared at the cemetery with written permission to exhume his sister’s remains. He was, in fact, none other than former intelligence chief Hector Cabanillas, who had long since retired from military service. He looked worried and in a desperate hurry as the body was placed in a hearse hired from a Milan undertaker. There was good reason for his concern. Word had been received from Buenos Aires that a Perónista terrorist group had sent agents to Italy to search for the body. If they got their hands on it they would certainly use it as a symbol in their guerrilla war against the Argentine army, a war that had already cost hundreds of lives. Failure by Cabanillas to return the body to Perón would doom the military regime’s attempt to bring about a national reconciliation.
The Argentine Government sought the cooperation of the Italian, French and Spanish Governments. As the hearse raced across Europe with its precious cargo, it was waved across national borders without the usual customs check. After spending the night in a Perpignan garage, Cabanillas drove into Spain and was escorted by two car loads of Spanish police on the final 450 mile lap to Madrid. At nine o’clock that evening, he passed through the gates of 6 Calle de Navalmanzano in the fashionable Puerto de Heirro suburb of Madrid. Waiting at the front door for him were Juan Perón, his new young wife, Isabel, whom he had met in a nightclub in Panama during his early days of exile, and Dr Pedro Ara, who had embalmed Evita nineteen years before.
They carried the coffin into the house. Cabanillas prised open the lid. For the first time in sixteen years, Perón gazed down on the face of his beloved Evita. Dr Ara recalled the moment in his posthumously published memoirs. ‘Without the least disorder in her coiffure, her hair appeared wet and dirty,’ he wrote. ‘The stainless steel hairpins, now rusted, crumbled in our fingers. The General’s wife began unbinding Eva’s braids to air and dry her hair and to clean it of dirt and rust.’ While Perón looked on, Isabel and Dr Ara cut away her stained white tunic. A fingertip had been broken off. One ear was slightly bent. But other than that and a few minor cracks in the plastic coating,
the body was in the same condition as the professor had seen it last in 1955. As he had promised Perón on the morning after Evita’s death, she had remained incorruptible.
She was left behind in Madrid when Perón returned to Argentina the following year, invited home by the people she had hated with such passion — the military leaders, large landowners, big businessmen who thought he could heal the wounds that had bled their country for so many years. At the age of 77, he was still a commanding presence, the jet black hair dyed but as thick as ever, his six-foot, 200-pound frame ramrod straight, and a smile as dazzling as the summer pampas sun. His booming, spellbinding voice still filled the plaza, and the Argentine people flocked back to his banner in greater numbers than ever before. He was re-elected President with seven million votes, a 62 per cent majority. And this time his wife was elected Vice-President without any argument from the army. But he was too old. Perhaps he had always lacked Evita’s passion, and without it and her he was lost. ‘I’m a vegetarian lion,’ he once said sadly. He was unable to provide the vigorous leadership his country so desperately needed, and he could not put a stop to violent feuding between the right and left wings of his party.
He soon aligned himself with the right-wingers, the old trade union leaders of his earlier years. The young Perónistas who shouted ‘If Evita lived, she’d be a Montonera’ (guerrilla), he dismissed as ‘jerks’. But to the party’s youngsters, who were born after Evita’s death, it was the dead Perón, not the ageing caudillo in the Palace, who symbolised the radical revolution they sought for Argentina. It seemed an unlikely union. Evita was a materialist who believed in homes for the workers and jewels for herself, and it was hard to believe that she would have shown any sympathy for the youthful middle-class university-educated revolutionaries (the Montoneros in Argentina, the Tupermaros in Uruguay, and the MIR in Chile) whose mindless violence provoked the overthrow of democracies and the vicious repression of workers by military regimes in all three countries.