Eva Perón

Argentine First Lady

• Born: May 7, 1919
• Birthplace: Los Toldos, Argentina
• Died: July 26, 1952
• Place of death: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Perón’s partnership with her husband, president Juan Perón, brought the laboring peoples of Argentina into politics for the first time but also laid the foundation for a corrupt and brutal dictatorship.

Early Life

Eva Perón (AY-vah peh-ROHN) was born María Eva Duarte, the fifth and last child of Juan Duarte, an agricultural estate manager, and his mistress, Juana Ibarguren. At the time of Perón’s birth, Duarte was already married to another woman by whom he had three daughters, and none of his children with Juana was legitimate. One year later he returned to his wife, and Juana was left alone to raise the children while bearing the brunt of neighborhood gossip. A critical turning point in Perón’s life came with the death of her father in 1926. Duarte’s legal family forbade Juana and her children from attending the funeral mass, and the attendant at the church would only allow them to follow the procession to the cemetery at a “respectable” distance from the heirs. The shame and trauma associated with this snub may have ignited Perón’s identification with the poor and excluded.

Perón received little formal education, and her exposure to the world outside Los Toldos came chiefly through the cinema. At age sixteen she migrated to Buenos Aires. Her physical beauty made her stand out in the city then known as the Paris of South America. Her most prominent feature was her platinum-blond hair, so important in a nation whose elite claimed descent from European conquerors. The girl’s constitution was frail, however, and her voice was soft but distinctive. In the company of others she was a natural conversationalist who was little intimidated by rank or money, yet her illegitimate birth made her distrustful of strangers and gave her a marked tendency toward paranoia.

Staying in flophouses and tenements, Perón worked with small theater companies performing in forgettable productions. Her big break came in 1940 when her brother Juan landed her a job as an actress on a radiosoap opera. Perón soon became nationally famous, but her ventures into cinema, while granting her greater public exposure, were not commercially successful, and she seemed destined to spend her life playing mediocre roles.

Life’s Work

Perón’s turn from show business to politics came almost by chance. On January 15, 1944, a powerful earthquake struck the northeastern town of San Juan, killing an estimated ten thousand people. Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, a prominent member of the military junta that ruled Argentina, was put in charge of organizing a national charity drive to aid the survivors. He asked artists and entertainers to help collect funds for the relief effort, and it was in his office in Buenos Aires a few days after the earthquake that the forty-nine-year-old army officer and the radio actress first met. Juan Perón later recalled that what he immediately noticed about Eva, then twenty-five years old, was her intelligence and determination in trying to help the unfortunate. While this account sounds self-serving, there were solid political as well as personal reasons for Juan to link himself to this young woman.

Juan Perón had played a minor role in the coup d’état that had brought the armed forces to power in 1943. Whereas his fellow officers took lucrative positions in the new regime, however, he claimed the post of minister of labor and social welfare. Argentina’s trade unions, ravaged by years of government persecution and the aftershocks of the global depression of 1929, counted for little with the military but could still mobilize millions of members. Juan, eager to run for president once civilian rule was restored, used his office to get close to the country’s impoverished day laborers, los descamisados (“the shirtless ones”), figuring he could rely on their votes. However, as an officer serving a repressive government, he was distrusted by the union rank and file. The colonel needed a political ally well known to the urban masses who could speak to them in their own language. Eva fit the bill perfectly: She was an established media personality, and her own life served as a powerful symbol of how Argentina’s forgotten ones could triumph over adversity. What she saw in Juan was the redeemer and avenger of Argentina’s working class against the oligarchy of landowners, capitalists, and nouveaux riches who stomped on the dreams of the poor. Making their first joint appearance at an outdoor rally for the earthquake victims, the new “power couple” of Buenos Aires began to live together in mid-1944.

Perón soon threw herself back into radio work, this time with a political mission; when Juan assumed the additional offices of vice president and minister of war in 1945, Perón made broadcasts on behalf of her lover, the self-proclaimed champion of Argentina’s workers, soldiers, wives, and mothers. Juan returned the favor by making Perón head of the union of radio employees, a step that alarmed the military establishment, already nervous about her populist-flavored tirades.

The couple’s domestic life also elicited official censure. That an army colonel should keep a mistress was not sufficient cause for public scandal in Buenos Aires. What did raise a stir was the way Perón insisted on all the prerogatives of a wife: to be received by officers and their spouses, entertain politicians and businesspeople at home, and stand side-by-side with her lover at public functions. Government ministers jealous of Juan’s rising influence among the working class used the couple’s “scandalous” relationship as an excuse to order his arrest on October 12, 1945. Eva kept in touch with Juan in his jail cell by correspondence, and through her he gave instructions to the trade unions to rally and demand his release. The armed forces, reeling from factional infighting and a postwar economic crisis, were obligated to grant his freedom on October 17. Nine days later, Juan and Eva married and announced his candidacy for the presidential elections scheduled for February of 1946.

Juan swept into the presidency on a record vote, although allegations of electoral fraud marred his victory. His new bride became Argentina’s second most important political figure. The president gave her virtual veto power over appointments to key cabinet positions, including the ministry of the interior, which controlled the national police. Eva also became owner of an influential newspaper, Democracia, transforming it into an organ of pro-Perón propaganda. After the government granted suffrage to women in 1946, she took charge of the so-called feminine branch of the Peronist party to mobilize female support for her husband. She also played an active role in the General Trade UnionConfederation (CGT) by handpicking its secretary-general. Her influence extended equally into foreign affairs: In 1947 she made a much-publicized tour of Spain, France, Italy, and the Vatican to shore up support for Juan in the face of mounting opposition from the United States, which was angry over Argentina’s nationalization of U.S. property.

Perón’s most important function, however, was to cement the ties between Juan and the working class. In impassioned speeches given from balconies, she reminded the Peronist faithful that their day of delivery had come and that through her person every Argentine laboring man was the leader’s comrade and every woman his bride. The Eva Perón Foundation (FEP), which was subsidized by the government, dispersed food, clothing, and medicine to the needy and built thousands of hospitals and schools in poor districts. However, Juan’s critics charged the foundation with corruption and Perón herself of embezzlement. Her extravagance in clothing and home decoration did not fit well with her stated goal of uplifting the masses, and the ongoing political and economic turmoil that befell the Peronist regime after 1949 made her an easy target for slander.

Juan’s first administration (1946 to 1955; he returned to power from 1973 to 1974) greatly improved life for Argentine workers in the form of higher wages, shorter hours, and medical care, but his mismanagement of the economy resulted in food shortages, strikes, lockouts, and high inflation. His attempt to regulate agricultural production led landowners to cut back on supplies to the cities. Nationalized industries such as railroads and banks were badly directed. Foreign investors stayed away from Argentina, while domestic manufacturers suffered from low customs and tariff duties. Critics of the regime were imprisoned or exiled, and opposition newspapers were shut down. By 1951, although Juan had won reelection as president, a mighty coalition of aristocrats, bankers, the Roman Catholic Church, and old rivals from the military joined together to press for his resignation. Then, while fighting for his political life, he lost his wife and most important ally.

As her husband’s fortunes declined, Perón’s speeches took a hysterical turn, denouncing enemies of Juan everywhere. Listeners could tell something was amiss. By late 1951 her public appearances became less frequent and her voice, although still full of passion, had lost its once-commanding power. Finally, the president was forced to announce that his wife was suffering from uterine cancer and did not have long to live. A death watch started in nearly all corners of the country, with public prayers, pilgrimages, and masses. Perón passed away on July 26, 1952, leaving her husband alone to wage a losing fight to stay in office. Under pressure from the military, Juan left Argentina in 1955, taking his wife’s body with him into exile in Europe.

Significance

Few figures in modern times have passed so easily from history into myth as Eva Perón. Vain, egotistical, jealous, charismatic, generous, and deeply patriotic, she was Latin America’s first true political celebrity, acting out in real life the cinema roles she had always coveted. The myth, however, has obscured much about her historical significance. To her followers she represented the populist side of Peronism, but she was no democrat; her manner in dealing with political opponents was dictatorial and deceitful. She championed the female vote but disdained feminism, insisting that everything she did was for the sake of her husband. She lived nearly all her life in public, often gripped by scandal, but advised women to be good homemakers and moral paragons.

Perón’s tragic death at age thirty-three turned her into an instant icon, but she failed to pass on an exemplary political legacy. Railing against anyone who stood against her as a traitor, she poisoned the atmosphere of a country already sick of politics as a grubby business. With her death and Juan’s banishment into exile, Argentina entered into a dark age, during which brutal military regimes alternated with incompetent civilian governments. Meanwhile, the Peronist party and trade unions lay frozen, longing for their departed father and mother.

Bibliography

Barnes, John. Evita: First Lady. New York: Grove Press, 1978. A laudatory volume written for a popular audience, Barnes’s book stresses Perón’s devotion to the poor. Contains an index but no notes or bibliography.

Brunk, Samuel, and Ben Fallow, eds. Heroes and Hero Cults in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Collection of essays examining ten Latin American heroes.

Flores, María. The Woman with the Whip: Eva Perón. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952. Written by an Argentine woman who relocated to the United States to escape the Peronist dictatorship, this is the earliest and still the most hostile of all full-length biographies of Perón. Although it is a telling example of how she was regarded by the educated middle-class of her country, this volume lacks credibility because it does not include notes or a bibliography.

Foss, Clive. “Propaganda and the Perons.” History Today 50, no. 3 (March, 2000). Describes how Eva and Juan Perón organized a propaganda campaign to win the gratitude of the Argentinian people.

Fraser, Nicholas, and Marysa Navarro. Eva Perón. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. The authors aim to separate the woman from the myth, relying heavily on interviews with participants in Argentine politics from the 1930’s to the 1950’s. Includes notes, a thorough bibliography, and an index.

Guillermoprieto, Alma. Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America. New York: Pantheon Books, 2001. This collection of Guillermoprieto’s articles about Latin America includes “Little Eva,” an article about Eva Perón.

Lerner, Barron H. “The Illness and Death of Eva Perón.” Lancet 355 (June 3, 2000). Lerner, a medical historian and ethicist at Columbia University, provides new information about the illness that caused Perón’s death, revealing that her doctors never told her she had uterine cancer.

Ortiz, Alicia Dujovne. Eva Perón. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. This pedestrian biography written in novelistic prose contains photos and a short bibliography but no notes. It is interesting only for trying to convey Perón’s elegance.

Taylor, J. M. Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. An anthropological study of Perón as myth and symbol. Utilizes periodicals from the 1940’s and 1950’s and interviews with an Argentine working-class family to gauge popular perceptions and interpretations of the “cult” of Evita. Includes notes, a bibliography, an index, and reproductions of photographs and posters from the Perón era.