The biography

Eva Duarte de Perón: ruthless woman in pursuit of power or advocate of the poor, whore or saint? She is one of those historical figures that manages to sharply divide people who pause to consider their significance. Evita, as she was affectionately referred to by everyone, rose from extreme poverty to become one of the most powerful women of the 20th century. Born in an old dirt town, La Unión (Pampa), in 1919 to a mother who was the lifelong mistress of a local married landowner and had five children altogether out of the wedlock, Eva quickly resolved to leave behind these poor beginnings. She dropped out of school and moved to Buenos Aires to become a movie star, just to be seduced by a tango singer at age 15.

Once in the big capital, Eva was sustained by multiple lovers since a very young age. In the meantime, she did some modeling and cultivated a glamorous look that would stay with her for a lifetime. Nevertheless, her career did not improve much until she decided to bleach her hair blonde, which oddly enough ended up getting her a role in a radio soap opera. Then, in 1944 she met Juan Domingo Perón, young officer and Secretary of Labor at age 48, who was rumored to have some strong presidential ambitions. She was 24 at the time, and every bit as ambitious as he. Rumors about their relationship spread across high society in Buenos Aires, helping improve Eva's career and getting her a role in some movies. As an actress, she was not really very good but still behaved like a prima donna, which sometimes got her into trouble. This is the main reason behind her competition with Libertad Lamarque, big movie star at the time, who would later see her career all but end when Perón was in power. The couple lived together for one and a half years until 1945. Perón was very popular in the Army, and also among the working class as a consequence of his years in the Ministry of Labor, which prompted the decision to arrest him when the President saw him as a dangerous rival. It was a miscalculation though, since news of his arrest led to a wave of mass protests that ended in his liberation. This somehow improvised show of force on behalf of the descamisados (the shirt-less, the poor working class) also started one of the longest living legends about Evita: that she was the mastermind behind the national protests. There is little evidence to support this view though, but that does not appear to matter much when a given historical figure becomes larger than life. In any case, Perón married Eva in 1946 in a secret civil ceremony, thus breaking all traditions and committing the social sin of marrying a mistress who came from humble beginnings.

Perón run for President in 1946 and won by a landslide. He quickly built the strong support of the working class by raising wages and nationalizing British railroad and utilities. On the negative side, he also laid the foundations of a totalitarian state inspired by Mussolini (Perón was a big fan of the Italian Fascist dictator) that drove thousands into exile. From the very beginning, Evita took revenge on her past enemies, including Libertad Lamarque who all of a sudden could not find any suitable role to play on the screens. She also took on a very active role in her husband's administration, which broke yet another taboo of the time. Evita had an office in the Labor Ministry where she held audience, gave favors, contracts and jobs. Some men in power, not used to this highly unorthodox role in the wife of a President, disliked Eva since the very beginning but with her mixture of glamour and populism she was too powerful for anyone to pick on her. She seduced the crowds with her claims to be "one of the poor" and helped solidify support for her husband's regime.

In 1947, Eva Duarte embarked on a three month goodwill tour of Europe that would end with mixed results. Spain's Franco, hungry for international approval, treated her like royalty. A reception with the Pope in Rome, on the other hand, was significanly cooler. Her reception in Paris was just as cool, and finally the British royal family refused to receive her at Buckingham Palace, which was taken by Evita as an affrent. To make matters worse, Time magazine published during her trip an article where she was described as an illegitimate child, causing some anger in her and leading Juan Domingo to prohibit the magazine from being sold in Argentina for four months.

In any case, Evita was welcome back in Buenos Aires by a crowd of hundreds of thousands, definitely making her the most powerful woman in Latin America at the time (and perhaps to this day). While the Argentinian elite still saw her as a pariah, she dressed up with furst and jewels to boost her image in front of the crowds, showing how it is after all possible to rise from abject poverty to the seats of power. Charity societies refused to name Eva Duarte their President, as it had happened traditionally with every other First Lady before her, which prompted her to cut all federal funding to these charities and set up the Eva Perón Foundation, personally directed by her. Evita helped set up hospitals, schools and old age homes, and built the Evita City Housing Project in 1948 to provide housing to the poor, and distributing more than 50 million dollars a year for the needy by 1949. Still, she never kept records of where this money came from or how it was spent, raising never proven criticisms that she kept some large sums of money and led one of the major extorsion rackets in history. Many of these social projects were financed with compulsory contributions from private companies (every working citizen was also forced to contribute one day's worth of his work towards these social causes), and to refuse was to risk having Government inspectors show up. All this helped build the image of Evita as a saint, a Lady of Hope, a Patron Saint of the Poor. The poor masses cared little where the money came from or whether such spending was sustainable.

In 1947, Eva convinced Congress to pass a law allowing women to vote for the first time, and funded the Peronist Feminist Party. These new developments make her even more central to the regime's propaganda machine. Her speeches called Argentinians to blindly follow their leader in quite a fanatical way:

Perón is everything. He is the soul, the nerve and the hope of the Argentine people.

But the economy faltered in 1950, leading to workers' protests that threatened with a national strike. Perón ordered martial law, and his agents applied repression and censorship to end the protest. Eva's hold on the affections of the poor became even more important now that Perón was about to run for reelection. So, right before the campaign started in 1951, she asked to be nominated as a Vice-Presidential candidate. Evita being Evita, the nomination had to occur in a rather theatrical manner. Perón and her appeared in front of the masses from the palace's balcony, and the crowd started chanting her name as a future Vice-President. So, in a carefully staged way, Evita appeared to vow to the will of the people when she finally accepted the position. It would not make a big difference anyways, because the generals pressed Perón to ask her to step down and she ended up resigning a few days later. Evita had broken too many taboos of the Argentinian society, and the elite would not allow her to climb to an official position of power. It was also at this time that everyone noticed how Eva had been losing weight and had little of her legendary energy left at the end of the day. As it turned out, she was affected by uteran cancer, the same disease that had killed Perón first wife. Still, that was no obstacle for Eva to campaign for her husband and attend his inauguration at age 32, the last time she was to appear in public.

Eva Duarte de Perón died in 1952, at age 33, "spiritual chief of the nation" according to the official announcement. She was mourned by the people that lined up for hours on end to see her in the casket. Juan Perón was devastated, and many worried that his days as President were counted without Eva by his side. Juan Domingo decided to embalm her body and build a mausoleum to exhibit it to the public, thus laying the grounds of what later would be the Peronist movement. However, the worries of many proved right, and an era of social unrest ensued that would finish with a new military regime. Perón left for Spain. The new regime simply did not know what to do with Eva's embalmed body, and afraid of ending with a shrine in their hands should she be buried in Argentina they ended up hiding it in a small cemetery in Italy where it would stay until 1971 when Juan Perón returned to power.

Perón ran for President again in 1972, having his new wife (Isabel) as a running mate. He died victim of a heart attack nine months after taking office, Isabel succeeded him and demanded that Eva's body be returned and buried in the Duarte's cemetery. To this day, many Argentinians still consider Evita a true saint, although the Church has stopped any attempt to declare her a Catholic martyr.