Eva Perón

Eva Perón: The Illegitimate Girl Who Became a Saint

She died at thirty-three, having never held elected office. The morning after, eight people were crushed to death in the crush to see her body and more than two thousand were treated in Buenos Aires hospitals for injuries. Every flower shop in the city sold out within a day, and blooms were flown in from across Argentina and from Chile. The government lowered the flags for ten days and gave her a state funeral, a thing normally reserved for heads of state.

From Los Toldos to the Radio

María Eva Duarte was born on 7 May 1919 in Los Toldos, in Buenos Aires Province — a date she later falsified, along with the rest of the document. Her father, Juan Duarte, was a well-off rancher with a legal family somewhere else; he abandoned her mother, Juana Ibarguren, and their children when Eva was one, leaving them poor and, under Argentine law, formally second-class. Illegitimacy in that country carried legal disabilities as well as shame, and Eva spent her life erasing it.

At fifteen, in 1934, she left for the capital to become an actress. She made her professional stage debut on 28 March 1935 and then found her real instrument: radio. By 1942 she was earning five or six thousand pesos a month, among the best-paid radio actresses in Argentina, and eventually co-owned a radio company. She bleached her dark hair blonde.

22 January 1944

She met Colonel Juan Perón at a charity gala for earthquake victims at Luna Park Stadium and called it her "marvellous day." He was forty-eight; she was twenty-four. When Perón's rivals arrested him in October 1945, somewhere between 250,000 and 350,000 people massed at the Casa Rosada until he was released — and Peronist mythology afterwards credited Eva with summoning them, a story historians have established to be fabricated. They married in a civil ceremony on 18 October 1945 and in church that December. That year she destroyed or altered her original birth certificate. When Perón won the presidency in 1946 with 54 per cent, Eva had campaigned hard on the radio, telling the poor that this man was theirs.

The Rainbow Tour

In 1947 she toured Europe in a blaze of publicity, meeting Franco, Pope Pius XII and de Gaulle and collecting Spain's Order of Isabella the Catholic. It was not an unbroken triumph. George VI declined to receive her; she cancelled the British leg. In Switzerland the trip ended with protesters throwing stones and tomatoes at her car.

The Vote and the Foundation

Argentine women got the vote under Law 13,010, passed by the House on 9 September 1947 after Senate approval the previous year; Perón handed the signed bill to Eva in front of a crowd. She built on it immediately, founding the Female Peronist Party, which by 1951 had 500,000 members and 3,600 branches — the first mass political organisation for women in the country's history.

The Foundation came from a snub. The aristocratic Sociedad de Beneficencia refused to make her its president, on the grounds that she was low-born and an actress, so she started her own charity and buried them. Within a few years the Eva Perón Foundation held assets over three billion pesos — more than $200 million at the exchange rates of the late 1940s — employed 14,000 people, and handed out, annually, some 400,000 pairs of shoes, 500,000 sewing machines and 200,000 cooking pots. It built whole settlements, including Ciudad Evita. Britannica describes her in this period as a de facto minister of health and labour, revered by the lower economic classes. By the end she was working twenty to twenty-two hours a day.

The Renunciation

In 1951 Perón put her forward for the vice-presidency. The military and the conservative wing refused to accept it, and she was already gravely ill. She withdrew, saying her only ambition was to help her husband and turn the people's hopes into glorious reality — and the party immediately converted the retreat into "The Renunciation," a parable of feminine self-sacrifice pitched straight at the Hispanic ideal of *marianismo*.

The illness had begun earlier than the public knew. A January 1950 operation described as an appendectomy was in fact for advanced cervical cancer. Through 1951 she was fainting and bleeding; the American surgeon George T. Pack performed a radical hysterectomy. A 2011 study by a Yale neurosurgeon argued she may also have been given a prefrontal lobotomy in her last months to control pain and agitation. By June 1952 she weighed 36 kilograms. Congress named her Spiritual Leader of the Nation on 7 May 1952, her thirty-third birthday. She died at 8:25 p.m. on 26 July.

The Body

Her embalmers replaced her blood with glycerine, and the plan was to display her permanently beneath a monument larger than the Statue of Liberty, on the Lenin model. The 1955 coup that removed Perón removed her too. The corpse vanished for sixteen years; in 1971 it was found buried in Milan under a false name, damaged in transit. It went to Perón in Spanish exile, who kept it at home. After his death in 1974 the Montoneros guerrillas seized the body of the former dictator Pedro Eugenio Aramburu and traded it for hers. She now lies in La Recoleta in a family tomb fortified with trap doors and compartments.

Why Eva Is Called a Genius

The word does not belong to her intellect, and pretending otherwise insults the real achievement. Eva Perón's gift was performance fused with organisation. Before politics she had made herself one of the highest-paid radio actresses in a nation of radio listeners — a trained professional instrument of timing and vocal register, aimed at people nobody in power had ever addressed directly. The persona was built deliberately: the scholar John McManners argues she consciously absorbed the theology of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene into her public image, which is why her portrait still hangs beside the Virgin of Guadalupe in Latin American homes. The anthropologist Julie M. Taylor locates her power in a combination almost nobody manages at once — femininity, mystical authority and revolutionary leadership. Behind the charisma sat real executive capacity: within a few years of being snubbed by a charity board she was running an organisation of 14,000 employees and over $200 million in assets, with a measurable output of shoes, sewing machines and houses, plus a women's party of half a million members built from nothing.

The counter-case is serious. She produced no political thought; *La razón de mi vida* omits dates, her birthplace and her birth name, because concealment was its purpose. She forged her birth certificate. Her authority was wholly derivative of her husband's, and when the army objected to her candidacy she folded. The Foundation ran on her personal discretion with no institutional check. And much of the legend — including her supposed role on 17 October 1945 — was manufactured by the state that profited from it.

Legacy

She remains one of the most potent political images of the twentieth century, and the mythology keeps compounding: Lloyd Webber and Rice's *Evita* has played every continent but Antarctica and grossed over $2 billion, Madonna's 1996 film took an Academy Award for its song, her face went onto the 100-peso note in 2012, and *Time* retroactively named her Woman of the Year for 1946. The Museo Evita opened in 2002 in one of her Foundation's own buildings. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina's first elected woman president, has said her generation owes Eva a debt for the example of passion and combativeness. An illegitimate girl from Los Toldos rewrote her own papers and then rewrote what a woman was permitted to be in Argentine public life — and the second forgery held.

Achievements

• Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic
• Grand Cross of the Order of the Condor of the Andes
• National Order of Merit
• Order of the Umayyads
• Grand Cross of the National Order of Honor and Merit
• Worked as politician, stage actor and film actor