by Barnes, John
That purple passage from La Razon de mi Vida is Evas description of ‘the marvellous day’ when she met Juan Perón. It sounds more like something out of one of the cheap comic-book romances she liked to read. But what is certainly true is that she wasted no time that first night. It was a warm, spring evening. They slipped away from the rally and drove out of the city to the Tigre, a suburban river resort of muddy delta waterways, tiny islands, boat clubs, mosquitos, and secluded weekend homes hidden away from prying eyes by the purple and orange blossoms of jacaranda trees. The next morning, Eva arrived for work at Radio Belgrano in a War Ministry limousine.
Despite the difference in years — at forty-eight, Perón was exactly double Eva’s age — they had a lot in common. For he was a country boy, born on October 8,1895, on a small pampas farm owned by his father just outside the town of Lobos, 65 miles south of Buenos Aires. Like so many Argentines, his heritage came out of the mass of southern European peasantry that poured into Argentina in the middle 1800s. He claimed that his family name was originally Peroni and that his greatgrandfather had been a Sicilian senator. His mother was what is known in Argentina as a chinita — a little country girl with Indian blood in her veins, reflected in her son’s high cheek bones, ruddy complexion and black eyes.
When he was five years old, the family moved to Patagonia in the deep south of the country. It is a desolate, cold and wind-battered land, hospitable only to sheep. Juan Perón grew up strong and tough, living the life of a gaucho, breaking wild horses, lassoing ostriches with the bolas, fording icy streams in sub-zero weather, riding the stony mesa, spurs strapped to his bare feet, his poncho streaming out in the wind. When his father died, his mother kept the ranch and, when he was sixteen packed him off to military college in Buenos Aires where he was an indifferent student but a tough soldier and a brilliant sportsman (he was one of the army’s best shots, its fencing champion for sixteen years, and a bare-knuckle fighter much feared in the dockside bars of Buenos Aires during his college years — a bony knob on his right hand tipped off former world heavyweight champion Gene Tunney that he was shaking hands with a man who had used his fists).
He was a handsome, athletic-looking man, over six-foot tall with thick jet-black hair combed back from his forehead, black-brown eyes of shimmering intensity, and a complexion made startlingly florid by a vivid labyrinth of veins on both cheeks. But it was not just his commanding physical appearance that made him the centre of attention in any company. He spoke German, Italian, and a little English, and he was well read, astonishingly so for one who had made the army his whole life. He had personality and charm — a ready smile and a quick wit that drew people to him long before he wielded the sort of power that automatically commanded respectful attention. ‘You sat down with Perón and in a few minutes he had won you into his world,’ recalled one of his old army friends. ‘He’d talk to a young captain, put his arm around his shoulders, and tell him what he wanted to hear. He could convince a socialist that he, too, was a socialist. But then a fascist would talk to him and leave absolutely certain that Perón was a fascist.’
Perón’s persuasive powers had worked like magic in the rural isolation of the Andean mountain garrison where had been posted in the summer of 1940. It had not taken him many months to cajole his fellow colonels into joining him in forming a political organisation that would channel their aspirations. Called the GOU, which stood for either Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (United Officers’ Group) or its slogan. Gobierno!/Orden!/Unidad! (Government! Order! Unity!), the officers professed disgust with the corruption of the country’s conservative government and resolved to push for a greater say in the affairs of the nation. As secretary of the secret lodge, Perón travelled the country from garrison to garrison, preaching its message to young army officers to whom the talk of national destiny was like red meat and wine.
By the winter of 1943, as thousands of brown-shirted fascists marched almost daily through the streets of Buenos Aires, shouting ‘death to the Jews’, and ‘death to the British pigs’, Perón had signed up all but a few hundred of Argentina’s 3,600 army officers. He was ready to make his move. On June 4, the government of President Ramon S. Castillo fell like a putrid fruit to a military coup organised by the GOU. The only resistance the army encountered as it rolled into the city with its tanks and armoured trucks was at the Naval School on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where nearly 100 naval officers and cadets were killed in a futile effort at defence. There was another very brief setback for the GOU when the wrong man, General Arturo Rawson, who had commanded the troops, had, in a moment of exuberance, proclaimed himself president from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, the ‘Pink House’, the presidential palace in the centre of Buenos Aires. But in a hurried opera-bouffe performance of musical chairs. General Rawson was quickly hustled out the back door of the presidential palace, his place on the balcony taken by the GOU’s choice of president. General Pedro P. Ramirez, who had been Minister of War in the Castillo Government.
As General Ramirez donned the presidential sash of office, he admitted in a moment of honest candour that ‘among the troops, I have been designated the first soldier’. It was the colonels, of course, who were doing the designating. They appointed one of their own, Colonel Edelmiro Farrell, as Minister of War, the most powerful post in the Cabinet. Colonel Perón, still an unknown figure in the country, took on the post of Under-Secretary at the War Ministry. But, as the Secretary of the GOU, he was the power behind the throne.
President Ramirez was a weak ‘Little Stick’ and he found himself buffeted back and forth between the various factions jockeying for power in the army. He became a bit of a joke to the porteños of Buenos Aires who quickly realised that their president was the pawn of others.
One of the stories going the rounds at the time poked fun at the executive decrees that poured out of the Casa Rosada in an endless stream. Apparently, a man had been sitting in his bathroom idly tearing off yards of toilet paper which he floated out of the window and across the nearby Plaza de Mayo. A detachment of soldiers came banging on his door, their officer demanding to know if the man had been responsible for the paper barrage. He admitted it. ‘Then it’s the concentration camp for you,’ he was told. ‘But why,’ asked the astonished porteño as he was led away. ‘Because all that paper floated in the window of the Casa Rosada and the President has been signing it.’
Ramirez knew about the jokes. He was no fool, and he tried to resign. But he was roughly told by Perón that ‘you can’t resign until we are ready to let you go.’ His political impotence was already being noted by foreign news correspondents based in Buenos Aires. On October 31, just four months after the revolution, John W. White of the New York Herald Tribune cabled from Santiago, Chile (he couldn’t file from Buenos Aires because of press censorship), that ‘the guiding mind behind the Ramirez regime is an intelligent and ruthless but almost unknown young colonel named Juan Perón.’
By then, President Ramirez was already well aware that he had to break Perón or remain his puppet. But he had been powerless to prevent the colonel from setting himself up with an additional power base as head of a brand new ministry, the Secretariat of Labour and Welfare. It was not a Cabinet post because the Argentine Constitution limited the number of ministries to eight and the quota was already filled. But Perón made it clear straight away that he had big plans for the Secretariat. The duties of the new department, he announced, would be to ‘strengthen national unity by securing greater social justice and an improvement in the standard of living of Argentine.’ Many years later, he looked back upon ‘the day we created the Secretariat of Labour and Welfare was for me the first day of our movement. From that mement the revolution acquired a new meaning and began to travel down a road from which there was no turning back.’
The first step along that road took him into the headquarters of the country’s unions. Their leaders quickly found out that they went to jail if they failed to show proper enthusiasm for Perón. To make sure they al
l got the message an example was made of Jose Tesorieri, the secretary of the Union of Government Employees. He was gaoled because he signed a petition asking the government to break diplomatic relations with Germany, an attitude that was, of course, anathema to Perón. After five months of brutal softening up in the Villa Devoto gaol in Buenos Aires, Tesorieri was released and restored to his job on the condition, which he accepted, that he speak for Perón at public meetings. He really had no choice. His wife and children had been forced to live on charity while he was inside. Not surprisingly, union leaders throughout the country were soon organising ‘spontaneous’ demonstrations on Perón’s behalf. ‘He has thrown himself into his work with such a will,’ reported New York Times correspondent Arnold Cortesi, ‘that he has aroused not a little jealousy among his colleagues who suspect him of promoting his own popularity.’
President Ramirez did not just suspect. He was convinced of it. On January 26, 1944, with the support of senior Navy officers who despised Perón, believing him responsible for the slaughter of the young naval cadets at the start of the revolution, the President signed a decree breaking diplomatic relations with Germany, knowing full well that would cause a make-or-break crisis with Perón. But nothing happened for a couple of weeks. The reason for that may have been because the colonel had just met the delightful Eva Duarte and, possibly, he was finding it hard to keep his mind on affairs of state. But then he also knew just where the power lay and it was not over in the Casa Rosada where the president sat. Calling a group of friendly reporters into his office at the Labour Secretariat, he told them: ‘This is the government of the GOU, and I am the GOU. In my desk I have the signed, undated resignations of 3,300 of the army’s 5,600 officers, and the others do not matter.’
Still rumours of coups and counter-coups were sweeping the Argentine capital almost daily. Then, on February 15, the president made his next move. He leaked word that he was about to declare war on Germany. That stirred Perón into action. All morning, groups of officers moved in and out of the Labour Secretariat to discuss the crisis with their undisputed leader. A decision reached, a dozen of the younger army officers, lieutenants and captains, walked over to the Foreign Ministry, drew their swords and chased the Foreign Minister and his Under-Secretary out of the building. At that point, President Ramirez promptly abandoned his plan to declare war on Germany, and for the next few days nothing happened while portenos, used to this kind of thing by now, went about their daily business, exchanging rumour for rumour. Finally, on February 24, Ramirez played his last card. He sent a messenger over to Perón’s office with a demand for his resignation. The burly colonel fixed the messenger with a steely gaze and told him: ‘inform the wretches who sent you that they will never get me out of here alive.’
That night, armed soldiers seized the central telephone exchange in Buenos Aires. All communications with foreign countries were immediately cut. Another contingent occupied the central post office. An entire mechanised infantry regiment descended upon police headquarters and disarmed the police force, which only a few hours earlier had been armed with rifles and ammunition. More truckloads of troops rolled through the suburbs to the presidential residence in Olivos, where sentries with fixed bayonets were posted around the building. In the early hours of the morning, Juan Perón and five other colonels arrived at the residence, burst into the president’s study and forced him at gunpoint to resign. Then Perón returned to the city and the heavily-guarded War Ministry, where he and his friend, Vice-President Farrell, had set up their operations’ headquarters. It was three o’clock in the morning. But there were still reporters around, taking in the excitement and confusion and trying to find out what was going on. Perón feigned surprise at seeing them. ‘No pasa nada,’ (nothing’s happening), he told them jovially. But then a touch of concern crept into his voice. The poor president is tired, very tired.’ A few hours later, an official communique announced that President Ramirez, being too fatigued to continue the arduous duties of the presidency, had delegated his duties to Vice-President Farrell.
The new president was no more his own boss than Ramirez had been. In fact, it was so obvious that he was Perón’s front man that he became the target of even more irreverent jokes than his predecessor among the porteno population of Buenos Aires. In one story, the hapless president dropped his handkerchief while reviewing a march-past of troops. Picking it up, he whispered to another general. ‘You don’t know how much that handkerchief means to me, it’s the only thing Perón will let me get my nose into. Nicknamed ‘the Phantom’ because Hollywood’s The Phantom of the Opera opened in Buenos Aires the day of his inauguration, he slipped quickly into the background as Perón moved aggressively to the front of Argentina’s political stage.
Most of the unkind stories usually reached the President’s ears. ‘It’s said that Colonel Perón and I quarrel every day,’ he grumbled to a friend, ‘and that I don’t dare leave my office because someone might be sitting in my chair when I get back. But it’s all lies.’ And so it probably was. For Perón was quite content to let the president make a public fool of himself while he continued to build his own power base. In a memorable speech that was echoed nearly three decades later in Vietnam by an American army officer who said, straight-faced, ‘We had to destroy the village to save it,’ President Farrell told the Argentine people: ‘We must be tyrants to make the people freer.’
Freedom for the people was certainly the last thing on Perón’s mind at that time. In July 1944, when seventeen generals signed a memorandum demanding that the government restore civilian constitutional government through elections, lift the state of siege which the country had been under since the revolution, and order all military officers to relinquish government positions and return to their barracks, Perón immediately promoted seventeen colonels to the rank of general, thus giving himself absolute control of Argentina’s military establishment. Soon afterwards, he had President Farrell promote him to Vice-President, a post he held with that of War Minister and Secretary of Labour. To cheering crowds of workers assembled in the Plaza de Mayo, Perón declared from the balcony of the Casa Rosada that, ‘I display only three titles: that of being a soldier, that of being considered the first Argentine worker, and that of being a patriot.’ Down below in the Plaza, the humblest, poorest of the population, hatless, coatless, tieless, their dark skins and high cheekbones betraying their Indian blood, roared out ‘Perón, Perón,’ a battle-cry that was to reverberate across the nation for years to come.
They had not taken up the cry of ‘Evita’ yet. Eva Duarte’s relationship with the Vice-President had not surfaced publicly. People in government and high society knew about it, of course. But it was not a matter of much concern. ‘Having a love affair might ruin an American politician,’ remarked a former US ambassador to the Argentine, James Bruce, who was stationed there at the time. ‘But not having one might make a Latin politician suspect. The names of favoured mistresses of important Argentines are generally open secrets and no one regards it as at all unusual.’ However, there were a few raised eyebrows when a story circulated that Eva had marched round to Perón’s apartment only a few days after she had met him and had thrown out his teenage mistress, a girl from the northern provinces whom Perón had lovingly nicknamed Piranha after the fierce, tiny fish with razor-like teeth that inhabit some of Argentina’s inland rivers. The piranha proved to be no match for the older woman.
Knowing her lover’s reputation as a man with a roving eye, Eva promptly moved him into an apartment next door to hers in the same building in Calle Posados in order to keep a closer watch on him. Every morning, an army conscript turned up with a can of fresh milk from the nearest army barracks, and it was usually Perón, in his dressing gown, who opened the door to take it in. That raised a few more eyebrows, particularly among the wives of senior army officers. For in polite Argentine society, a man did not live with his mistress. They persuaded their husbands to complain to Perón about the notoriety, the lack of dignity, of th
e Vice-President of the nation living openly with an actress. He laughed at them. He was, he told them, a man of normal appetities, adding with sardonic humour, ‘How much better than if, as with some officers I know, it was said that I was being seen with actors.’
If there was a suggestion that the relationship could hurt Perón’s career, it could do nothing but good for Eva’s. Although her influential friends had done nothing to improve her acting — ‘She was terrible, cold as an iceberg, incapable of stirring an audience,’ recalled one of her old acting colleagues, Pierina Dealessi — it had done wonders for her earning power. Jaime Yankelevitch at Radio Belgrano had raised her salary again, estimating that Eva’s switch from her old lover, Colonel Imbert, to a new one, Colonel Perón, was well worth a few thousand extra pesos a month. So between Radios Belgrano, El Mundo, and El Estado, Eva by mid-1944 was earning the equivalent of £1,800 a month, a fortune by Argentine standards.
Pierina, who used to work with her at Radio Belgrano, said that Yankelevitch was very demanding of his star performer, trying to squeeze out the very last drop of her not very considerable talent. One day, he went too far, and Eva refused to go back. Terrified that her powerful friends would close him down, Yankelevitch pleaded with Pierina: ‘Ask your god for help. I can’t get any help from mine.’ But peace was finally restored, and Eva returned. Her colleagues were extremely envious of her intimacy with Perón. Pierina remembered Malisa Zini, a popular radio actress of the time, saying to her: ‘I just saw Perón on the street. If only Evita would lend him to me — just for fifteen minutes.’
But Eva had other plans for Perón. All her experience told her that her position as mistress of the most powerful man in the country was a precarious one because it was rare in Argentina that a man married his mistress. At the same time, she also knew herself well enough to realise that her interest in him would last only as long as he remained the powerful figure that he was, and the chances on that score were not too good, either: there had been three presidents and forty ministers in the past eighteen months. So, very simply, she decided to keep his love by seeing to it that he stayed in power.
