by Barnes, John
It went on all evening and through most of the next day, the tiny apartment filling and emptying, with groups of officers arriving bewildered and angry, leaving half an hour later pumped full of Eva Duarte’s adrenalin. Early that evening of the 10th, she sent Perón off to the Labour and Welfare Ministry on the pretext of collecting personal papers from his office. While he was there, wandering around the building, bidding emotional farewells to clerks and typists as well as top ministry bureaucrats, Eva was on the phone again — this time to union officials pleading with them to get as many of their members over to the Labour Ministry as quickly as possible. Their beloved leader was there. Now that he had been thrown out of his job because he had done so much for the workers, he would speak to them one last time before going into retirement.
Next, she phoned her mother’s lover, Oscar Nicolini, who was sitting fearfully in his office in the Central Post Office, waiting to be fired. Bluntly, she told him that if he wanted to hang on to his job, he had better listen carefully to her instructions and carry them out immediately. Her Juan was at the Labour Ministry. A large crowd of workers was gathering outside. He would probably talk to them when he left the ministry for the last time. The state radio network must carry that talk, she told Nicolini, and broadcast it live throughout Argentina by hooking in to every radio station in the country.
Finally, she called Federal Police Headquarters. Her friend, Colonel Velazco, the Police Chief, had been fired minutes after Perón had resigned. But the whole police department was militantly pro-Perón. Eva was listened to respectfully when she suggested that the Buenos Aires newspapers which had enthusiastically reported Perón’s resignation — nearly all of them — should be closed for mentioning troop movements while the nation was under a state of siege.
Throughout that evening, Argentina was given its first demonstration of the nation-wide power of Eva Duarte, though few people realised it at the time. Police squads raided and closed newspapers in every major city in the country. All the evening newspapers in Buenos Aires were shut down. Great crowds began to gather around the Ministry of Labour. When the numbers had reached close to 30,000 packing the side streets as well as the main avenue in front of the building, Perón walked out on to the street, where, not by coincidence, radio microphones had already been set up. Dressed in civilian clothes and bareheaded, he told the vast throng packed in around him that he was a simple citizen now, to which there were roars of ‘No, no, no. We want you back!’
However, he had an announcement to make, he said. Before leaving his office, he had signed a decree granting all Argentine workers salary increases and a share of the profits of the companies for which they worked. There were great cheers at that. But then there was a hush as he warned them to be prepared for war. ‘If you the workers are decided to defend your conquests, I am going to defend you against the oligarchy of capitalist interests. Follow my leadership and victory will be ours.’ There was more cheering, and the crowd set out through the streets, shouting ‘Perón for President!’ Mounted policemen, who the day before had charged people expressing their joy at Perón’s resignation, now chased away any one who attempted to interfere with the marching workers. Even more significantly, Perón’s speech had been carried live, as Eva had planned it, on every radio station in Argentina. It hardly sounded like the last farewell of a deposed dictator.
Out at Campo de Mayo, officers listened to the speech in astonishment and then fury. The gall of the man! He was finished. They had his resignation in their hands. Their military might controlled the country, and yet he was still acting as though he ran things. Three hundred of them marched to the living quarters of General Avalos and demanded to speak to him although he had already retired for the night. They got him out of bed and told him they were marching on Buenos Aires to throw out General Farrell from the Casa Rosada. They were also going to seize Perón and toss him in gaol if they did not string him up from the nearest lamp-post first. They were enraged that he had been allowed to make a speech over the state radio and even more incensed that newspapers had been suspended for reporting military details of the coup, details which had been supplied by them.
General Avalos finally calmed them down with a promise that as soon as he was sworn in as the new War Minister the next morning he would order Perón’s arrest. But that was easier said than done. For after his broadcast on the evening of the 11th, Juan, with Eva, had slipped out of town and headed towards the Tigre, the river resort at the mouth of the delta of the River Plate. From there, the two of them took a launch and cruised through the narrow reed-choked waterways to the tiny island and cottage where they had made love the night they first met. The next day, undisturbed, they enjoyed the warm spring sunshine, listening on their radio to the chaos they had left behind in the city.
For a while that morning, Argentina had been reduced to a government of three men, President Farrell, General Avalos, and Admiral Vernengo Lima, who had taken the post of Navy Minister. The rest of the Cabinet had resigned, and President Farrell had offered his resignation, too. But the garrison at Campo de Mayo refused to let him go. For his departure would have left the country without a President or Vice-President and that would have meant, according to the Constitution, the handing over of the government’s powers to the Supreme Court, a civilian body. That was the last thing the garrison officers wanted. They were determined to keep the government in military hands, and they were sure they had sufficient fire power outside the gates of the city to see that they got what they wanted.
It was not what President Farrell wanted. Marooned in the presidential residence in Olivos, he was still trying to prevent the arrest of his good friend, Juan Perón. So he was not willing to appoint new ministers until Perón’s safety was guaranteed. However, over at the Circulo Militar, the Military Officers’ Club, a massive baroque mansion overlooking Plaza San Martin, the country’s top generals and admirals had decided that the only sensible political solution lay in President Farrell’s resignation and the delivery of his powers to the Supreme Court.
As officers scurried in and out of the club, a large crowd gathered across the street under the shade of the Plaza’s acacia trees. It is an elegant part of downtown Buenos Aires, perched on a hillock, once the site of a slave market, looking out towards the River Plate. Two of the city’s most fashionable streets, Avenida Santa Fé and Càlle Florida, meet at Plaza San Martin, which exudes an air of established wealth in the grey, old converted palacios of the oligarchy, which was what the Circulo Militar once was.
The people in the plaza also fitted in with their surroundings. They were mostly middle-class — businessmen, lawyers, doctors, housewives, respectable clerks from the city’s financial district a few blocks away — all well dressed, very different from the workers who had cheered Perón outside the Labour Ministry the night before. But they were just as noisy, singing the songs and shouting the catchwords that had become fashionable during the recent months of opposition to the military government. There was a moment of near panic, however, when the dreaded mounted police appeared on the scene, warning the crowd to disperse or face the consequences. But, dramatically, a young officer in uniform appeared on the club balcony and warned the commander of the police that if he gave the order to charge the crowd, all the officers in the club would themselves lead the people against them. The mounted police promptly wheeled and trotted out of the square into the narrow, hilly side streets. A few minutes later, Admiral Lima appeared on the balcony to tell the crowd, which by now had grown to close on 50,000, that the military had discarded the idea of turning over the government to the Supreme Court. But he promised them that Argentina would soon have a civilian government. There were loud boos and shouts of ‘We have heard such promises from Perón.’ The Admiral replied with studied dignity: ‘I am not Perón. I am Admiral Vernengo Lima.’
But that did not sooth tempers, which were getting more and more frayed in the plaza as it became apparent that the military had no intention of giving up
power. Army officers were manhandled and cursed as they struggled through the crowd to the club and they were booed each time they appeared in the window. Someone splashed the words ‘Tor Rent’ in red paint across the wall of the club. Another added: ‘To the gallows with Perón.’ As dusk fell, a trumpet sounded in one of the side streets. Suddenly, the hated police were back, charging into the crowd, swinging sabres and firing blank cartridges. In the panic, men and women fought for shelter, under the marble benches in the plaza, behind the acacia trees, against doorways, and in the sanctuary of the plush foyer of the Plaza Hotel. Then street battles began as civilians started sniping at the police and the police abandoned their horses and sabres for armoured cars, rifles and sub-machine guns. Miraculously, there were only two deaths despite all the shooting that took place, although close to 100 people were injured, some seriously. Once again, the responsibility for the brutality lay with the pro-Perón senior police officers, who took advantage of the absence of their new police chief who had driven to the Tigre on a tip that Perón was hiding in the islands.
The new police chief, accompanied by naval officers, finally found Perón at one o’clock in the morning, asleep in the cottage with Eva. The colonel started to shake when he was told that he was going to be taken to a gunboat on the River Plate. He was terrified. The Navy hated him, he knew that. He had never been forgiven for the slaughter of the young naval cadets during the revolution two years before. He was convinced he was going to be killed, and he begged for mercy. Eva, on the other hand, flew into an uncontrollable rage. She screamed obscenities, shouted insults, and spat in the faces of the three shocked Navy officers. Perón they could handle. They told him they were not going to kill him. But he was still shaking. So they sat him down and gave him a whisky while Eva continued to scream at them. They had been told to arrest her, too. But they did not know what to do. They were accustomed to the etiquette of gentlemen. They had no idea how to handle the hysterical blonde who was threatening to attack them physically if they did not get out. They got out, pushing a stumbling, bemused Perón in front of them, leaving Eva behind. It was an error of judgement that was to change the course of Argentine history.
Eva wasted no more time on tears. She rushed back to Buenos Aires and began phoning the trade union friends that she and Perón has so assiduously cultivated. But the 13th and 14th of October were a Saturday and Sunday, which almost certainly meant that she accomplished little on those two days. Argentines do not make revolutions on weekends or during the summer holiday period — from Christmas to the end of February. They are too busy enjoying themselves. To them, revolutions, like work, are the business of ordinary weekdays. So it was not until Monday the 15th that Eva began to rally support for her counter-revolution. In her autobiography, she claimed that ‘I flung myself into the streets searching for those friends who might still be of help to him … As I descended from the neighbourhoods of the proud and rich to those of the poor and humble, doors were opened to me more generously and with more warmth. Above I found only cold and calculating hearts, the “prudent” hearts of “ordinary” men incapable of thinking or doing anything extraordinary, hearts whose contact nauseated, shamed and disgusted one.’
She had certainly felt that way about the rich all her life. But it is more likely that on that Monday morning she hurried out to Avellaneda across the trickle of the Riachuelo to see Cipriano Reyes, who, at Perón’s request, had seized control of the meat packing house workers’ union. She had a debt to collect, she told Reyes with blunt directness. The next morning, the first group of workers wended their way out of the Avellaneda slums, across the Riachuelo Bridge and into Buenos Aires. The new federal police chief had received orders to turn them back. But his men, whose sympathies were very much with Perón, did not work unduly hard at obeying the order. About 400 workers, mostly young men and teenagers, reached the city centre and began shouting for Perón. The police treated them leniently, limiting themselves most of the time to following them around with a tear gas squad. When the demonstrations threatened to get out of hand, the police intervened and broke them up with the use of a few tear gas bombs. But the workers quickly rallied and their shouts could be heard throughout the heart of the city all afternoon and late into the night.
The two generals and an admiral, who at the moment constituted all there was of a government in Argentina, had been meeting all morning in the Casa Rosada in an effort to find a political solution to the crisis which would be acceptable to all the various factions of the armed forces. From the president’s window, they saw army officers being attacked on Plaza de Mayo by crowds shouting anti-Perón slogans. In the distance, they could hear chants of ‘Viva Perón’, growing louder as the day went by.
To Generals Farrell and Avalos, it seemed quite apparent that the military overthrow of Peron had somehow turned into a popular uprising against the army. Judging from what they had seen from the window. it had become open season on army officers. They decided there was only one solution if the army was to survive — Perón must be brought back. He should not be allowed to sit safely in a gaol cell while his fellow officers were being abused by the mob. Let him face the music. An official communiqué was issued from the Casa Rosada to the effect that Colonel Juan Perón was not, and never had been, under arrest. According to General Avalos, he had been taken to the naval prison on Martin Garcia Island under protective custody because his life had been threatened by undisciplined elements in the turmoil and excitement of the previous week’s events.
It was a surprising statement, considering that the news of Perón’s arrest had been published, with a wealth of detail by all Argentine newspapers, and that both General Avalos and Admiral Lima had taken credit for having put him under lock and key. Certainly no one was more surprised than Perón himself. He had been sitting in his cell, guarded by two sailors, when he heard his successor at the War Ministry on the radio blandly denying that he was under arrest. Perón had already written to Avalos demanding to be charged or set free. He had also asked to be moved to a Buenos Aires hospital because he said he was suffering from pleurisy. Both requests had been ignored. So this time he sent Avalos a telegram sarcastically suggesting that as he was not under arrest, his guards should be removed as he was quite capable of protecting himself. He received a reply at 3.30 in the morning of the 17th in the form of a police squad, which escorted him aboard a police launch, took him to the mainland, then drove him in an ambulance to the Central Military Hospital in Buenos Aires.
A strong military guard had cordoned off the hospital for three blocks in every direction. But that did not stop the workers who, in their thousands, streamed across the Riachuelo Bridge that morning. Most of them were coatless — a shocking sight in staid Buenos Aires where a man could go to jail for taking off his coat in a public park. Some had even discarded their shirts in the spring sunshine as they marched to the hospital, surrounded it, and set up a throbbing, repetitive cry of ‘Pay-ron! Pay-ron!’
Throughout the day, workers continued to pour into Buenos Aires by bus and truck from the shanty slums — the villas miserias — on the outskirts, and, while the police stood passively by and the army held back, they took control of the city, singing, shouting slogans, and waving portraits of Peron. In the chaos, the middle-class porteños, who had gathered in Plaza San Martin only four days before, stayed at home behind shuttered windows; the General Confederation of Labour — Perón’s umbrella organisation for all the unions — declared a general strike; and a delegation of workers was admitted to the military hospital and was received by one of Perón’s leading henchmen, Colonel Domingo A. Mercante. Then, late in the afternoon, a tired, tight-lipped General Avalos pushed through the crowd outside the hospital entrance and went in to see Perón. They were together for over two hours, but what was said at that meeting has never been revealed. Afterwards, however, Avalos drove out to Campo de Mayo and resigned his army commission.
Within an hour of Avalos leaving the hospital, Perón and Eva were
on their way to the Casa Rosada. In the car, she showed him a copy of an afternoon Buenos Aires newspaper which had printed pictures of the demonstrators, sneeringly titled: ‘The shirtless ones (descamisados) who roam our streets.’ Eva thrust the paper into his hands. ‘There is your cause and your slogan,’ she told him, her dark eyes blazing with excitement. When they arrived at the Presidential Palace, they found most of Perón’s last cabinet (before his resignation) gathered there consulting with union delegations. President Farrell had already removed General Avalos and Admiral Lima from their ministerial posts. A new government was quickly formed with men totally loyal to Perón. He had left himself off the cabinet list as he had other plans. The vast crowd waiting noisily outside in the Plaza de Mayo certainly knew what they wanted for him. For the chant, louder than ever, was now, ‘Perón for President.’
