Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  The throng beneath the balconies of the Casa Rosada had grown by the hour as thousands poured into the square from the cobbled dockside avenue below. There were perhaps 200,000 of them, most of them young, some of them were boys, but all of them obreros, working men with dark skins, rough hands, and cheap clothes. Perhaps they were the poorest of the poor. But they knew the name of the only man who had ever done anything for them. The chanted roar of ‘Pay-ron’ boomed on through the evening, hushing for a minute or two at eight o’clock as the windows leading to the main balcony of the palace were thrown open and it was announced that Perón would talk to the crowd within a few minutes. But, in fact, it was not until ten minutes past eleven that he appeared on the balcony with President Farrell. There was a great yell that lasted uninterrupted for ten minutes. The two men embraced, clasping each other around the shoulders. ‘Here,’ cried Farrell, ‘is the man we all love — Juan Perón — the man who has conquered the hearts of all Argentines.’

  Then Perón spoke. He told them he was ill and ailing, although his powerful, mesmeric voice showed no sign of weakness as it thundered across the packed plaza. He told them that he had resigned from the army. With a dramatic gesture, he unhooked his sword belt and handed it to President Farrell. ‘I discard the honourable and sacred uniform of my country to put on the coat of the civil servant, and to mingle with the suffering and powerful masses which build up with their work the greatness of the nation. Herewith, I give my final adieu to the institution which is the fulcrum of the country: the army! I give, too, my first welcome to this huge crowd which represents the synthesis of a sentiment which seemed to have died in the Republic: the true civic status of the Argentine people!’

  Then Perón remembered Eva’s words. Holding out his arms to the crowd below, he roared: ‘As a simple citizen, mingling with my descamisados, I wish to press all of you to my heart.’ Behind him, in the great room of the Presidency, Eva smiled that smile of hers that curled up at the corner of her mouth. They were not yet shouting Evita — Little Eve. But that could wait. Her man was back in power. And she had put him there.

  5

  PERON FOR PRESIDENT

  Buenos Aires, November 9 (AP) — A friend of Colonel Juan D. Perón said today that the former Vice-President of Argentina married Eva Duarte, a tall and attractive blonde, October 18. The informant, whose name may not be disclosed, said the marriage was performed in an apartment in Buenos Aires and that a Vital Statistics Bureau book was taken there to record the marriage.

  It was the morning after Perón’s triumphant return to power. The city was paralysed by a general strike. ‘It would have been difficult to obtain even a glass of water in Buenos Aires,’ grumbled the New York Times’ correspondent, Arnaldo Cortesi, who also complained about the ‘groups of irresponsible and rowdy young men who never seemed to tire of marching through the main thoroughfares shouting the name of Colonel Juan Perón as Buenos Aires lived through another day of mob rule.’ Colonel J. Filomino Velazco had been reinstated as police chief. On the losing side, Admiral Hector Vernengo Lima — who had proudly proclaimed from the balcony of the Circulo Militar that ‘I am not Perón. I am Admiral Vernengo Lima’ — had fled the city with three units of Argentina’s river squadron. He was threatened with severe measures, including the bombing of his ships from the air, if he did not return. This he finally decided to do and he was placed under arrest as soon as he reached Buenos Aires.

  A triumphant Señora Maria Eva Duarte de Perón arrived back at the studios of Radio Belgrano to an effusive welcome from Jaime Yankelevich. He doubled her pay and dug even deeper into his pocket when she demanded restitution for the ten days she had been off the pay-roll. She was also making a film at the time, a major feature role in The Spendthrift, a production of one of Argentina’s top film-makers, Miguel Marchinien-dorena. He had already given her a leading role earlier in the year in a movie called Circus Cavalcade. The part had been promised to a much better known Argentine actress, Alita Roman. But Marchiniendorena was desperately trying to curry favour with Perón in an effort to get back the casino he had owned in Mar del Plata, which had been expropriated by the government.

  Cavalcade did not help his cause at all. It was a disaster from start to finish. It starred Libertad Lamarque, who was still seething with rage at Eva for having stolen Perón right out of her arms at the charity concert at Luna Park a year earlier. Not being the most modest of young ladies, Eva flaunted her position as mistress of the nation’s Strongman. She saw to it that Perón picked her up after work every day in his chauffeur-driven War Ministry limousine, and she behaved on the set as though she was the star, not Libertad. The inevitable explosion came when Eva sat in the chair which had Libertad’s name on it. The star walked over and gave the younger woman a stinging slap across the face. With all that tension on the set, it was not surprising that the film was a box office disaster. Everybody agreed (though no one said so publicly) that Eva was terrible, a total failure as an actress. As for the lovely Libertad Lamarque, her films were banned in Argentina after October 17, 1945. She was forced into exile in Mexico City in order to make a living. She was one of many Argentines who were to discover that Eva Perón was totally unforgiving to her enemies.

  Marchiniendorena certainly did not want to get on that list. So he gave Eva another chance in Spendthrift, the starring role this time. The male lead was Juan Jose Miguez, who had been responsible for Eva getting her very first job at Radio Belgrano. He had left radio work soon after that and had quickly established himself as a major star in Argentine movies, which in those days were mostly bad tear-jerkers. Miguez at first turned Eva down when she asked him to co-star with her in Spendthrift.

  ‘Who was she to ask me to be her leading man?’ he sniffed years later as he recalled the making of that movie. What was her background? At that time, she was living with Perón and could choose any play she wanted, cast, salary, everything. But I was quite frank about it. “You’re mad at me,” she said. “Of course,” I replied. “If you were in my shoes you would feel that same way. At the moment I’m the biggest draw in Argentine movies. You’ve no experience at all. It would cheapen my standing to work with you.” Those who heard me say this trembled for me. I added: “I don’t want to stop you from acting. I just don’t want to act with you.” She got very angry. But we remained friends, and in the end, of course, I made the movie. It took six months to make, mainly because Eva was always having to take days off to go politicking. No one, of course, was going to fire her. And, as a matter of fact, we would have had problems making the movie without her. Film negative was scarce in those days. But I often saw Perón arriving on the set with several rolls of film under his arm. So we had to put up with her domineering everybody. She gave the orders, no doubt about that. But I’d argue with her so often that Mario Soficci, the director, would say to me: “Miguez, for God’s sake stop contradicting her. You’ll do it once too often.” Actually, she was very good to me. She gave me ration coupons when petrol and tyres were rationed. On another occasion, she found out that I was short of money. She asked me what had happened and I finally confessed that I had taken some heavy gambling losses. She sent me 10,000 pesos (about £1,250 in those days) of her own money and never accepted repayment.’

  So there was a soft spot in that tough, trim little figure. But those who saw it were mostly friends from the old days who had struggled as she had. Even poor, fat Jaime Yankelevich managed to survive, though he was constantly on the receiving end of the bruising side of her tongue. He kept on making errors of judgement that always cost him money in the form of salary rises for Eva. A couple of months after his expensive October miscalculation, he was approached by Eva with a demand to use the station to promote her husband’s candidacy for president. He had formally thrown his hat in the ring on December 15 for the scheduled February 24 election. Jaime made some rapid calculations and got it wrong again. He said no. For a start all the knowledgeable political observers were convinced that Perón would get
trounced in the election by the country’s ‘democrats’ — radicals, conservatives, socialists, and even communists. But more important than that, as far as Yankelevich was concerned, Perón had shown no visible signs of marrying his mistress.

  For some reason, best known to themselves, the Peróns had not bothered to inform their countrymen that they had legalised their relationship. Maybe it was because Perón felt that, having humiliated his generals with his October 17 counter-revolution, he did not want to further embarrass them by upsetting their wives with a public announcement so soon afterwards that he had married his mistress. He knew that every wife on aristocratic Avenida Alvear would be aghast. ‘That Woman’ represented everything they hated and despised — the mistress who existed in almost every well-born Argentine man’s life. If a man was so infatuated with his mistress that he married her, they would never accept her.

  Eva, of course, did not mind how much she upset those particular ladies. But obviously she felt that her silence on this occasion was a small price to pay for her marriage certificate. But Jaime Yankelevich’s refusal to allow Eva to use his radio station for presidential election campaigning — and the obvious reason for his refusal — were too much for her trigger-fast temper. ‘You dirty Russian son-of-a-bitch,’ she screamed. ‘You’ll see what happens if you refuse.’ And as Jaime flinched, she brandished her marriage certificate under his nose. ‘I tell you this as the First Lady of Argentina.’ She was not. But she was too close for Yankelevich to dare argue about it.

  As a matter of fact, the document was only a few days old. It was actually Eva’s church marriage certificate. For although in law the Peróns had officially been married since their civil ceremony in October, in Catholic Argentina, it is really the church wedding that counts. Weddings to middle and upper-class Argentines conjure up images of white lace and sweet virgin brides. The thought of Eva Duarte — illegitimate, actress, mistress — marrying in church was to many of them sheer blasphemy. But in the early morning of December 9, three cars drew up to the Perón apartment building on Calle Posadas. A few minutes later, Colonel Perón, in army uniform despite his retirement, appeared at the front door arm-in-arm with Eva, who beamed a radiant smile under a fashionably floppy hat. She was wearing a simple white dress. They climbed into the back of Perón’s Packard, and the convoy drove off to La Plata, the modern capital of the Province of Buenos Aires. There, in the cathedral, Juan Perón, widower, married Maria Eva Duarte, spinster. Her brother Juan gave her away, while Colonel Mercante, Perón’s best friend who had just taken over the Labour Ministry in the new Farrell Government, served as his best man.

  There was no time for a honeymoon. On the day before the wedding, the opposition Democratic Union, a coalition of parties opposed to Perón, held a campaign rally in Plaza del Congresso in downtown Buenos Aires. An estimated 200,000 porteños turned up for it. But they quickly learnt how dangerous it was to actively oppose Juan Perón. Gunmen opened fire on the crowd, which was then attacked by federal police. Four people were killed and 35 injured. The following Friday, Perón appeared in public for the first time since his October 17 come-back, presenting himself as the presidential candidate of his own political party, the Labour party, which he had formed specially to represent the descamisados who had taken the city by storm on that October day. Between 100,000 and 150,000 people once again flooded the centre of the city to see their hero take his place on a floodlit platform at the foot of a towering, needle-shaped obelisk that stands in the middle of Avenida Nueve de Julio, which Argentines justifiably claim as the world’s widest avenue.

  To ensure that Perón’s enemies could not revenge themselves for the previous week’s killings in Plaza de Congresso, federal police took elaborate precautions. Mounted, motorised and foot police, reinforced by riot and tear gas squads, patrolled the streets in great numbers. People going to the meeting had to pass through a triple cordon of police. All the buildings in the vicinity were searched, and police with rifles were posted on the rooftops. The owners of the houses facing Avenida Nueve de Julio, all of them certainly middle and upper class, were warned by police that they would be held responsible for the behaviour of people watching from their windows or balconies. But there was no trouble at. It was a happy, noisy crowd that cheered so loudly when Perón appeared on the platform with his tiny, slender wife that it was almost fifteen minutes before he could be heard.

  His voice boomed out over the loudspeakers down the wide avenue, rolling over the swaying, banner-waving mass of humanity. ‘Consolidating our future, I join the ranks of the descamisados,’ he cried, taking off his coat and rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt to bare his hairy forearms. That was exactly the sort of thing his descamisados had come out of the slums to hear. They roared their appreciation, a roar that faded to a gentle hum as Perón explained his plans for their future. He promised, if elected, to give them shorter working hours, a share in their company’s profits, state-built housing, and, under the leadership of his wife, political rights for women, who had never had any in Argentina.

  It was revolutionary stuff by Argentine standards. Politicians had never campaigned for the working class vote before. They did not have to. Elections in the past were always stolen by the Conservatives with stuffed ballot boxes except during the brief period of middle-class Radical Party government in the 1920s. But now here was a man who not only promised to look after the country’s working class people but who, during his period at the Labour Ministry, had already done more for them than anyone ever had. He was their man, and the admiration was mutual. As the hour grew late and Perón’s long oration finally came to an end, he and his wife slowly waved an Argentine flag from whose pole hung a sweaty workman’s shirt. From the vast crowd in front of them came the thundered response of ‘Pay-ron! Pay-ron!’

  That chanted name became a battle-cry during the next ten weeks of the campaign. For many Argentines it was a sound to be dreaded. With the army and federal police openly showing support for Perón, there was no protection for his opponents or their supporters. Violent disorders were almost a daily occurrence as packs of pro-Perón thugs roamed the capital. The city’s Jews — 400,000 of them, the largest Jewish community in South America — were one of their favourite targets, news which sent chills around a world still digesting the horrors of Buchenwald. ‘Kill a Jew and be a patriot,’ was just one of many anti-Semitic slogans splashed in red paint on the walls of the Jewish quarter of the city. After one pro-Perón demonstration, crowds of young Perónistas invaded the quarter to loot Jewish-owned shops, brutally beating anyone who attempted to stop them. In scenes reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, police stood by while Jews were knocked to the ground and kicked. When the police did act, it was usually to arrest the victims.

  ‘Alarm and even terror are beginning to spread in the Jewish quarter,’ reported the New York Times’ Cortesi, adding that ‘It is hardly possible to doubt any longer that anti-semitism forms part of Colonel Perón’s political stock in trade.’ Certainly the attacks on the country’s Jewish population could not have happened without Perón’s tacit approval. As the country’s Strongman, he could put a stop to it at any time. Eventually he did. Perhaps it finally dawned on him that his country stood in danger of being labelled the international pariah of the post-war world. So before the end of December, he publicly condemned those supporters of his who had taken part in attacks on Jews. ‘Those doing so,’ he said, ‘are outside all democratic standards and cannot be regular members of any Argentine political force.’

  But Perón’s dispensation to Argentina’s Jews did not extend to his other political opponents. Throughout January 1946, the streets of Buenos Aires were constantly blotted out by billows of tear gas as police moved in to break up battles between warring factions in which Perón’s opponents almost always came off second best. The reason why was simply explained by the Assistant Inspector of the federal police, Alejandro Jorge Gallardo, when he resigned in disgust over the behaviour of his colleagues. In
his letter of resignation he wrote: ‘In the streets of Buenos Aires and several towns of the interior, I have witnessed Perónista gangs of hoodlums attacking our women and mistreating our brethren while counting on the passiveness of officials charged with keeping order.’ But Gallardo’s gesture achieved nothing. The harassment continued.

  When the Democratic Union’s Presidential candidate, Dr Jose P. Tamborini, and Vice-Presidential candidate, Dr Enrique M. Mosca, set off on a whistle-stop campaign tour of the interior late in January, the train was repeatedly stoned as it steamed through the countryside. Wherever it stopped, the candidates’ meetings were almost invariably broken up by small bands of Perónistas while police stood idly by. In Entre Rios, the province immediately to the north of Buenos Aires, federal officials banned all public meetings and allowed the train to halt only for re-fuelling. Not until after it had been set on fire, a small boy killed, and the candidates’ campaign literature destroyed, did the Government order 50 armed soldiers to ride shot-gun on the train to prevent any further violence. In Cordoba, the largest city in the interior, Tamborini told a sympathetic audience that he wanted to ‘remove from Argentine public life this impudence which sells the public offices of the state as electoral arsenals, which converts them into recruiting offices for street rioters. We desire order, peace, the ability to live together, and respect for law.’

  Dr Tamborini was hoping for too much in the emotion-charged atmosphere of Argentina’s first real presidential election campaign in sixteen years. When his rock-gashed train arrived back in Buenos Aires, police fired on the crowd that had gathered to greet him in the Plaza Once outside the station. Three young men were killed and many others wounded. Explaining away the gunfire on people whose only crime had been that some of them had started chanting, ‘to the gallows with Perón’, police said they had done so to restore order.