Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  However, the telling and retelling of such gossip did little to lift the heavy air of depression and dejection that pervaded the city. The country’s intellectuals — students, writers, artists — were depressed by a sense of inevitability, frustration, and gathering darkness. A middle-aged lawyer recalled his student days in the 1940s. ‘On this continent,’ he said, ‘we were accustomed to the dictator type of rulers — ruthless, arrogant strongmen. It is a woeful tradition. But this man Perón, he was a dictator of another type. He was subtle, devious, charming. He did not come out in the open and crack skulls. He did his work silently and cynically. You see, there was so little we could put our hands on — everything he did was in the name of democracy and social betterment — and yet we sensed the smell of evil in the air, and the thin ledge on which we walked.’

  9

  EVA’S RULE

  In the early hours of September 24, 1948, Buenos Aires radio stations began blaring forth the news of a conspiracy to murder Evita and her husband. Thirteen of the plotters had already been arrested said Federal Police Chief Arturo Bertollo in a dawn press conference. He named their leader, and it was hard to believe. For it was the original descamisado, Cipriano Reyes, leader of the meat packing house workers. Three years earlier, on that fateful October 17, he had led his ragged mob of fellow workers into the heart of Buenos Aires and had restored Juan Perón to power. Now, if it was true, Reyes, disillusioned and in opposition, had planned to throw a bomb at the Peróns as they entered the Teatro Colon Opera House for a gala performance. Also accused as a plotter was a former American Embassy official, John D. Griffiths, who had been ordered out of the country the previous April for alleged anti-Perón activities. No explanation for this desperate adventure was given by the police. But within a few hours posters denouncing the plot were plastered around the city. Loudspeaker trucks toured the streets announcing a one-day general strike so that workers could show their indignation. By noon the city was paralysed.

  Factories and shops closed. The trains stopped running. So to make sure of a good turnout, the government mobilised trucks to bring in workers from the outlying shanty-town slums to the centre of the city. In the bright spring sunlight they streamed into Plaza de Mayo, many of them carrying posters condemning the plot against their beloved leaders. Gallows decorated trees and buildings — a meaningful reminder of the bitter speech two weeks earlier in which Perón assured his enemies that his voice would not tremble as he ordered them hanged. To the gallows with Cipriano,’ screamed the vast crowd in the plaza. But then, as the afternoon grew later, the chanting changed to the more familiar rhythmic ‘Evita! Evita! Perón! Perón!’ There was a roar that lasted for a good ten to fifteen minutes when finally the President and this wife walked out on to the balcony, accompanied by Interior Minister Angel C. Borlenghi.

  When the crowd had quietened down sufficiently for Peron to begin to speak, he launched into an emotional, almost hysterical attack on ‘the traitors to the country’ who had plotted his death because ‘international capitalists desire it.’ His audience knew the Peron shorthand by heart. ‘It’s the Yankees,’ they yelled. The President was not saying anything. But he savagely attacked John Griffiths as ‘this international spy who came into our country free and trusted, only to use his diplomatic position to spy against the Republic.’ Then Evita weighed in with a promise that she would willingly ‘die a thousand times’ for her descamisados, and she wondered aloud, with a catch in her voice, why anybody would want to kill a ‘humble woman’ just because she happened to be the ‘humblest collaborator of General Perón’. Below in the plaza, the crowd responded with a thunderous ‘Hang them, hang them!’

  But before things got out of hand, Perón called on everybody to be calm. He had the patience, he said, ‘to dominate the agitators or liquidate them if necessary.’ He told them to go home, adding an afterthought with a grin that they should not stop and attack La Prensa on their way, which they had a habit of doing whenever they came into town for a Plaza de Mayo rally. Just what this one had been all about no one seemed quite sure. Not many Argentines, other than the most fanatical of Perónistas, took the story of the plot seriously.

  John Griffiths, the American diplomat involved who was living on the other side of the River Plata in the Uruguayan capital of Montevideo, called it ‘a joke in bad taste’. Cipriano Reyes was not heard from. Nor was he for another seven years. He was kept in gaol and intermittently tortured. Among the other alleged plotters were three priests, a half blind doctor, and two women, all of them completely unknown politically. As for relations with the US, Perón seemed to have consigned them once more to the low level they had reached during his early days in power. There appeared to be only one reasonable explanation, that the Peróns wanted to warn their enemies, whoever they might be, they could still produce a potent mob of the faithful on short notice.

  Glittering with diamonds in Paris on the arm of the Argentine Ambassador.

  Touching up in Geneva.

  Below: With her escorts at the Vatican, en route to see the Pope.

  Back home, distributing gifts to children.

  Preparing for a busy day with hairdresser and manicurist.

  Above: The start of a formal evening.

  Below: A gala night at the Teatro Colon opera house.

  Above: A dying Evita greets the crowds from the balcony as she is held up by her husband, October 17,1951.

  Below: A warm embrace on that same “Santa Evita Day”.

  So it was attack, and there was no finer, fiercer exponent of that than Eva Perón. ‘Wait until we get the opposition out of the way,’ she told a group of union leaders who visited her in her office shortly after she returned from Europe. Then you’ll really see things.’ To a newly-elected Perónista deputy named Astorgano, a former bouncer in a bar who confessed he was nervous about speaking in Congress, she advised: ‘Oh, you won’t need to do much talking. But you can do plenty of listening. And if you hear anyone speaking ill of me, break his head open.’

  One Congressional head that Evita particularly wanted bloodying belonged to Radical Deputy Ernesto Enrique Sammartino who had sardonically remarked on the floor of Congress that, ‘A President who believes that the nation’s history begins and ends with him shows at least a lack of mental and moral equilibrium.’

  Perón paid no attention, preferring to joke about attacks like that unless they got out of hand. But not Evita. She was not going to allow an insult like that pass without punishment. She told Hector Campora, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, to expel Sammartino from Congress. Campora was a small-town dentist who had risen to the top in Perónista politics through a policy of slavish devotion to Evita which had paid off. He had once even boasted that, They say I’m Evita’s servant. I’m honoured to be called her servant because I serve her loyally.’ So naturally he wasted no time in carrying out her order.

  Under Argentina’s constitution, members of Congress could be expelled by a two-thirds vote for ‘gross misconduct’. As far as Evita was concerned, there could be no greater misconduct than insulting her husband’s dignity. There never was any doubt what the result would be. The Perónistas already controlled more than two-thirds of the Chamber of Deputies and they had one hundred per cent of the Senate. All the Radicals could do to protect their man was to stand up for him in debate. When Perónista Deputy Conte Grand put the expulsion motion before the chamber, quoting Sammartino’s attack on the President as the basis for the charge, a Radical deputy shouted, ‘And well spoken, too!’

  When it became time for Sammartino to defend himself, he spoke with measured insolence. We have not come here to do obeisance to the lash nor to dance to Madame Pompadour’s tune,’ he said. ‘This is not a fashionable nightclub or the ante-room of a palace. It is the parliament of a free people, and it should be made plain to the people here and now that this Chamber will not obey the commands of meddling old colonels, nor heed orders given in perfumed letters from the boudoir of any ruler.’ With t
hat, Campora struck the bell on his desk and put an end to any further debate. A prominent Perónista hurried to a cloakroom telephone, then returned to whisper in Campora’s ear. The roll call began, and the deputies voted — by turning the electrical indicators on their desk to ‘Aye’ or ‘No’. The lights on the board above the dias flashed the result: 104 to 42 in favour of expulsion. ‘Let’s see who runs to telephone la Señora!’ yelled Radical Deputy Emir Mercador.

  With his parliamentary immunity lifted, Sammartino disappeared underground as federal police scoured the city for him. Finally, like so many other opponents of the Peróns, he surfaced across the river in Montevideo, from where he sent a message to his Radical colleagues predicting that ‘tomorrow all of you will have to join me’. They had walked out of the Chamber of Deputies after Sammartino’s expulsion. But that had simply opened the way for a field day of Congressional rubber-stamping. Without so much as looking at the mimeographed budget report on their desk, the Perónista deputies passed a £425 million budget, then whipped through 28 bills in four hours, one of which gave the President dictatorial rights to govern by decree whenever he felt the nation’s welfare demanded it. Another allowed him to gaol anyone who showed ‘disrespect’ for any official from President to dog-catcher.

  But when the Perónistas turned their attention to yet another bill authorising a convention to amend the country’s 1853 constitution, the Radicals hurried back to the Chamber for a last ditch battle to salvage some remnants of Argentina’s badly tattered democracy. They attacked the Government for railroading the reform bill through the Congress before the country had a chance to study it. We are watching the destruction of Parliament,’ cried Radical Deputy Alfredo R. Vitolo. Another Radical shouted: ‘We want reform for the people and not for the President.’ From 4 o’clock in the afternoon until 2.50 the next morning the opposition fought a futile delaying action. Then the bill was passed. One of its provisions, once a constitutional convention ratified it, enabled Perón to succeed himself as President, a step that brought a warning from the Radicals that the country was heading towards a situation where ‘all political, economic, and cultural powers’ would be concentrated under ‘one official party and its chief’. The warning reached few Argentines. The Government-controlled press and radio saw to that.

  But a few old enemies of Evita decided to register their protest against the constitutional changes. On Calle Florida — probably the most famous shopping street in South America — a group of the wealthiest and most socially prominent women in Argentina paraded with banners and chanted ‘Save the Constitution’. It was an unlikely sight, a huddled group of fur-coated elderly and middle-aged ladies all looking a little scared at their temerity. But outside the opposition newspaper La Nacion they sang the national anthem with its chorus line of Libertad! Libertad! Libertad!, and immediately were surrounded by hundreds of cheering shoppers. It was that kind of street, not the sort of place, with its high prices, that was likely to attract Evita’s descamisados. But the cheering and the singing of the society ladies quickly attracted the attention of a police riot squad. Seven women were arrested, two of them Uruguayan tourists, a mother and daughter who had been shopping on Calle Florida and had stopped to watch the demonstration. All of them were thrown in gaol overnight and released the next morning with a scolding from the judge. But that was not the end of the matter. Evita had been out of town. When she returned and found out what had happened she immediately ordered that the women be re-arrested.

  They were herded into cells reserved for prostitutes, a cruelly vindictive touch by Evita. She had done it before to a group of teenage girls who had been arrested for laughing at the rustic accent of a Perónista provincial governor while he was making a speech at the annual Rural Show, always one of the main social events of the year in Argentina because of its connection with the country’s landed aristocracy. Evita knew exactly what horror and indignation that punishment would arouse in a society which set such a high premium on a girl’s virtue. So she repeated it with the older women and then had them appear before a Perón-appointed judge who sentenced them to 30 days in jail, although one of them, who was 72 years old, was allowed to serve her sentence at home.

  That evening, the Perónista paper La Epoca devoted most of its front page to condemning the women for seeking deliberately to embarrass the Government outside the country. ‘The people will scourge their enemies,’ the paper thundered. ‘Traitors to the nation will not be tolerated.’ Indeed, the Peróns seemed determined to make an example of the women. Possibly it was part of Evita’s revenge against the Sociedad de Beneficiencia, for all five of the Argentine women involved were members. The Uruguayan Government tried but failed to persuade the Argentines to release the two Uruguayan women. As for the others, the Perónista majority in Congress made sure there would not be any public debate by the simple expedient of staying away from the Chamber until the women had finished serving their sentences. And to make sure that everybody got the point that opposition was no longer tolerated in Argentina, Perón growled that he recognised ‘the inalienable right of an outworn oligarchy to a final kicking fit in its death agony. But even within that right, they should learn that if we so wish, we shall bind them securely so that they can kick no more.’

  The next day, an underground edition of the banned Socialist weekly Vanguardia appeared on the streets of Buenos Aires with a particularly apt cartoon by its celebrated cartoonist Tristan. It showed Perón in full uniform, armed with club, knives, cannon, spear, bombs, rope, moneybag, and microphone. He was addressing a gagged figure, tied hands and feet to a stake and labelled ‘opposition’. ‘Stop bragging and come out and fight,’ the General said in the cartoon. ‘You cannot frighten me, you traitor, oligarch, thief, cheat, faker, and liar.’

  While porteños giggled privately, the Peróns sent out the federal police on yet another dragnet hunt for the gadfly weekly. It had infuriated them both so often with its scathing personal attacks that they had closed it down but in the way that they normally dealt with their enemies — by bending laws to suit their purpose. Three charges had been brought against Vanguardia — its printing presses violated a municipal anti-noise measure, a weapon chosen by the Peróns with cool irony since the anti-noise ordinance had been sponsored some years back by the Socialists; its loading of papers into delivery trucks tied up traffic on the street; and its pressroom lacked proper first-aid equipment.

  La Vanguardia’s management said it would stop printing at night and avoid loading during hours when the traffic was heavy, though it pointed out that several Perónista papers on the same street ran their presses after sundown without official rebuke. The paper also said it would see to it that the pressroom was well supplied with necessary first-aid equipment. But it was no use. The paper was forced to go underground, skipping from one secret printing plant to another, sometimes publishing on wrapping paper. Cartoonist Tristan found a special delight in laughing at Evita’s flowery speeches with their constant references to the ‘heart of Perón’ and the ‘heart of Evita’. He drew her bejewelled with a blank face and a heart-shaped mouth as her only identification.

  No one who met Evita ever forgot her. Milton Bracker, who covered Argentina for the New York Times during her years of power, remembered a woman of incredible humourlessness, startling energy, and corroding rancour, who had an absolute inability to forget or forgive. In cold print, her speeches failed to convey the constant sense of offended righteousness in her voice; the fusion of tension and outrage which may have had a deeper effect upon her listeners than her words; and the semi-mystic, fear-ridden role which made her probably the most idolised, hated and mistrusted woman in the world in her day. Her temper was notorious. A high-ranking diplomat once heard her in the presence of other high officials scream at Argentina’s Minister of the Treasury: ‘shut up Cereijo, ‘Shut up!’ And yet she could speak gently and lovingly over the radio at midnight on Christmas Eve to her ‘beloved descamisados’.

  But it was on t
he balcony that Evita reigned supreme. It has always been the podium of Latin American demagogues. Ecuador’s popular populist Jose Maria Velasco Ibarra, who was regularly elected President and deposed just as often, once cried from exile: ‘Give me a balcony in each town and I shall take possession of Ecuador.’ Juan and Eva Perón had that same spellbinding appeal for working-class Argentines. Indeed, the ardour of the vast crowds that packed Plaza de Mayo never seemed to dim with the passing of the years. Whether the Peróns were celebrating an anniversary, like October the 17th, or seeking reassurance in a time of crisis, Argentines would turn out by the tens of thousands, waving aloft banners and pictures of their hero and heroine along with shirts tied to poles, the symbol of the descamisado.

  After hours of noise, the singing of Perónista songs and the chanting of slogans, rising to a crescendo of ‘Evita! Evita! Perón! Perón!’ the President and his wife like actors on a cue, would fling open the big windows and walk out on to the balcony. The script rarely changed. Perón spoke first. He only had time to say: ‘shirtless companions’ and the crowd instantly interrupted with shouts of ‘the coat, the coat’. Perón would laugh, take off his coat, and in shirt-sleeves launch into his speech. His powerful voice thundered through the plaza, deafening the ears of those who stood too close to the loudspeakers. His words poured out with a rhythm, the tempo building, slackening, pausing, at which point the uninitiated, the first-timers, applauded like a concert-goer confusing the end of a movement for the end of the symphony. Then, with a flourish and a cry of ‘companeros descamisados’, he would be off again.