Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron

by Barnes, John

  There were a number of other things irritating the normally exuberant Juan Domingo Perón at the time. His teeth for one. His dentist had been a good friend, which is perhaps why Perón had overlooked the fact that he had once been arrested for practising without a licence. Returning from a trip to the USA, where he had been buying cars for top government officials, Oliva Paz found the President’s teeth in worse shape than ever. He lanced the gums. But that did nothing for his patient’s terrible case of pyorrhoea. So Perón demanded to see a specialist. His Secretary of Education, Oscar Ivanissevich, a skilled surgeon who had taken out the President’s appendix, recommended Professor Stanley D. Tylman of the University of Illinois, who had just arrived in Buenos Aires. Dr Tylman was willing to look at Perón’s mouth. The examination went something like this:

  Tylman (peering into Perón’s mouth): ‘You have one of the worst pyorrhoea cases I have ever seen. The treatment you have been receiving is incredibly bad.’

  Oliva Paz (translating): ‘Although you have one of the worst attacks of pyorrhoea I have ever seen, your gums have been very well treated.’

  Tylman: ‘Since your mouth has been so neglected and maltreated, there is no way to avoid extracting at least six teeth.’

  Oliva Paz (still translating): ‘With the fine treatment you have been getting, your mouth and gums will be alright within a few weeks.’

  Although Perón spoke a little English, he had been listening attentively to the translation and on hearing the good news he gave one of his broad grins, pumped the professor’s hand and said ‘Thank you, thank you.’ Dr Tylman realised immediately that something was wrong. He called in Ivanissevich to give a correct translation, then yanked out the six offending teeth. Perón was so delighted with the treatment that he and Evita invited the professor over to the Residence for dinner every night and then drove him out to the airport when he returned to the United States. As for Oliva Paz, he took the well travelled route across the river to Uruguay.

  But embarrassing and painful as Perón’s teething troubles were, they were nothing compared to the ego-shattering debacle of Argentina’s entry into the world of atomic power. One day he matter-of-factly announced that his country had produced atomic energy. Naturally, the news made headlines around the world, placing Argentina in one verbal leap in the super-power league alongside the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain. Perón’s claim was that a team of Argentine physicists headed by an Austrian, Ronald Richter, had produced thermonuclear atomic reactions using energy from the sun instead of uranium.

  Such incredulity was voiced by foreign scientists that Perón vented his anger in an interview with Evita’s newspaper Democracia. ‘I’m not interested in what the United States or any other country in the world thinks.’ he thundered. ‘I am only speaking to the Argentine people to whom I am responsible because I have always avoided the course followed by politicians and newspapers in other countries in the world who lie consciously, directing their lies to their own people and spreading them abroad. They have not yet told the first truth, while I have not yet told the first lie.’ No one in Argentina, of course, was accusing the President of lying. To do so was to invite a year or two in jail for desacato, disrespect. Nevertheless, a few months later hoaxer Richter disappeared across the river to Uruguay, having squandered a few million dollars of Argentina’s fast vanishing foreign exchange reserves.

  Still, even the atomic caper was a minor misadventure compared with Perón’s bungling of the nation’s economy. At the end of World War II, Argentina’s foreign exchange stood at over 500,000 million dollars, making it one of the richest countries in the world. The peso stood at four to the dollar and for every one of those pesos there was a backing of one and a half pesos in gold. Perón knew what he wanted to do with all that money, and his intentions were good. He was going to lift the nation’s workers out of their feudal, impoverished bondage, rescue the country from its long servitude as an economic colony of the British, pay off the country’s foreign debt, and build an industrial base so that Argentina would no longer be a nation of peasants at the mercy of the industrial world and its own land-wealthy oligarchs. He paved those intentions with the nation’s gold, and by the late 1940s the gold was running out.

  The problem was that Argentina simply did not have the foundations for an industrial economy. It had no coal or iron worth mentioning, produced less than half of the oil it needed, and did not have a large enough population (16 millions in 1947) to run both a great industrial plant and a great farm economy. The government paid farmers and stockmen low prices for their products and sold them abroad for high prices, using the profits to build up industry. For a while Argentina led the world in increased production. But this very success hurt the country’s agriculture. Drawn by high wages and the attractions of urban life, hundreds of thousands of rural workers abandoned the farms for the squalid, overcrowded slums of the big cities. The population of Buenos Aires increased by a million in one year. Worse yet, nature added to the farmers’ woes. For two years in a row, Argentina suffered from devastating droughts. The parched pampas, once rich in corn, wheat, and cattle, cracked and blew away in a cloud of dust. The editor of the economic journal, The Review of the River Plate, wrote: ‘Last week I visited one of the western ranches in the south of Santa Fé province, and while there I saw part of the province of Cordoba blowing over in the form of a huge yellow cloud.’

  With less grain and meat to sell abroad, Argentina received less foreign exchange with which to buy coal, oil, raw materials, and machinery. Industrial production fell, unemployment rose. Foreign exchange reserves melted away to nothing and the balance of trade turned against Argentina. For the first time in history, Argentina had to import wheat. There was even a scarcity of beef in Buenos Aires, the legendary beef capital of the world. For Juan Perón, for all Argentines, there could be no worse crisis than that. American writer Bernard Collier once claimed that the most distinctive quality about Buenos Aires is its olor porteño — the odour of fresh beef roasting.

  ‘An Argentine must have fresh beef,’ he wrote. ‘Without fresh beef he feels weak, angry, anxious and hungry, all the time without satisfaction. Give him lamb and he can’t stand the taste; chicken, fish and pork he rejects as baby food. You walk along a downtown street at 1 o’clock in the afternoon and watch the pipefitters, the cable splicers, the sewer workers, the diggers and the pavers pop out of holes in the street to check on the doneness of a 2-pound bife, which is sizzling over a wood or charcoal fire on a grill fashioned out of a tar bucket and iron reinforcing rods. By 2 o’clock on a hot summer afternoon there will be workmen in blue shirts and leather sandals lolling in the shade of buildings or construction fences all over town. In the winter they will be hunched over the little fires. They will be sleepy with their big steak and most of a bottle of good red wine and half a loaf of crusty Italian bread inside. At 3 o’clock they will return to their jobs refreshed and strong again. When they get home at night they want another steak for supper.’

  Businessmen in the skyscrapers, the shopkeepers and the gaucho on the pampas feel the same way. They want their beef every day, and when it is scarce, there is great unrest among Argentines across the land. So when porteños found themselves having to pay black-market prices for beef imported from Uruguay, even the Peróns’ beloved descamisados began to grumble, although Evita continued to push wages up to keep them happy. But prices now were rising just as fast. The four peso dollar of 1945 had become the 16 peso dollar of 1949, a fact that the General tried to brush away with the comment that he did not care if the peso was worthless outside Argentina because ‘I don’t have to buy anything abroad.’

  If his most loyal supporters believed that, even they must have found it hard to swallow his claim that he had been examining dustbins on his way to the Casa Rosada each morning. The result of his investigation, he said, was that the amount of bread and meat thrown away each day would feed another city as large as Buenos Aires. There was plenty for
everybody, he said firmly, if wasteful Argentines would eat what was on their plate instead of throwing it away.

  But there were plenty of Argentines who were not amused by the rhetoric. The army, for one, saw a chance of settling old scores with the traitor who had trumped his military colleagues’ machine guns in 1945 with his descamisados. In the summer of 1949, rumours flooded Buenos Aires that the army had demanded the retirement of Evita from public life. No one knew whether the rumours were true because all the newspapers in Buenos Aires were on strike. That in itself was odd, too. For by all Perónista rules, the strike of newspaper typographers should have been easy to settle. Their demand for a 25 percent pay rise to meet the soaring cost of living seemed mild enough by the standards that Evita had set for settlements in the past. The union’s officers had taken their demands to her. But to their surprise, she only met them halfway and then lectured them on the need for economic responsibility. They backed down, as union bosses usually did when in confrontation with the Señora. But to everybody’s surprise, the rank-and-file revolted. Evita promptly called in convicts from the federal prison in Buenos Aires as strikebreakers. But they refused to work, too. Within days, every newspaper in Buenos Aires, including her own Democracia, had shut down. And the rumours were in full spate.

  11

  REPRESSION

  Normally, mid-summer is not a time for revolution in Argentina. The capital takes on a sleepy air. Small shops close for the holidays. Government offices work only half days, and most of the city moves to Mar del Plata, which is the Blackpool of South America. There were probably a few generals, headed by War Minister Humberto Sosa Molina, who were ready to pull a golpe, a revolution, right there and then in the summer of 1949. But they were handicapped by a lack of officers and men. Most of them were in Mar del Plata, too, lying out on their own two feet of beach, listening to Hector y Su Jazz Band at the world’s largest casino, dining nightly on two inch-thick steaks, and tangoing to a new tune called ‘El Cafetin de Buenos Aires’ before losing a portion of their latest big pay increase at the roulette tables. Enfuriatingly for General Sosa Molina, a golpe at that particular moment, if he had been able to round up a few soldiers, would have met with little resistance. For thousands of the most fervent of descamisados were also at Mar del Plata in the big Government sea-front hotels that Evita’s social aid foundation had built for them.

  So the Minister had to settle for daily crisis meetings with the Peróns who were themselves on holiday at their San Vicente quinta. Sosa Molina told them bluntly that the army not only wanted Evita out of politics, it wanted her foundation closed and an end to bribery and corruption in the government. To show that the army meant business, the guard at Campo de Mayo, the big army encampment on the outskirts of the capital, refused to allow Evita on to the base when she called without an invitation. For a few days it appeared to be touch-and go as the Peróns fought for their political lives. He failed to turn up to open an international travel conference in Buenos Aires. She abruptly cancelled plans to speak at the Constitutional Convention which was meeting to replace the 1853 Constitution with one more to the liking of Perónistas.

  When they did appear in public together, she spread her arms out in front of her and shook her head when the inevitable chant went up of ‘Evita, Evita’. Right there and then, before a large outdoor crowd in Palermo Park in the city, Perón lashed out at the rumour-mongers. He said he had merely been resting in his San Vicente quinta and he’d had a good laugh with the messenger who told him that everybody believed he was a ‘prisoner of his own government’. He assured his audience that he and Evita were ‘perfectly calm and safe’. But in the newspaperless city, rumours continued to spread — Perón had offered to resign. Evita had chartered a plane to take her to Brazil.

  But when the dust finally settled, it was the army that had lost once again. Infuriated by the treatment that his wife had received at Campo de Mayo, Perón angrily pointed out to his War Minister that his government had raised the pay of the rank and file soldier by a considerable amount, and his wife, through her foundation, had also bettered the lot of their families. So if the generals wanted to find out to whom the troops owed their loyalty, they should go ahead and try a golpe. That was the end of that.

  But Evita wanted to make sure the generals were properly humiliated. She ordered them to invite her and her husband to lunch at Campo de Mayo at which the officers’ wives had to be present. For many of them, it was the first time they had ever spoken to Eva Perón. They had to choke silently over their bifes as the War Minister humbled himself before her with a nation-wide radio audience gleefully listening in. ‘The most worthy Señora of the most excellent President,’ General Sosa Molina said, ‘for her multiple activities to mitigate the troubles of her fellow beings and because she is enshrined in the hearts of the people, deserves all our sympathy and respectful consideration. The significance of her being among us as a special guest is none other than a stout denial of rumours that present the army as opposing her actions and thereby opposing the feelings of the people who support her.’

  It was a moment of triumph for Evita, and she savoured it. A few days later, she was at the President’s side when he took the oath to uphold the new constitution drawn up by the Perónista-dominated Constitutional Convention. The vast chamber of the Hall of Congress was filled with senior members of the armed forces, members of the diplomatic corps, and Perónista Congressmen who overflowed into the opposition benches of the Radical deputies who had refused to attend. As the President took the oath on a bible provided by Evita’s foundation, outside a crowd of over 100,000 packed into the three-block Plaza de Congreso echoed his promise to defend the new constitution. At that point, the ceremony turned into a Perónista rally, much to the embarrassment of the diplomats and generals, who were crushed so tight in the hall there was no way they could get out. ‘Evita’ was chanted over and over again. As she responded with smiles and blown kisses, the crowd whooped into the party marching song, ‘The Perónista Boys’ —

  We Perónista boys

  Fighting together

  Will ever cry

  With heartfelt joy

  Viva Perón! Viva Perón!

  Evita was now more powerful than ever. Through her foundation, her control of radio stations and newspapers, her presence permeated every town and home in Argentina. There was no escape. Her picture dominated the hoardings. Her thoughts were broadcast every few hours throughout the day on nation-wide radio. Her name graced the country’s largest gas works and its biggest passenger liner. A newly discovered star was named after her. So was a new downtown Buenos Aires underground station, where the words ‘Eva Perón’ were bordered with light and her portrait in coloured tile gazed on all passersby.

  There was a Maria Eva Duarte de Perón Street in Rosario, an Eva Perón Avenue in Tucuman, an Eva Perón surgical pavilion in San Juan, an Evita City housing project near the federal airport in Buenos Aires, an Evita mainline railway station, and two Evita songs — the ‘Eva Perón March’ and ‘Captain Evita’. Both were sung at the opening ceremony of the Western hemisphere’s own Olympics, the first Pan-American Games, which were held in Argentina in February 1951. Athletes and officials from seventeen nations in the hemisphere were given a full dose of Peronism at its most spectacular. Entering the floodlit, flag-decked arena in a limousine, Evita and her husband were wildly cheered by the huge crowd packed into the new vast soccer bowl built by Evita’s foundation in the Avellaneda meat packing district of Buenos Aires. Two of her sayings, in letters six foot high, rimmed the facade of the upper tier. A section of the stadium bearing her name was filled with thousands of children waving Argentine flags with ‘Perón’ and ‘Evita’ printed on either side of the flag’s white stripe. Throughout the programme a guard of honour of the nurses of the Eva Perón Foundation formed a spectacular aisle of dark blue and white across the grass.

  During the ritual of the opening ceremonies — the lighting of the Olympic flame and President Pe
rón’s greeting to the hundreds of athletes — Evita dominated the scene in the official tribunal. An Argentine girl athlete presented her with an enormous bunch of flowers on behalf of all the participating women. Her influence was also apparent during the taking of the Olympic oath. Contrary to the Olympic practice until then, both a man and a woman took the collective oath together. Afterwards, Avery Brundage, the president of the Pan-American Games Committee, offered a tribute to Señora Perón, ‘without whose enthusiastic support’ the games would not have been possible. What he meant was that Evita had paid the bills, or rather her foundation had, which was the same thing. Adulation also came from beyond the borders of Argentina. Bolivia adorned her with the Order of the Condor of the Andes. The Colombians gave her the Cross of Boyaca. She held the Peruvian Grand Cross of the Order of the Sun, Mexico’s Order of the Aztec Eagle, and Ecuador’s Grand Cross of the Order of Merit for ‘the spontaneous and generous manner in which she contributed to the relief of the grief of the victims’ of Ecuador’s 1949 earthquake.

  She was only thirty-one years old, and already countrymen and women of hers were venerating her as a saint. So perhaps it was no wonder there were signs that she was beginning to lose touch with reality. She told the country’s provincial governors with a straight face and the utmost sincerity that Argentina’s children were now learning to say Perón before they said papa. She told a reporter that ‘at times, in my travels, I have seen in the eyes of children, women and even men an expression of adoration, as though I was a supernatural being. I believe this happens precisely because the difference between living conditions in Argentina in the days of the oligarchy and now is almost as great to simple and humble minds as the difference between the natural and the supernatural. An example that confirms what I am saying is that in Jujuy a child approached me and said, “Mama Eva, give me your benediction.”’