Eva Perón

• 1. Introduction

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  Eva Perón rode through Buenos Aires beside her husband on the 4th of June 1952, in a parade celebrating his re-election as president. She was so ill that she could not stand without support. Hidden beneath her oversized fur coat was a frame of plaster and wire that held her upright. Before the parade she swallowed a triple dose of pain medication, and once she was home she took two more doses.

  Millions of Argentines knew her simply as Evita. Her life raises questions that biographers still argue over.

  How did a child of rural poverty, with no formal education, end up at the center of a national movement? Why do her birth records, her charity's finances, and even her politics still divide the people who write about her? And why did her body, after she died, become one of the most traveled and contested objects in Argentine public life?

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• 2. Two Birth Certificates

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  Two documents disagree about who Eva Perón was at birth. A birth certificate held by the civil registry of Junín records a María Eva Duarte, born on the 7th of May 1922. A baptismal certificate names an Eva María Ibarguren and gives the 7th of May 1919. Researchers think the adult Eva forged the first document in 1945, around the time of her marriage. Her own 1951 autobiography, La Razón de mi Vida, offers no help, because it gives no dates, no birthplace, and no birth name.

  The reason for the secrecy lay in her father's other life. Her father, Juan Duarte Manechena Etchegoyen, lived from 1872 to 1926 and was descended from French Basque immigrants. He was a wealthy rancher from nearby Chivilcoy, and he already had a wife, Adela D'Uhart Hiriboronde, and a legal family. Eva's mother, Juana Ibarguren Nuñez, was descended from Spanish Basque immigrants. In rural Argentina at that time, it was not unusual for a rich man to keep more than one family.

  When Eva was one year old, Duarte went back to his legal family for good. He left Juana and her children in abject poverty. Juana sewed clothes for neighbors in Los Toldos, a dusty village in the Pampas with a bleak reputation. Under Argentine law the children were illegitimate, and the stigma left the family somewhat isolated. According to the biographer John Barnes, all Duarte left behind was a document declaring the children his, which allowed them to use the Duarte surname.

  Duarte's death brought one more humiliation. Juana and the children went to his funeral and were allowed to pay their respects, but they were quickly shown out of the church. His widow did not want her husband's mistress and her children there, and as the legal wife, her order was obeyed.

  Soon afterward Juana moved her children into a one-room apartment in Junín. She and her daughters earned the rent as cooks in the houses of local estancias. Help from Eva's older brother later let the family move into a bigger house, which they turned into a boarding house. Eva loved school plays and concerts, and the cinema was a favorite pastime. Her mother hoped to marry her to a local bachelor, but Eva dreamed of being a famous actress. In October 1933 she took a small role in Arriba Estudiantes (Students Arise), which Barnes describes as "an emotional, patriotic, flag-waving melodrama". After that performance she was determined to act.

  After she became first lady in 1946, she had her birth records altered to show married parents and a birth date three years later. One account holds that she also arranged the destruction of her original birth certificate in 1945. When she died in 1952, the public was told she was only 30, which fit the doctored paperwork.

  The anthropologist Julie M. Taylor, a professor at Rice University, points out that children of unmarried parents had fewer legal rights than other children. Taylor believes Eva knew the pain of being called illegitimate. She speculates that this explains why Eva had the law changed so that such children would be called natural children instead.

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• 3. Microphone to Balcony

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  In her autobiography, Eva recalled that people from her town who had visited big cities described them as "marvelous places, where nothing was given but wealth". In 1934, at 15, she left for the capital, Buenos Aires. One account says she ran off with a young musician, and that the romance ended quickly while she stayed in the city. A popular story says she rode the train with the tango singer Agustín Magaldi. No record places him in Junín in 1934, and he usually traveled with his wife. Her sisters say their mother went with her, took her to a radio station audition, and arranged for her to live with the Bustamante family, friends of the Duartes.

  Buenos Aires in the 1930s was called the "Paris of South America". Its center had cafés, restaurants, theaters, movie houses, and bustling crowds. It also suffered great unemployment, poverty, and hunger. The Great Depression had swollen the city with migrants, and many newcomers from the interior lived in tenements, boardinghouses, and outlying shanties known as villas miserias. Eva arrived with no formal education and no connections.

  On the 28th of March 1935, Eva made her professional debut in the play Mrs. Perez, at the Comedias Theater. She bleached her naturally black hair blonde, a look she kept for the rest of her life. In 1936 she toured the country with a theater company, worked as a model, and appeared in a few B-grade movie melodramas.

  Security came in 1942, when a company called Candilejas, sponsored by a soap manufacturer, hired her for a daily part in the radio drama Muy Bien. It aired on Radio El Mundo, then the most important station in the country. Later that year she signed a five-year contract with Radio Belgrano, which gave her a role in the program Great Women of History. There she played Elizabeth I of England, Sarah Bernhardt, and Alexandra Feodorovna, the last Tsarina of Russia.

  By 1943 she was earning five or six thousand pesos a month, which made her one of the best-paid radio actresses in the country. She eventually came to co-own the radio company. Pablo Raccioppi, who ran Radio El Mundo jointly with her, is said to have disliked her, yet he called her "thoroughly dependable". In 1942 she moved into an apartment at 1557 Calle Posadas in the exclusive Recoleta district, now the site of the Hotel Melia Recoleta Plaza. In 1943 she helped found the Argentine Radio Syndicate.

  Her film career fell in the Golden Age of Argentine cinema but stayed short, and none of her movies was a major hit. In La cabalgata del circo (The Circus Cavalcade), one of her last, she played a young country girl who rivaled the film's older star, Libertad Lamarque.

  An earthquake struck the town of San Juan on the 15th of January 1944 and killed ten thousand people. Juan Perón, then Secretary of Labor, set up a relief fund and planned an "artistic festival" with radio and film actors. After a week of fundraising, the participants gathered for a gala at Luna Park Stadium in Buenos Aires on the 22nd of January 1944. There Eva Duarte met Colonel Perón. They left together at about two in the morning, and she later called it her "marvelous day". Perón's first wife, Aurelia Tizón, had died of uterine cancer in 1938.

  Perón was 48 when they met, and Eva was 24. She had neither knowledge of nor interest in politics, so she argued with no one in his circle and simply absorbed what she heard. In his memoir, Perón claimed he deliberately chose her as his pupil and set out to build in her a "second I".

  In May 1944 the government announced that broadcast performers must form a union, the only one allowed to operate in Argentina. Perón had suggested the idea, and the performers probably thought it good politics to elect his mistress as its president. Eva soon began a daily program called Toward a Better Future, which dramatized Perón's accomplishments in the style of a soap opera. His own speeches were often played during it. She spoke in ordinary language, like a regular woman.

  On the 9th of October 1945, opponents inside the government arrested Perón. They feared that his base of unskilled union workers, many of them recent arrivals from the countryside in industrial cities, would back a power grab. Between 250,000 and 350,000 people gathered in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of government, to demand his release. At 11 pm Perón stepped onto its balcony. The biographer Robert D. Crassweller says the scene recalled caudillos such as Rosas and Yrigoyen addressing their people. He also says the evening had "mystic overtones" of a "quasi-religious" nature.

  After Perón won the 1946 election, his administration circulated a highly fictionalized account of that day. In it, Eva knocked on every door in Buenos Aires to bring people into the streets. The film version of the Lloyd Webber musical later popularized this tale, and historians agree it is false. At the time, Eva was only an actress. She had no influence with the unions, no favor with Perón's inner circle, and no special popularity in film or radio. The rally was organized by unions, above all the CGT, which was Perón's main base.

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• 4. The Rainbow Tour

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  In 1947 Francisco Franco of Spain extended an invitation to Juan Perón for a state visit. When Perón would not go, Eva decided that she would. The timing was awkward. Argentina had only recently emerged from its "wartime quarantine", taken its place in the United Nations, and improved relations with the United States. A visit to Franco, who along with António Salazar of Portugal was one of the last authoritarian leaders left in Western Europe, drew international frowns.

  Advisers solved the problem by adding other countries to the itinerary, so that Eva's sympathies would not seem tied to Franco. The trip was billed as a non-political goodwill tour. The press called it the Rainbow Tour.

  Spain welcomed her warmly. She visited the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella in the Capilla Real de Granada. The country was still struggling after its civil war, and its closed economy and the United Nations embargo meant it could not feed its people. Eva handed 100-peseta notes to poor children she met along the way. Franco gave her the highest award of the Spanish government, the Order of Isabella the Catholic.

  In Rome the reception was cooler. Pope Pius XII gave her no papal decoration, though he allowed her the amount of time usually reserved for queens and gave her a rosary. In France she met Charles de Gaulle and promised two shipments of wheat.

  While she was in France, word arrived that King George VI would not receive her in Britain, whatever his Foreign Office advised, and that the visit would not count as a state visit. Eva regarded this as a snub and canceled the stop. She gave "exhaustion" as the official reason.

  Switzerland was the worst leg of the journey. According to John Barnes's biography, someone threw two stones that smashed the windshield of her car as crowds pressed around it. She threw up her hands in shock but was not hurt. Later, while she sat with the Swiss Foreign Minister, protesters threw tomatoes that splattered both him and her dress. She then ended the two-month tour and flew home.

  Opponents of the Peronists speculated that the real aim was to deposit money in a Swiss bank account. That seems unlikely, since a state visit and a tour of a watch factory are a strange way to hide money. It is also unlikely that such an account existed.

  Time magazine put her on its cover during the tour, with the caption "Eva Perón: Between two worlds, an Argentine rainbow". She was the only South American first lady ever to appear alone on its cover. She appeared again in 1951, but that time with Juan Perón. The story was also the first publication to mention that she had been born out of wedlock, and Argentina banned the magazine for several months in retaliation.

  The tour changed her appearance. She gave up the elaborate hairdos of her movie-star days, and the bright blonde softened to a more subdued shade, pulled back in a heavy braided chignon. She dropped the elaborate hats and form-fitting dresses of Argentine designers and turned to Parisian couture. Christian Dior and the jewelry of Cartier became favorites, and she began to wear conservative, stylish tailleurs, mostly from Dior and other Paris houses, to project a more serious political persona.

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• 5. The Foundation

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  Eighty-seven society ladies made up the Sociedad de Beneficencia de Buenos Aires, which handled most charity in the capital before Juan Perón took office. In the 1800s the group had lived on private gifts, largely from the ladies' husbands. By the 1940s it ran on government money, and its work with orphans and homeless women had slowed.

  By tradition, the Sociedad elected the First Lady of Argentina as its president. The ladies did not approve of Eva's impoverished background, her lack of formal education, or her career as an actress. They feared she would set a bad example for the orphans and refused her the post. It is often said that Eva retaliated by cutting off their government funding, though this account has been questioned. What is clear is that the money once given to the Sociedad went to support her own foundation.

  The Eva Perón Foundation began with 10,000 pesos from Eva herself. Its backing came from donations of cash and goods from Peronist unions and private businesses. The General Confederation of Labour gave three man-days of pay per worker each year, later reduced to two. Taxes on lottery and movie tickets, a levy on casinos, and revenue from horse races added more. Crassweller notes that some businesses were pressured to give, and that refusal could bring bad consequences.

  The foundation's finances remain a battleground among biographers. Mary Main, author of The Woman with the Whip, the first English-language biography of Eva, writes that no account records were kept. She argues that it was merely a way to funnel government money into private Swiss accounts held by the Peróns. Fraser and Navarro answer that the Minister of Finance, Ramón Cereijo, did keep records. They write that the foundation "began as the simplest response to the poverty Perón encountered each day in her office" and to "the appalling backwardness of social services-or charity, as it was still called-in Argentina".

  Within a few years its assets in cash and goods passed three billion pesos, which was over 200 million dollars at the exchange rate of the late 1940s. It employed 14,000 people, of whom 6,000 were construction workers and 26 were priests. Each year it bought and handed out 400,000 pairs of shoes, 500,000 sewing machines, and 200,000 cooking pots. It also awarded scholarships and built homes, hospitals, and other institutions.

  It even built entire communities. Ciudad Evita, founded by the foundation in 1947 just outside Buenos Aires, still exists. Through the foundation's works and health services, Argentine health care became significantly more equal. Every part of the operation was under Eva's own supervision.

  Toward the end of her life she worked 20 to 22 hours a day at the foundation. She often ignored Juan Perón's requests that she cut back and take weekends off. Contact with the poor sharpened her anger at poverty. She once said, "Sometimes I have wished my insults were slaps or lashes. I've wanted to hit people in the face to make them see, if only for a day, what I see each day I help the people."

  Crassweller writes that after 1946 her public crusades and private devotions narrowed in intensity and veered "toward the transcendental". He compares her to Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and calls her a one-woman Jesuit Order.

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• 6. Votes and Renunciation

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  On the 21st of August 1946, the Senate of Argentina approved a women's suffrage bill. Eva Perón is often credited with winning women the vote, but the decision was beyond her power. She made radio addresses in favor and published articles in her newspaper, Democracia, asking male Peronists to back the cause. Her real effort went to a bill from her supporter Eduardo Colom, which was eventually dropped.

  The Senate's bill had to wait more than a year for the House of Representatives, which approved it on the 9th of September 1947. Law 13,010 established equal political rights for men and women and universal suffrage, and it passed unanimously. At a public ceremony, Juan Perón signed the law and then handed the document to Eva, a symbolic gift.

  She then created the Female Peronist Party, the first large women's political party in the country. By 1951 it had 500,000 members and 3,600 headquarters nationwide. Eva did not consider herself a feminist, yet her effect on women's political life was decisive. Thousands of women who had never taken part in politics joined, and they were the first women active in Argentine politics. Female suffrage and the party together helped give Juan Perón 63 percent of the vote in the 1951 presidential election.

  In 1951 Juan Perón chose his wife as his candidate for vice president. Some of his more conservative allies disliked the idea, because Eva would become president if he died. Her backers were the descamisados, or "shirtless ones", the low-income and working-class Argentines whose name echoes the sans-culottes of the French Revolution. Her support among working-class women was especially strong. It surprised Perón, who saw that she had become as important to the Peronist movement as he was.

  On the 22nd of August 1951, allied unions held a mass rally they called the "Cabildo Abierto", after the first local government of the May Revolution of 1810. The Peróns spoke from a balcony on scaffolding on the Avenida 9 de Julio, several blocks from the Casa Rosada, under two large portraits of themselves. The rally is claimed to be the largest public show of support ever for a female political figure.

  Eva turned down the candidacy. Opposition from the military and the bourgeoisie, together with her failing health, forced her withdrawal. She said her only ambition was that in the large chapter of history to be written about her husband, a footnote would mention a woman who brought the "hopes and dreams of the people to the president" and later turned them into "glorious reality". Peronist rhetoric calls the episode "The Renunciation" and presents her as a selfless woman in the Hispanic tradition of marianismo.

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• 7. Illness, Death, and Her Body

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  On the 9th of January 1950, Eva fainted in public, and she underwent surgery three days later. It was reported as an appendectomy, but doctors had actually found advanced cervical cancer. Fainting spells continued through 1951, including the evening after the Cabildo Abierto, along with extreme weakness and severe bleeding. A few months after the Renunciation, the American surgeon George T. Pack secretly performed a radical hysterectomy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

  The cancer spread and returned quickly. She became the first Argentine to receive chemotherapy, a novel treatment at the time. By June 1952 she weighed only 36 kg. In 2011 Daniel E. Nijensohn, a Yale neurosurgeon, studied her skull X-rays and photographs. He said she may have been given a prefrontal lobotomy in her last months to relieve pain, agitation, and anxiety. Her 33rd birthday, the 7th of May 1952, brought the title of "Spiritual Leader of the Nation".

  She died at 8:25 pm on Saturday, the 26th of July 1952, at the Unzue Palace. Radio broadcasts across the country were interrupted with this announcement: "the Press Secretary's Office of the Presidency of the Nation fulfills its very sad duty to inform the people of the Republic that at 20:25 hours, Mrs. Eva Perón, Spiritual Leader of the Nation, died."

  The government suspended official activities for several days and ordered flags at half-staff for 10 days. Movies were stopped, and restaurant patrons were asked to leave. Outside the presidential residence the crowd grew so dense that it clogged the streets for ten blocks in each direction. The morning after her death, as her body was moved to the Ministry of Labor Building, eight people were crushed to death. Over the next 24 hours, more than 2,000 people were treated in city hospitals for injuries from the rush, and thousands more were treated on the spot.

  For two weeks, lines of mourners stretched for several blocks, and people waited hours to see her body. Within a day, every flower shop in Buenos Aires had sold out, and flowers were flown in from across the country and from as far away as Chile. Although she never held office, she received a state funeral, usually reserved for a head of state, along with a full Catholic Requiem Mass. A memorial was held in Helsinki so the Argentine team could attend during the 1952 Summer Olympics.

  On Saturday, the 9th of August, her body was moved to the Congress Building for another day of public viewing, and the entire legislature attended a service. The next day, after a final Mass, the coffin was placed on a gun carriage pulled by CGT officials. Juan Perón, his cabinet, her family and friends, and delegates of the Female Peronist Party followed it, along with workers, nurses, and students of the foundation. Flowers rained from balconies and windows.

  Observers disagreed about the mourning. Some reporters thought it genuine, while others saw the public yielding to another of the regime's "passion plays". Time reported that the government enforced a daily five minutes of mourning after a radio announcement.

  The embalmer Pedro Ara, well known for his skill, was soon approached to preserve her body. There is doubt that Eva ever asked for this, so it was most likely Juan Perón's decision. Ara replaced her blood with glycerine to preserve the organs and give an appearance of "artistically rendered sleep".

  Plans called for a monument topped by a statue of a man representing the descamisados, projected to be larger than the Statue of Liberty. Her body would be kept in its base and displayed to the public, in the tradition of Lenin's corpse. While the monument was built, the embalmed body lay in her former office at the CGT building for almost two years.

  The monument was never finished. A military coup called the Revolución Libertadora overthrew Juan Perón in 1955, and he fled the country without securing her body. The new dictatorship took it off display, and its whereabouts were unknown for 16 years. From 1955 to 1971 the military government kept a ban on Peronism.

  In 1971 the military found the body in a crypt in Milan, Italy, buried under the name "María Maggi de Magistris". It had been damaged in transport and storage. Her face showed compression, and one foot was disfigured because the body had been left upright. The body was exhumed and flown to Spain, where Juan Perón and his third wife, Isabel, kept it in their dining room on a platform near the table.

  Juan Perón returned from exile in 1973 and became president for a third time, then died in office in 1974. That year the Montoneros stole the corpse of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, whom they had earlier kidnapped and killed, and used it to bargain for Eva's repatriation. Isabel, who had been elected vice president and succeeded her husband, had the body brought back to Argentina. The Montoneros then left Aramburu's corpse on a Buenos Aires street.

  Eva's body was finally buried in the Duarte family tomb in La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. Later governments took elaborate security measures. A trap door in the marble floor leads to a compartment holding two coffins. Beneath it is a second trap door and a second compartment, where her coffin rests.

  In 1995 Tomás Eloy Martínez published Santa Evita, a novel with many invented stories about the adventures of her corpse. Many books and articles have wrongly repeated its fictional claims of abuse as fact, which created a widespread myth.

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• 8. Icon and Accusations

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  On the 26th of July 2002, the 50th anniversary of her death, the Museo Evita opened in Buenos Aires. Her great-niece Cristina Alvarez Rodriguez created it in a building once used by the Eva Perón Foundation. It holds many of her clothes, portraits, and artistic renderings of her life, and it has become a popular tourist attraction. Many Argentines mark the anniversary of her death each year, though it is not a government holiday.

  She has appeared on Argentine coins, and a form of currency called "Evitas" was named for her. In 2011 the artist Alejandro Marmo unveiled two giant murals of her on the facades of the building that houses the Ministry of Social Development on 9 de Julio Avenue. On the 26th of July 2012, the sixtieth anniversary of her death, a 100-peso note was issued. Her portrait replaced the controversial effigy of Julio Argentino Roca, and she became the first woman on Argentine currency. The image was based on a 1952 design by the engraver Sergio Pilosio with the artist Roger Pfund. The printing totals 20 million notes, and she appears on a new 100-peso note issued in 2022.

  Politicians still reach for her name. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the first elected female president in Argentine history, has occasionally been called "The New Evita". Kirchner does not want to compare herself, saying Eva was a unique phenomenon. She does say that women of her generation, who came of age under the military dictatorships of the 1970s, owe Eva a debt for her "passion and combativeness".

  In many Latin American homes, an image of Evita hangs on the wall beside the Virgin of Guadalupe. John McManners argues that Eva consciously folded aspects of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene into her public persona. The historian Hubert Herring called her perhaps the shrewdest woman yet to appear in Latin American public life. In a 1996 interview, Tomás Eloy Martínez called her "the Cinderella of the tango and the Sleeping Beauty of Latin America". He compared her to Che Guevara, as symbols of the hope for a better world and a life sacrificed for the poor.

  Julie M. Taylor traces her lasting power to three elements: femininity, mystical or spiritual power, and revolutionary leadership. A woman who embodies all three, Taylor says, makes a claim that no social rule can control. Taylor adds a fourth factor, the power of a dead woman, and compares Eva's embalmed body to the incorruptible bodies of Catholic saints such as Bernadette Soubirous.

  John Balfour, the British ambassador during the Perón years, described how differently people saw her. The oligarchs, as she called the privileged, hated her and thought her ruthless. The masses worshipped her as a lady bountiful dispensing manna from heaven.

  From the start, Juan Perón's opponents called him a fascist. Spruille Braden, a United States diplomat backed by Perón's opponents, campaigned against his first candidacy by calling him a fascist and a Nazi. Her 1947 tour as a guest of honor of Franco deepened that perception. Fraser and Navarro write that it was inevitable that Evita be viewed in a fascist context, as an ideology exhausted in Europe re-emerging in a farcical form in a faraway country.

  Defenders disagree. Crassweller writes, "Peronism was not fascism", and "Peronism was not Nazism." George S. Messersmith, the United States ambassador, said in 1947 that there was not as much social discrimination against Jews in Argentina as in New York or most places at home. Laurence Levine, a former president of the U.S.-Argentine Chamber of Commerce, notes that one of Perón's important industrial allies was José Ber Gelbard, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. Perón's government was the first to court the Argentine Jewish community and to appoint Jewish citizens to public office, and it set up a branch of the party for Jewish members, the Organización Israelita Argentina. Because the regime also allowed rival parties to exist, it cannot be called totalitarian.

  Martínez wrote in Time that the charges of fascism, Nazism, and theft were untrue. He noted that in 1964 Jorge Luis Borges claimed Eva's mother had run a brothel in Junín, a calumny repeated so often that some still believe it. Around 1955 the pamphleteer Silvano Santander forged letters that made her look like an accomplice of the Nazis. Martínez says Perón did help Nazi criminals enter Argentina in 1947 and 1948, hoping to obtain German technology, but Evita played no part.

  Her story has been told many times. The 1952 biography The Woman with the Whip and a 1981 television movie, Evita Perón, starring Faye Dunaway, came before the most successful version. In 1976, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice produced a concept album, Evita, with Julie Covington in the title role. Elaine Paige won the 1978 Olivier Award for Best Performance in a Musical in the London stage version. In 1980 Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical, and the Broadway production won Best Musical.

  Nicholas Fraser says the stage musical has played on every continent except Antarctica and has earned over 2 billion dollars. In 2025 it returned to the London Palladium for a limited run, directed by Jamie Lloyd and starring Rachel Zegler.

  The film version took nearly 20 years to reach the screen. Madonna played Eva in 1996 and won the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy. The film earned five Academy Award nominations and won for Best Original Song, "You Must Love Me". An Argentine company answered with Eva Perón: The True Story, starring Esther Goris, which was Argentina's 1996 Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film but was not accepted as a nominee.

  Fraser argues that Eva is the perfect icon for our time. Her detractors accused her of turning public life into show business, which was scandalous for a former entertainer then. By the late 20th century the cult of celebrity had made her career look ahead of its time. Alma Guillermoprieto writes that "Evita's life has evidently just begun." In 2019, when Time created 89 new covers honoring women of the year from 1920 onward, it chose Eva Perón for 1946.

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