Eva Perón

Eva Perón (born May 7, 1919, Los Toldos, Argentina—died July 26, 1952, Buenos Aires) was the second wife of Argentine Pres. Juan Perón, who, during her husband’s first term as president (1946–52), became a powerful though unofficial political leader, revered by the lower economic classes.

Duarte was born in the small town of Los Toldos on the Argentine Pampas. Her parents, Juan Duarte and Juana Ibarguren, were not married, and her father had a wife and another family. Eva’s family struggled financially, and the situation worsened when Juan died when she was six years old. A few years later they moved to Junín, Argentina. When Eva was 15, she traveled to Buenos Aires to pursue an acting career and eventually began performing steadily in radio parts.

Eva attracted the attention of a rising star of the new government, Col. Juan Perón, and the two married in 1945. Later that year he was ousted by a coup of rival army and navy officers and briefly taken into custody. After his release, Juan entered the presidential race. Eva was active in the campaign, and she won the adulation of the masses, whom she addressed as los descamisados (Spanish: “the shirtless ones”). He was elected and took office in June 1946.

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Juan Perón: Marriage to Eva Duarte

Although she never held any government post, Eva acted as de facto minister of health and labour, awarding generous wage increases to the unions, who responded with political support for Perón. After cutting off government subsidies to the traditional Sociedad de Beneficencia (Spanish: “Aid Society”), thereby making more enemies among the traditional elite, she replaced it with her own Eva Perón Foundation, which was supported by “voluntary” union and business contributions plus a substantial cut of the national lottery and other funds. These resources were used to establish thousands of hospitals, schools, orphanages, homes for the aged, and other charitable institutions. Eva was largely responsible for the passage of the women’s suffrage law and formed the Peronista Feminist Party in 1949. She also introduced compulsory religious education into all Argentine schools. In 1951, although dying of cancer, she obtained the nomination for vice president, but the army forced her to withdraw her candidacy.

After her death in 1952, Eva remained a formidable influence in Argentine politics. Her working-class followers tried unsuccessfully to have her canonized, and her enemies, in an effort to exorcise her as a national symbol of Peronism, stole her embalmed body in 1955, after Juan Perón was overthrown, and secreted it in Italy for 16 years. In 1971 the military government, bowing to Peronist demands, turned over her remains to her exiled widower in Madrid. After Juan Perón died in office in 1974, his third wife, Isabel Perón, hoping to gain favour among the populace, repatriated the remains and installed them next to the deceased leader in a crypt in the presidential palace. Two years later a new military junta hostile to Peronism removed the bodies. Eva’s remains were finally interred in the Duarte family crypt in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

Eva inspired numerous books and other works, both in Argentina and abroad. Notably, her life was the basis for the musical Evita (1978), by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice; it was later adapted into a film (1996) starring Madonna.