Redeemers (39 page)

Fueled by the weight of his illegitimate birth—a particular badge of shame within Catholic societies—a president of Mexico, General Plutarco Elías Calles, would unleash a war with the Catholic Church that cost seventy thousand lives during the 1920s. As for Eva, she retained her rancor and resentment across the long years. Before formally marrying Perón, she returned to the town of Los Toldos, her actual birthplace, where she removed the original record of her birth (as Eva Ibarguren) and then had a new certificate deposited in Junín under the name of Duarte, which her father had denied her. During her time in power, she was obsessed with finding fiancés for women who had been prostitutes and marrying off couples living out of wedlock with their children. In 1951 she was the godmother at 804 weddings.

Another source of resentment was her sexual history. Many jokes and insults would be heaped upon her and her memory, based on the assumption that she had been a prostitute. Borges, who hated her, told me a story of this kind, involving a pun in Spanish. A proposal is made to change the name of the city of La Plata to Evita Perón. But Perón himself has doubts about it. A member of Congress comes up with the ideal solution: “Let's call the city La Pluta,” a fusion in Spanish of the words
plata
(silver, money) and
puta
(whore). What is nevertheless certain is that the role of seductress hardly suited her. “Those who knew her,” Martínez says, “considered her the least sexual woman in the world.” The male lead in one of her movies later said about her, “You couldn't get yourself excited about her even if the two of you were alone on a desert island.” Dujovne presents Evita's amours—except for the Chilean Emilio Karstulovic, editor of her favorite magazine,
Sintonía
, and of course Perón himself—as transient, unhappy, and often humiliating. In
Santa Evita
, Martínez reconstructs from the statements of two friends a picture of her in those first six months of 1943: “a weak little creature, sick, insipid . . . she had small breasts and a complex about them . . . she was like one of those street cats that have survived cold, hunger, the harshness of human beings.”

Martínez was able to establish that between February and May 1943, she spent time in the Otamendi y Miroli clinic of Buenos Aires under the name of María Eva Ibarguren:

 

She was pregnant . . . Neither she nor the father wanted the child . . . The problem was that the abortion ended badly. They tore the base of her uterus, the ligaments, the fallopian tube. A half hour afterwards, she collapsed covered with blood, and with peritonitis . . . In those months she would have rather been dead . . . she could have put a bullet into her head.

 

The episode was only one chapter in a long catalogue of insults and injuries that Eva retained in her memory, with the hope of eventual revenge. “If Eva managed to become somebody,” said one informant to Martínez, “it's because of her intention never to forgive.” Someone told the actress and singer Madonna (who played Eva Perón in Alan Parker's overly facile and trivializing musical film,
Evita
) that “Evita had the sweetness of revenge running through her veins.”

Her liaison with Perón redeemed her. He would raise her to a position from which she could reverse her fate and avenge every affront. But Perón needed her as much as she needed him. Based on his recent experience as a military observer in Mussolini's Italy—a leader whom he venerated and for whom he would have “raised a monument at every corner”—Perón had learned what he saw as the key to seizing hold of Argentina: “managing men is a technique . . . an art of military precision. I learned it in Italy in 1940. Those people really knew how to command.” He was also an assiduous reader of
Mein Kampf
and had visited Berlin during the war. Taking Goebbels as a guide, he would emphasize the importance of oratory and especially the medium of radio in the political manipulation of the masses. And here was where Evita and the sociological circumstances of the time met in perfect union. Buenos Aires, like other Latin American capitals, was filled with a new body of urban workers, uneducated people who had swarmed from the country to the city—like Evita herself—near the beginning of World War II. They were
los descamisados
,
“
those without shirts,” uprooted masses hungry for a savior. They were Evita's people and she was Perón's perfect partner in the enterprise of power, the orator who could hypnotize the
descamisados
, the
caudilla
of the
Justicialista
movement.

Perón himself was a complex and cleverly manipulative man. The old wolf was twenty-five years older than his consort. A distinguished athlete, an idiosyncratic author of texts on military history and the place-names of the Mapuche Indians of Chile, he was more a charismatic and astute politician than a soldier. Years later, he would assert, from his comfortable exile in Madrid, that “I created Eva.” And in a sense he was right.

Did he and Evita love each other? Perhaps they did. In some way. Or so we can gather from their exchanges of letters, although figures at their level of power are always thinking of an additional anonymous recipient: the later generations.

Eva's true stardom began October 17, 1945, when Perón was acclaimed by a crowd of three hundred thousand in the Plaza de Mayo. Now as the wife of the president of the republic, she moved with him to the Palacio Unzué, a modest residence of 283 rooms, barely enough to accommodate Eva's wardrobe. From the heights of her new position, she could remold her own history from its roots. It was like reviewing the film of her life and doing it over as she wished it might have been. She began by altering the paper trail to legitimize her birth. And then she would accumulate the fortune that she felt she deserved. Nothing could ever be enough because her social rancor was so intense. Displaying wealth and power was her way of emulating and defying the stratified and rigid society that had treated her with disdain. (Also, in effect, a scandalously racist society where the light-skinned upper class—who considered themselves quite “English”—rained down their contempt on the lower classes, the
cabecitas negras,
with their often darker skin colors.) Eva as a child had an additional burden. She had grown up with a calcium deficiency that made her painfully conscious of her vulnerability. The young girl saw her own image in a mutilated doll that her mother gave her for Christmas. It is hardly surprising that after reversing the course of her own destiny, she tried to do the same for all the poor of her country.

During Christmas of 1947, she gave away five million toys. Year after year she distributed tens of thousands of shoes, pants, dresses, jars, dolls, tricycles, soccer balls, baby bottles, food products, dentures, sewing machines. “You have the right to ask!” she would shout to the ecstatic beneficiaries of her charity, while not only the free bread mounted up but also a flood of social work as hallucinatory as it was tangible and often effective: small cities for students and others specifically for children (they were in some sense pre-Disneylands), polyclinic institutes, residences for the aged, hospital trains moving through the country. Who paid the price? Not Eva herself, certainly, but the treasury reserves Argentina had accumulated over the decades, or the workers themselves with their “voluntary” donations, and, of course, the future generations impoverished, thrown into debt, devoured by inflation. The couple found a country that was economically among the fifteen richest in the world (with a huge budget surplus after World War II) and left a nation divided and very far from the levels of production and efficiency that Argentina had shown through the 1940s.

Within the history of populism, Eva Perón broke all records. She would receive twenty delegations a day. She would frenetically visit factories, schools, hospitals, union centers, sporting clubs, neighborhoods, and small towns. With equal devotion she would inaugurate bridges, new stretches of roads, rural schools, and soccer tournaments. When she had nothing else to give away, she distributed banknotes or advice. And she was also, in some real sense, a feminist who gave the women of Argentina the right to vote and be elected to office.

Everything she did, she would supervise personally. (Fairy godmothers, as is well-known, rarely delegate authority.) She would question people on their individual situations: “How many children do you have? Do they sleep in beds?” Her confessor, the Jesuit Father Benítez, wrote: “I have seen her kiss lepers, people with tuberculosis and cancer . . . embrace the poor in their rags and be inundated with their fleas.” Although an element of theater was always clearly present in these manifestations of charity, there is no doubt that she was moved by a genuine compassion for human suffering. By a kind of mission.

 

IV

Juan and Evita Perón had their opponents (dissident journalists, leftists, independent critics) jailed, sometimes killed, often tortured. According to Dujovne, in at least one instance, involving the electric torture of women employees of the Telephone Company who had refused to join the Peronist Party, Evita herself was rumored to have given the order for the prods to be applied. The facts remain no less incriminating even if it must be added that the Peróns' use of torture and murder cannot be compared to the orgy of sadism unleashed by the military government and its paramilitary allies during the Argentine “Dirty War” of the late 1970s and early '80s. But toward the end of Perón's first period in power, his torturers would learn more sophisticated techniques from some of the century's greatest experts at the trade: the Nazi war criminals who flooded to sanctuary in Argentina.

The admiration of the Argentine army for their German counterparts (proverbial during the final decades of the nineteenth century) had grown even stronger with the crisis of 1929—a humiliating time for Argentina, with its export economy dependent on England—and it would become even more firm and solid with the rise of Hitler. Perón was a member of the military group that in 1943 left no doubt about their sympathies in a secretly composed manifesto: “Today Germany is giving life a heroic meaning. It is an example to follow . . . The struggle of Hitler, in peace as in war, should lead us on.” The Argentine government placed its bets on the Axis, literally until the last minute. When Argentina declared war (nominally taking the side of the Allies) on March 27, 1945, the real reason—according to the cynical account of Perón himself—was to provide a way to save Nazi lives. And he was successful. According to Dujovne, by 1947 ninety thousand Nazis were living securely in Juan and Evita's Argentina.

Not long after meeting Perón, Evita had moved to a sumptuous mansion: the considerate gift of one of Perón's friends, the German millionaire (and Nazi agent) Rudolf Ludwig Freude. This individual, along with three of his countrymen named Dörge, Von Leute, and Staudt, would figure in a still obscure episode. (Dujovne notes that the facts have never been fully established but the evidence she offers, based on dozens of sources and investigations, is overwhelming.) The issue was nothing less than the delivery of the treasure of the Nazis to safekeeping in Argentina. The action took place around the time of the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945. Two German submarines deposited their cargo on the docks of La Plata. There are at least two precise documentations of the contents. The lists coincide: tens of millions of dollars in various currencies, 2,511 kilograms of gold, 4,638 karats of diamonds, and a river of jewels, works of art, and precious objects stolen from the Jews of Europe and formerly deposited in the Reichsbank of Berlin. Vice Führer Martin Bormann is supposed to have entrusted the operation to Otto Skorzeny, chief of Hitler's commando forces. According to Dujovne, the operation also was supported by members of the Vatican hierarchy. Whether that is true or not, it is certain that Croatian priests were central figures in the operation of what Allied intelligence called “the rat line,” which funneled Nazis and Nazi “property” to sympathetic Latin American countries and most especially Argentina.

It is said that Bormann himself was scheduled to arrive in Argentina and oversee the treasure. According to various sources—among them Skorzeny, who led the commando raid that freed Mussolini in 1943 and would, in 1948, find a comfortable postwar refuge in Argentina—the real overseers were none other than Juan and Evita Perón. Certainly Perón had been a key element in the operation, and he would never hide his great sympathy for the Nazis. Among other direct actions, he is supposed to have provided the military attaché of the German embassy with eight thousand Argentine passports and 1,100 identity cards; and he would refer to the refugees of the Luftwaffe as “
Justicialistas
of the air.” In recompense for his services, the Nazis opened an account for him in Switzerland and gave him a mansion in Cairo where, in 1960, he would live for a time.

Perhaps, up to this point, Evita was playing a nonspeaking role: serving coffee, accepting gifts. But later, during her “Rainbow Tour” across Europe, odd events began to multiply. In Rapallo, Italy, she met with an important figure in the Vatican hierarchy. Almost at the same time, a shipment of Argentine wheat docked at Genoa. Was she only discussing the wheat? And her itinerary seemed to lack rhyme or reason. Lisbon to Paris to the Côte d'Azur to Switzerland to Lisbon to Dakar. She spent five days in Switzerland and in Lisbon had a long meeting with the deposed king Umberto of Italy. Various clues collected by Dujovne, derived from monographs on the subject, as well as testimony from Skorzeny himself suggest that Eva, with the aid of someone in the Vatican hierarchy and the mediation of King Umberto, deposited in Switzerland at least some part of the treasure of the Nazis. The death of her brother Juan, less than a year after hers, under circumstances that have never been clarified (it was said to be suicide but he was probably murdered) may support the hypothesis that he was the guardian of the secret bank deposit. The four Germans supposedly involved—Dörge, Von Leute, Staudt, and the millionaire Freude himself—all died between 1948 and 1952, perhaps executed by order of the Nazi hierarchy “in exile,” which could thereby claim full use of the treasure for their own purposes. Perón is also supposed to have returned part of the hoard to Skorzeny. The real story continues to be veiled in mystery. Dujovne even speculates that the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires had some connection with the documentation being developed there on Nazi networks and dealings in. Argentina.