Evita, First Lady: A Biography of Evita Peron by Barnes John

Author:Barnes, John [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802196521
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

8

‘LOVE CONQUERS ALL’

Undoubtedly the noisiest place in the world on August 23,1947, was the port of Buenos Aires. Evita was coming home. A chill breeze off the Rio de la Plata whipped the muddy water-front as her ship slipped past the old yacht club of the oligarchs and pulled into harbour. Sirens howled. Tugs boomed their welcome. On the dockside, 250,000 Argentines roared a greeting: ‘Uno, dos, tres, Evita otra vez!’ (One, two, three, Evita once again!). Thousands of them had poured into the capital by train and bus the previous day, sleeping out in the city parks, wrapped in their ponchos to protect them from the cold winter night air. Their dark skins, Indian-mestizo features, and ragged clothes — the badge of the descamisados, Evita’s Shirtless Ones — were their passport to the dockside festivities.

Amid the din, the ship inched up against the quay. Evita was on the bridge, waving and wiping the tears from her eyes. Her husband-president was crying, too. For in Latin America, a man is allowed to show his emotion. He is not considered any less of a man for that. As his wife stepped ashore, dressed in a kohinoor mink coat with luxurious balloon sleeves, he crushed her in an emotional embrace in front of the crowd. Then, with a flourish, Juan Domingo Perón wiped the tears from her eyes and led her to a specially-built platform draped with wine-coloured velvet.

Obviously, it was a happy and exciting moment for both of them. While the Grand Tour had had its ups and downs — diamonds in Madrid, boos in Milan — Eva Perón had become a world-famous figure. The Presidents of Spain and France had kissed her hand. She had met the Pope. She had stolen the limelight from US Secretary of State George Marshall. For two months her name had been in the headlines every day throughout Western Europe as newsmen scrambled over each other to cover every word and move of the illegitimate farm girl from the pampas. Every newspaper told and retold the astonishing rags to riches success story of the beautiful enchantress from Argentina.

It would not have been surprising if the Peróns had used those moments in front of the microphones for a little reflective glory and mutual back-slapping. Perhaps it says a lot about their characters, their single-minded devotion to power, that they used their few minutes with their descamisados and their captive nation-wide audience to attack their enemies. For even after nearly two years of close to dictatorial Perónista power, there were still opposition newspapers that refused to be silenced and political opponents who refused to be cowed. The President warned them on that August afternoon that his patience was exhausted and that if they did not accept his bid for tranquillity, it would be forced upon them.

‘We have been tolerating the intolerable for the past year and a half,’ he thundered. ‘We are still asking that they do not use infamy as a battle nor calumny as a weapon.

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