PROSTITUTE, FASCIST, PROFLIGATE--EVA PERON WAS MUCH MALIGNED, MOSTLY UNFAIRLY
BY Tomas Eloy Martinez
TIME Magazine; January 20, 1997 VOL. 149 NO. 3
URL: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/1997/int/970120/cinema.the_woman.html
The first image is that of Evita as an ambitious prostitute who seduced Peron out of sheer desire for power. The second places her ideologically in the Nazi camp--or at least the fascist one--apres la lettre. The third image shows her doling out other people's money, helter-skelter, and pocketing some for herself.
Evita Peron was a prejudiced woman: poorly educated, fanatical and hungry for power or at least for the love and admiration of the multitudes that can only be gained through power. But she was not a prostitute. She was not a fascist--ignorant, perhaps, of what that ideology meant. And she was not greedy. Though she liked jewelry, furs and Dior dresses, she could own as many as she desired without the need to rob others. Anyone who has seriously looked into her personal biography knows she was not interested in money itself. She sought money to invest in that unique form of charity, still surviving in Argentina, that she invented and named: social assistance or social justice.
When Juan Peron was overthrown by a military coup in September 1955, the hatred between Peronistas and anti-Peronistas was so visceral, so irreconcilable that the new government launched an intense propaganda campaign to tear apart the self-glorifying construct built up by Peron and his wife during the previous 10 years. Although Evita had died of uterine cancer three years earlier, she was officially venerated as a national saint. As part of the anti-Peronist campaign, all the ills Argentina had suffered, and was about to suffer, were blamed on the couple.
Peron had been elected President twice in clean elections, and his regimes were, at least formally, democratic. Both he and Evita, however, closed the door to any dialogue with the opposition and ruled Argentina with a heavy hand. The censorship of that period and the jailing and occasional torture of political adversaries led to Peron's being labeled a tyrant. However, after the atrocities committed by the military dictatorships that succeeded him, particularly the one from 1976 to 1983, the use of that label now seems empty and almost pathetic.
The difficulty in understanding Peronism and its two protagonists--Peron and Evita--stems above all from the fact that Peron sympathized with the Axis powers in 1944 and 1945, when he was a colonel and Minister of War. That blunder made him unacceptable to the U.S. The seeds of the idea that Evita shared his sentiments were also planted during that time. But Evita was more or less Peron's clandestine lover then and thought only of holding on to her man and surviving. She lacked not only any political ideology but also influence and power in either Peron's household or the political life of Argentina.
Moreover, when she first arrived in Buenos Aires in late 1934 or early 1935, Eva Duarte lacked everything: acting talent, money, a legitimate father, education. It was a time of extreme machismo in a country that has always been highly sexist. Each time Eva auditioned for a part in radio, theater or film, she was expected to pay a sexual toll. Sometimes she paid; sometimes she didn't. Under the social codes of the time, her behavior had little to do with prostitution. It was merely a matter of survival.
Once in power as Peron's wife and the First Lady of Argentina, Evita assumed the best role of her life--the one that made her a notable actress at last--playing herself. To the poor she offered opportunities and things she hadn't known: jobs, schools, vacations, marriage licenses and homes. From her class and gender enemies she extracted revenge by making their life impossible in a country that responded to her every whim.
In 1964 Jorge Luis Borges stated that "the mother of that woman [Evita]" was "the madam of a whorehouse in Junin." He repeated the calumny so often that some still believe it or, more commonly, think Evita herself, whose lack of sex appeal is mentioned by all who knew her, apprenticed in that imaginary brothel. Around 1955 the pamphleteer Silvano Satander employed the same strategy to concoct letters in which Evita figures as an accomplice of the Nazis. It is true that Peron facilitated the entrance of Nazi criminals to Argentina in 1947 and 1948, thereby hoping to acquire advanced technology developed by the Germans during the war. But Evita played no part. She was far from being a saint, despite the veneration of millions of Argentines, but she was not a villain either. Human beings are full of contradictions and labyrinthine complexities. Rarely do they resemble their portrayal in the musicals of Hollywood and Broadway.
Director of the Latin American program at Rutgers University, Tomas Eloy Martinez is the author of Santa Evita and The Peron Novel, translated by Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush.