Don't Cry For Me, Argentina. From the Daily Reckoning:
The Daily Reckoning PRESENTS: Eva Peron was a favorite of the poor of
Argentina. She had a warm heart, it was said. But like that other great
champion of the masses, Che Guevara, Eva realized her greatest glories
after she was stone cold dead. Bill Bonner explores...

DON'T CRY FOR EVITA
by Bill Bonner

"One cannot accomplish anything without fanaticism."
- Eva Peron

One of the strangest of the world improvers to appear in the 20th
century
was the wife of Argentina's Juan Peron, Evita, as the "descamisados" -
or
'shirtless ones' called her.

We went to visit her grave on our recent trip there. It is in the
Recoleta
cemetery, a short walk from our apartment near the French Embassy.
There,
you will find a whole city of the dead, laid out in tiny houses of
marble
or granite, often with statues on the roof, sometimes with glass domes
and
elaborate carvings. Most of the mausoleums have glass doors. Some of
the
doors are even open. You can look in at the cobwebs and caskets.

People wander around, down one street, up another - often looking for a
family tomb, or if tourists, just looking. It is a huge place, with a
thousand stories, some of them chiseled in stone.

"Did your father die?" begins a Marx brothers' routine.

"We hope so," Groucho replies. "Because we buried him."

Here, it is no joke. One of the tombs tells the story of a poor girl
who
was entombed alive. Cemetery workers found her coffin ajar, and
realized
the mistake - but too late.

While most inscriptions tell us of the dead, some recount the stories
of
the living. One father was so grief stricken that he gave away all his
fortune and traveled the pampas begging.

"Here it is," Maria called out to us. After roaming the streets in the
ciudad de los muertos (city of the dead) for half an hour, she had
finally
found the corpse she was looking for, that of Eva Peron.

We had expected more: A fountain maybe, or a giant statue of the woman.
Maybe even crowds of poor people, crossing themselves, vowing revenge
on
the rich and plotting revolution. But the tomb is like any other, only
less attractive in many ways...plainer than you'd expect, just gray
granite with no particular style or flourish. All that sets it apart
from
those around it are the flowers - there were several bouquets - along
with
candles and a few notes. There were a few other people visiting the
monument, but they seemed no more interested in it than we were; they
were
just casually curious.

Eva Peron was a favorite of the poor of Argentina. She had a warm
heart,
it was said. But like that other great champion of the masses, Che
Guevara, Eva realized her greatest glories after she was stone cold
dead.
That was when the common people really took to her. For that she can
thank
her embalmer, a man who worked on her corpse like Rembrandt on canvas.
You
can check for yourself. Eva was pretty enough, but no great beauty,
even
when she was young, warm flesh.

Still, it seems she had something going for her. She got a tango singer
to
take her to Buenos Aires when she was only 15, and if she gave herself
to
him in exchange, as her upper class critics whispered, would that have
been so bad? After that, she managed to make something of a career for
herself and by 24 was already a popular radio actress. She did most of
her
real work in the bedroom, went the jealous rumors. All we know is that
she
must have had talents that don't show in a public photograph. She
managed
to get one colonel fall for her and then, at a charity event, she got
her
hands on another one, Juan Peron, and never let him go.

Juan Peron was then 48 years old. His first wife had died. He has spent
his career in the army and greatly admired the way Mussolini had
handled
Italy, some of which he had seen firsthand during officer training in
the
1930s. In 1943, when he met Eva, Peron wanted to do in Argentina what
Mussolini had been able to do in Italy - line up the support of the
working classes and take control of the government. But, he desperately
lacked one thing - the Duce's charisma and powerful personality.
According
to most biographers, Peron had no personality at all. On the other
hand,
he was a calculating, conniving kind of guy.

When he met Eva, he must have realized that she could supply what he
lacked. Here was a woman with the gumption to elbow her way through a
society crowd so she could sit down to dinner next to him...and then,
yes,
he hardly had to say a word...she was in his bedroom before his soup
got
cold. What a woman! And besides, she had the right credentials. She was
born poor, and even illegitimate. She had had to make her own way in
the
world - we won't dwell on the details - and now could stand before the
lumpen as one of their own. Publicly, she could be Evita...the Princess
Di
of Argentine fascism...the peoples' princess of the pampas. Privately,
she
was more than that - she was a tough and determined arriviste.

In 1945, Peron was arrested. While he wobbled and even considered going
into exile, Evita kept her nerve. She used the money she had embezzled
from an earthquake relief fund and went directly to the unions to rally
support, arguing that Peron was the man they needed in the Casa Rosada,
Buenos Aires' equivalent of the White House. By October of that year,
she
could field 200,000 demonstrators, and forced the authorities to back
down. A year later, she helped Peron win a landslide election victory;
he
was well on his way to realizing his ambition of being an Argentine
Mussolini. Later, after Il Duce - and his mistress - were strung up by
fickle followers, Peron would amend his ambition, saying that what he
really wanted was "a fascism that is careful to avoid all the errors of
Mussolini."

Evita burned hot, but she burned fast. By 1952 she was burned out and
burned up. She appeared at Juan Peron's side for his second
inauguration
in an open car, held up, like El Cid, by a plaster support under a long
fur coat. She was not yet dead then, but almost. Cancer had eaten away
at
her and the radiation with which doctors had burned her to try to kill
the
cancer. Between the doctors and the cancer, she was left with not much
time. She died seven weeks later, weighing only 80 pounds and only 33
years old, younger than Elvis, the two Kennedys, or Che...but older
than
Joan of Arc.

She may have died young, but she did not leave a good-looking corpse.
The
burnished beauty that hundreds of thousands of mourners admired,
sobbing
into white handkerchiefs...touching her coffin...even kissing it, were
not
those given to her by God. No they were the handiwork of the mysterious
Spaniard who embalmed her.

Doctor Ara was a bit of a miracle worker. Jesus Christ himself only
managed to change water into wine, but Dr. Ara all but resurrected
Eva's
worn-out corpse. He laid on the waxes, the paint, and the rouge with a
touch nearly divine, and somehow transformed the gutter girl into a
veritable saint.

If Evita was a humbug and a scalawag, it no longer showed. Bargain
basement when she started out, her price had skyrocketed with her
ascent
to power. By the time she flamed out, she was pure Tiffany's. Yet, this
was a woman who looted the "charitable" foundations that were meant to
serve the poor and who helped hundreds of Nazi war criminals escape to
the
pampas. Peron himself made 1,000 blank passports available to the
defeated
Germans after the war - again, it was for a price. You see, Eva and
Peron
were classic world improvers of the better sort - they could be bought.

On June 6, 1947, Evita began a triumphal tour of Europe. It was even
called a "Rainbow Tour," anticipating the great celebrity promenades
later
in the century. She visited heads of state. She visited Pope Pius XII.
She
visited her Swiss bank. She even made the cover of Time magazine. It
was
about that time that Argentina became a refuge for war criminals on the
lam. Thus, it was that Juan Peron won reelection in 1951 with money the
provenance of which no one was quite sure, but many thought came from
the
grateful Nazis.

The truth is, Argentina may be a hard place to govern, but for such as
they, it has always been a good place to disappear. Debtors, criminals,
and political refugees have always run off to the pampas; a few Nazis
could hardly make much difference one way or another. And the krauts
turned out to have their uses. Later, when the Argentine generals
needed
to "disappear" others, it is said they turned to squads of
professionals,
trained and originally organized by those who had disappeared
themselves
after World War II.

The Perons learned quickly that the masses could be manipulated with
vulgar demagoguery. Evita even gave away Christmas presents to the
poor,
and brought in poor orphans so they could be photographed with her,
before
they were tossed back onto the streets. But the masses needed to be
controlled, too, and that was the hard part. The collapse of commodity
prices in the '30s had made them restless and had initially led them to
support Peron. But Mussolini's economic meddling worked no better on
the
banks of the Rio Plata than it had on the banks of the Tiber. In 1949,
the
stock market collapsed and made the mobs restless again. The incomes of
the working class fell 30%. And this time, Juan Peron could not pose as
an
outsider. This time, he was in power; the plebs held him responsible.
At
first, Evita tried grander gestures to appease them, but then the lace
gloves came off. Troublemakers were arrested, and drawing on the
talents
and training of Argentina's new immigrants from the Third Reich, many
were
tortured.

And then, when Evita's corpse had finally cooled and Juan was thrown
out
of the Casa Rosada, it was Evita herself who disappeared. The generals
were afraid her dust might provide a rallying point for the mobs, so
they
shipped her casket to Germany, then to Italy, and didn't return it to
Juan
until 16 years later. By then, he was living in Madrid and had
remarried.
His new wife, Isabel, was ambitious, too. When Evita's coffin was put
in
the living room, Isabel lay on top of it (some say she lay down inside
of
it) to draw power from the dried-up corpse.

And what happened to Evita's Swiss bank account? That disappeared, too.
After her death, Juan Duarte, her brother, who had rushed to
Switzerland,
died suddenly and mysteriously on his return in his apartment in Buenos
Aires. Authorities were never able to figure out whether it was murder
or
suicide, but either way, the money never turned up.

Epilogue: Juan Peron and his new wife returned to Argentina and retook
power in 1973. But the poor man died the following year, leaving
Isabel,
his vice president, to run the country. Naturally, she ran it into the
ground and was overthrown by the army in 1976.

Bill Bonner
The Daily Reckoning