Years later, while travelling in an official car with an Italian admiral, jeering crowds taunted her.
“Do you hear that?” she said. “They are calling me a whore.”
“I quite understand,” said the admiral. “I haven’t been to sea for fifteen years and they still call me an admiral.”
Even Argentine poet and leading opponent of the regime, Jorge Luis Borges, said: “Peron’s wife was a common prostitute. She had a brothel near Junin. And that must have embittered him, no? I mean, if a girl is a whore in a large city that doesn’t mean too much, but in a small town in the Pampas, everybody knows everybody else. And being one of the whores is like being the barber or the surgeon. And that must have greatly embittered her. To be known and to be despised by everybody and to be used.”
Not content with being a back-seat First Lady, Evita wanted political power for herself. She tried to legalize prostitution and regulate Buenos Aires” redlight district, further exacerbating rumours about her past. She also promoted votes for women and organized workers. The Eva Peron Welfare Foundation pumped millions of pesos of government money into welfare programmes, though some of it was siphoned off into her Swiss bank account.
Through her sexual charisma, Evita controlled a web of men strategically placed throughout her husband’s regime. She politically castrated many leading figures, and dealt more literally with others. Political opponents were tortured with electric shocks that left them impotent. She also took direct responsibility for the castration of rebel leaders, keeping her victims” testicles in a glass jar on her desk. This obviously made a considerable impression on the ministers, officials and union delegates who came to petition her.
Evita seems to have been faithful to her husband throughout her marriage — with one exception. During World War II, she met Aristotle Onassis, who was channelling food parcels through Argentina to Nazi-occupied Greece. When Evita was in Europe in 1947, they met again at a formal lunch and arranged a private meeting at her villa on the Italian Riviera. As soon as he arrived, they made love. Afterwards, he was hungry and she made him an omelette. In return, he donated $10,000 to her favourite charity. He said later that it was the most expensive omelette he ever had.
On that same trip, in Rome, thousands of people gathered outside her window at the embassy, screaming: “Peron! Peron!” When she went out and waved to the crowd, they responded with a straight-armed Fascist salute, which had not been seen in Italy since the downfall of Mussolini. Fighting immediately broke out between Communists and Fascists. It took an hour for the riot police to clear the street and the embassy’s flower beds had been trampled out of existence.
Evita died at the age of thirty-three from cancer of the uterus. Her death plunged Argentina into mourning and moves were made to have her canonized.
After Evita died, Juan Peron, who was already fifty-six, began to take an inordinate interest in the Union of Secondary School Students, especially its young female members. It had branches in every school. The girl recruits were sent to luxurious “recreation centres” where they entertained high-ranking government officials. The centres had teams of doctors to handle unwanted pregnancies and venereal disease.
Peron had his private recreation centre where he would spend the afternoon with teenaged girls, watching them play basketball or swimming. One of them, Nellie Rivas, became his mistress.
The daughter of a worker in a candy factory, she was just thirteen, but Peron said he was not superstitious. She slept on a sofa at the foot of her parents” bed. One day at the Union of Secondary School Students at Olivos, she was told that she would be having lunch with the President. That lunch led to others.
Then she was assigned to take some papers from Olivos down to the presidential palace. She spent the afternoon there talking, then stayed the night. The next day she went to a sporting event with Peron. It finished late, so she stayed again. The third night there was a rain storm, so she could not go home. In fact, she never went home again.
Peron built her a luxurious love nest with mirrored walls and white bearskin rugs in the basement of one of his villas and showered her with jewels. But the relationship, though sexual, was caring. Peron would spend time teaching her the rudiments of culture. He even offered to send her to Europe to learn about the world, but she refused as she did not want to leave him.
“The very thought of leaving the residence brought me attacks of madness,” she wrote later.
Stories about Peron’s teenaged mistress spread. Soon people were talking about sex orgies behind the high walls of the presidential mansion, with Peron running amok like a Roman emperor among slave girls. Although most of the tales were fanciful, many of his followers believed that Peron was defiling the memory of Evita. In 1955, amid economic ruin and having alienated a large section of his support, Peron was deposed. He was forced to seek sanctuary on a Paraguayan gunboat that had put into Buenos Aires harbour for repairs. Before it took him into exile, he scribbled a final note to Nellie Rivas. It read: “My dear baby girl… I miss you every day, as I do my little dogs… Many kisses and many desires. Until I see you soon, Papi.”
Later, the torrid correspondence between Juan and Nellie was published, further besmirching his reputation. He was tried in absentia by a military court for his affair with Nellie Rivas and he was stripped of his rank of general for “conduct unworthy of an officer and a gentleman”.
The judges wrote: “It is superfluous to stress the horror of the court at the proof of such a crime committed by one who always claimed that the only privileged in the land were children.”
Nellie was heartbroken.
“He loved me,” she said. “He could have been my grandfather, but he loved me. He always told me I was very pretty, but I’m not really, am I?”
Nellie was sent to a reformatory for eight months. Her parents went into exile in Montevideo. Later, she married an Argentine employee of the American embassy.
At the same time, Evita’s remains were disinterred and removed from Argentina in an attempt to prevent them becoming an object of Peronist veneration. They were hidden in Italy.
Exiled in Spain, Peron met Isabel Martinet, an Argentine dancer. She quit her career to become his personal secretary. They married in 1961. In 1971, there was yet another coup in Argentina. This time the military promised to restore democracy and as a gesture to Peron, who still had a huge following, Evita’s remains were returned to him in Madrid.
In 1973, Peron returned to Argentina and successfully stood in the presidential elections with Isabel Martinet as his running mate. When he took office in October 1973, he already knew he was dying. His widow succeeded him on 1 July, 1974. Politically, she suffered in comparison with Evita — or at least, the legend of Evita. In desperation, she brought Evita’s remains back to Argentina and had them interred next to Juan Peron’s in the crypt in the presidential palace.
It did no good. In 1976, she was seized by Air Force officers and held under house arrest for five years. In 1981, she was exiled to Spain, where she resigned as head of the Peronist party. She died there in 1985.
11. SHOE FETISHISM IN THE PHILIPPINES
Ferdinand Marcos, the head of state of the Philippines from 1966 to 1986, was a master at fraudulently manipulating the electoral system. To keep himself in power, he declared martial law in 1973 and, again, in 1986. When he was forced to hold presidential elections in 1983, the opposition leader Benigno Aquino returned from exile in the U.S., only to be shot as he stepped off the plane.
Ferdinand managed to cling onto power for another three years until, in 1986, he and his wonderful wife Imelda went into exile in Hawaii, leaving behind her collection of over three thousand pairs of shoes.