Who is the real Evita? History tells us she was born María Eva Ibarguren on May 7, 1919, in the tiny town of Los Toldos, huddled on the edge of the vast Argentina pampas. The daughter of a ranch manager and his mistress, Eva lived under a cloud of illegitimacy for most of her childhood, culminating in the traumatic events of her father's funeral, when she and her family were refused entry by his lawful wife. In her autobiography, La Razon de mi Vida, Eva writes, "From every period of my life, I retain the memory of some injustice tormenting me and tearing me apart."

A lively, intelligent girl in love with American films and yearning for a life beyond the endless expanse of grassland, seventeen-year-old Eva left her home for the bright lights of Buenos Aires.

Within three years of her arrival, Eva had carved out a career as a radio and film actress, and the press linked her to a number of powerful suitors.

In January 1944, Eva encountered a fast-rising and immensely popular politician named Juan Perón at a fund-raising concert organized to help earthquake victims. Within weeks, she was sharing his apartment. Perón went on to become Minister of War and Vice President of the Republic, but political unrest at the end of World War II eventually led to his arrest and imprisonment. Freed in a populist revolt, Perón subsequently married Eva and was elected President of Argentina with a huge popular mandate.

With a blend of democratic principle and despotism dubbed "Peronism," Juan Perón became one of the most admired and maligned leaders of the modern era. Yet even as she shared her husband's vision of Argentina's manifest destiny, Eva herself became the object of intense, almost mystical adoration by the country's common people. She gained international attention during her Rainbow Tour of Europe to promote Argentinean interests, and at home she was instrumental in the formation of the Perónist Women's Party, as well as The Eva Perón Foundation for charitable works among the nation's poor.

The poor, in turn, clamored for Eva to assume political office beside her husband, and despite growing dissent from military and political opponents, she was put forward as the vice-presidential candidate.

It was, however, a goal Eva would never realize; she was subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer. Renouncing her political aspirations, Eva Perón fell into a steep and sudden decline, and on July 26, 1952, she died at the age of 33.

A measure of her enormous appeal among her fellow citizens could be seen in the outpouring of grief that followed her death. Close to a million Argentineans crowded the streets of Buenos Aires for her funeral procession, and an estimated three million filed past her casket to pay their last respects. The myth of "Saint Eva" was kept alive by frequent requests to the Vatican for her canonization. Forty thousand such appeals were received in the two years following her death.

The story of what happened to Eva's body after death is almost as fascinating as her life.

After the funeral in early August, the corpse was moved to the Confederation of Labor headquarters, where it remained for three years, while government officials worked out plans for a monument as huge as the Statue of Liberty. But when the military overthrew Perón in 1955, a lieutenant colonel with a squad of soldiers seized the building and removed the body, fearful that the Peronistas would snatch it for a totem to rally behind.

Concealed in a plain box, Evita's body was taken in an army truck to a marine base where the truck remained for a day before the commandant discovered its contents and nervously ordered it removed from his jurisdiction.

For lack of a better destination, the truck was simply parked on a street in downtown Buenos Aires. It was Christmas Eve, but the grisly Christmas package was left unopened.

The body was next loaded into a crate marked "radio equipment" and stashed in the office of the army's information chief until he was transferred in June 1956. The crate disappeared, its whereabouts known to only a few military officers.

In the late 1960's, Argentine journalist Tomas Eloy Martinez learned the closely guarded secret: Evita's body had been sent to Bonn as part of an Argentine military attaché's household effects and was buried either in the embassy basement of in the garden of the ambassador's residence.

Martinez and a diplomat did some digging - literally - on the embassy property. But they were too late. The body had already been moved and reburied under a false name in a cemetery in Milan, Italy.

After negotiations with Perón, who was living in exile in Madrid with his third wife, Isabel, Evita's body was turned over to the Peróns on September 23, 1971.

The coffin was usually kept in an upstairs room, though visitors sometimes saw it on the dining room table. According to one fascinating report, Perón's private secretary, Jose Lopez Rega, an astrologer and spiritualist, encouraged Isabel to lie on the coffin to soak up Evita's magic vibrations - while Lopez chanted incantations.

Perón returned to power in 1973, and after Isabel succeeded him the next year, she brought Evita's coffin back home and put it on display in a Buenos Aires suburb. But the magic proved non-transferable.

A military junta overthrew Isabel in 1976 and Evita's itinerant corpse was quietly turned over to her two sisters the next year. It now lies in a family crypt in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.

 

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