María Eva Duarte (later known as Evita) was born out of wedlock in 1919 in the village of Los Toldos in Buenos Aires Province, the youngest of five children. Her father (as that of her siblings) was a wealthy married landowner who allowed the children to carry his name, but they were cut off from Duarte's family, lived in borderline poverty and were shunned as illegitimate, a serious stigma at the time.
In her late teens she moved to Buenos Aires and had considerable success as a model and radio actress. She had a short lived film career, but none of her movies were hits (they can be seen in You Tube). She met Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, an up-and-coming politician at the time Secretary of Labor, and married him. The military, wary of Peron's growing popularity among workers arrested him on October 1945. A few days later half a million supporters gathered in front of the Government House and demanded Peron's freedom. The military, scared, complied. Perón was a candidate in the 1946 elections at the head of his own party, and won by a landslide.
Perón's government was populist (not understood as a negative). Working conditions were ameliorated and worker's rights were taken seriously. Certain professions (e. G. rural and domestic workers) were regulated by the first time. There was much progress in public health: the number of hospital beds was duplicated and endemic diseases like malaria were eradicated. New hospitals were built, some in remote regions until then deprived of medical care. Trade unions were supported, but also controlled by the government. Eva, now Evita, was a very visible First Lady. She started the Eva Peron Foundation, a charitable organization that built homes, hospitals and schools in underprivileged areas and assisted the poor in various ways. Evita was a complex personality. She was instrumental in ensuring women's right to vote in Argentina, sanctioned in 1947, and tirelessly supported women's participation in politics. Yet, in her only book, La Razón de mi Vida, The Reason of my Life she stressed her subordinate role next to Peron. She was warm and generous with friends but a dangerous enemy.
Evita's death from cancer in July 1952 elicited the largest outpouring of grief ever seen in Argentina. Not from the military and moneyed classes though; among them her passing was celebrated. Her demise took the wind out of the sails of Peron's government; it grew increasingly corrupt and oppressive until was overthrown by a military uprising in September 1955. The subsequent military dictatorship was as afraid of Evita dead as alive; they feared her tomb would become a place of pilgrimage. Her embalmed corpse was stolen and, after various vicissitudes interred under an assumed name in a Milan cemetery. Finally, in 1970 her remains were repatriated and now rest in the Duarte family vault.
After her death, Evita's memory was relentlessly reviled. A overheated "biography," Woman with the Whip was published in 1952, its ludicrous fabrications echoed by the Argentine mainstream press after 1955. A cartoonish Eva Peron based on the book was presented in the musical Evita (1976) and put on screen in 1996. Today, a more sensible view prevails, exemplified in this movie. Script writer José Pablo Feinmann does not try for a complete biography but enough is shown to give a good picture of Argentina under Peron. Although the film is broadly favorable to Eva, it is not a whitewash; the good and the bad are there. Acting is excellent. Victor Laplace has been made up to look uncannily like Peron and has captured all his mannerisms. Esther Goris does an outstanding job of reconstructing Evita in public and private settings. All in all, a balanced and fair look at an important historic personage.
