Eva Perón

Eva Perón, known everywhere as Evita, rose from rural poverty to become a radio star and then, as the wife of President Juan Perón, the most powerful woman in mid-twentieth-century Argentina. Through her charitable foundation, her bond with the trade unions and her campaign for women's political rights, she became a central figure of the Peronist movement, and her early death at 33 turned her into a near-sacred national icon.

She was born in the Pampas, in the village of Los Toldos, most probably on 7 May 1919, the date on her baptismal record; a civil birth record giving 1922 is thought to have been altered in 1945, around the time of her marriage. Her father, a landowner with a legal family elsewhere, left her mother and their five children when Eva was a baby, and the family lived in poverty, carrying the stigma of illegitimacy.

At fifteen, in 1934, she moved to Buenos Aires to become an actress. After years of touring companies, modelling and small film parts, she found success in radio drama in the early 1940s, playing famous women of history, and by 1943 she was among the best-paid radio actresses in the country.

In January 1944 she met Colonel Juan Perón, then labour secretary in the military government, at a benefit gala for victims of the San Juan earthquake. She became his companion and a public voice for him on the radio. When rivals arrested Perón in October 1945, a mass demonstration organised by the unions secured his release on 17 October; later Peronist accounts gave Eva the leading role in it, a version historians reject. The two married that month, and in 1946 she campaigned for him as he won the presidency.

In 1947 she toured Europe, meeting Francisco Franco in Spain and Pope Pius XII in Rome and travelling on to France and Switzerland. The trip raised her international profile but also fed foreign suspicion that the Peronist government was sympathetic to fascism, a charge several historians have judged largely unfair.

At home she worked from the Ministry of Labour, built close ties with the unions and set up the Eva Perón Foundation, which grew to assets of over three billion pesos and built homes, hospitals and other institutions and handed out goods on a vast scale. Critics said businesses were pressured to donate and that its money was poorly accounted for; her defenders dispute this. She campaigned for women's suffrage, granted by law in September 1947, and founded the Female Peronist Party, which claimed 500,000 members by 1951. Women's votes helped her husband win re-election that year with about 63 per cent.

In August 1951 a huge union rally called on her to run for vice-president, but opposition from the army and conservatives, and her failing health, led her to withdraw. She had advanced cervical cancer, and despite surgery and early chemotherapy she died in Buenos Aires on 26 July 1952. Congress had named her "Spiritual Leader of the Nation", and she received a state funeral; in the crush of mourners eight people died.

Her embalmed body was displayed for nearly two years. After the military overthrew Juan Perón in 1955, it was taken away and secretly buried in Milan under a false name, returned to him in Spain in 1971 and brought back to Argentina in 1974. She now lies in her family's tomb in Recoleta Cemetery. The 1976 musical Evita carried her story around the world.

Our 1945 map shows Argentina as she rose to prominence, and our 1960 map shows the country in the years after Peronism was banned.