498. Evita: The Mystery of the Missing Body (Part 5)
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"Don't be afraid," said Dr. Ara. I was under the impression that she was asleep. I could not take my eyes away from her breast, because I hoped at any moment to see her arise and the miracle of life repeat itself. Ava was wearing a long white tunic covering her feet.

Her hands were visible through the cuffs of white sleeves, and they were knit together, holding a crucifix. Her face was as if of wax, clear and transparent. Her eyes closed as if she was dreaming. Her hair had been beautifully dressed, and she shone with a special radiance. Don't be afraid, said Dr. Ara. She is as whole as...

That's when she was alive. So Dominic, that was creepy husband of the year, Juan Domingo Perón. And that is his memory of his very first visit. I think the first of three visits to see the embalmed corpse of his late wife, Ava Evita, a year after she had died in 1952. And we've promised people mad scenes in this episode. And I guess that's quite a mad scene.

But what I will tell the listeners is it's going to get a whole lot madder, isn't it? Because we're dealing today with the afterlife of Eva Perron and particularly what happens to this mummified body of hers. And the story is just spectacularly odd. It is very odd.

So we ended last time, if you remember, with the extraordinary grief, the sort of, what do they call it, a bacchanal of necrophilia, the Peron critics. Yeah, so the problem I have with this episode is that there's a brilliant novel, I mean, very creepy, weird novel by an Argentine writer called Thomas Martinez.

which came out in 1996. So the same year as the Madonna musical, the film. And it was called Santa Evita. And it tells the story of this, everything that happens. And I was going through your notes and it seemed to me that certain bits were missing, as it were, from your story, not from the body of Evita, obviously.

Because the novel portrays itself as being strictly factual, but I'm suspecting that he may actually have elaborated, he may have fabricated certain things. There are layers upon layers of myth, folk tales, legends, weird propaganda tales, and all that. So I might, as we go through, I might just see what you think of some of them. Yeah, throw in some stuff that's not true, Tom. We always like that on The Rest is History. Well, you can evaluate it. It'll be a test of your methodology as a historian. But I mean, even without it, I mean, what we know and what can be attested is pretty bizarre.

This is the story of Evita's ghost and what it meant for Argentina. And you could argue that Argentina in the next 20, 30 years is going to go through a very strange necrophiliac kind of politics. So we'll start with the body. The body, as we ended last time, has got to the headquarters of the trade unions, the CGT. And as we said...

Dr. Pedro Ara, the guy who at the beginning said… With the head of the embalmed peasant in his briefcase. Yeah, the guy who you said was saying, don't be afraid. He has built a secret laboratory on the third floor of this building. And he now takes possession of the body, which of course is not in the state that he had hoped. She has been literally lying in state too long. So I'll read to you into the distance what Dr. Ara did.

He made incisions in the heels and below the neck by which the body was drained. It was then placed in a bath of 150 litres of acetate and potassium nitrate, which was weighted down, and it was weighted down with a coffin lid to keep it under the surface. Then it was injected and re-injected with mixtures of 4-mol, 5-mol and pure alcohol, dipped in bath after bath, month after month, re-injected each time and finally coated...

with a thin but hard layer of transparent plastic so that it could be displayed and touched. So if anybody listening to this has ever been to see the body of Lenin in Red Square, you will know that it looks very weird and waxy. And I would imagine that this must have had a similar process, although in Lenin's case, the process, I believe, is still secreted.

Ara does this for a year and it must have looked at the end of it very waxy and very shop dummy. And it costs a lot of money, doesn't it? It's kind of $100,000. It's an absolutely crazy thing to do. After a year, he says to the government, the Argentine government, the body is now stable. It is under a glass case, but this must not be opened. And I have the key. Only I have the key. Now, the reason that it's still there is

and he is keeping the key, is that the tomb that they have been preparing for Eva Perón is not ready. Now, the plan for the tomb is mad. It's going to be a colossal monument, sort of ultra the fatherland monument, the biggest in Argentina. It's modelled on Napoleon's tomb, I think. It is. And it will be topped with a gigantic 60 metre tall statue of

of a desk camisado with his shirt undone, sort of like Peter Frankopan, the historian, Tom. Shirt unbuttoned to the navel, standing there, a sort of image of unrepentant masculinity. I hope Peter commissions a statue like that for his grave. Oh, it looks tremendous. The statue will... I'm trying to understand really how the statue would work, but what seems to be clear is there would be a lift inside this bloke. So you would get the lift up through his legs or something.

to his head and then you'd come out in his head and you'd be able to look out through his eyes over the skyscape of Buenos Aires.

Now, unbelievably, this plan is bonkers. But the committee, the official government committee, said to the sculptor, who was called Leon Tomasi, actually we've changed our minds. I think it should be of her. He said, oh, no, no, no. She would look wrong. The proportions would all be wrong. And they agree. The committee says, well, we'll compromise. You will still have the Des Camisado bloke, the shirtless bloke on top of the monument. But let us get Dr. Ara. This is my favorite detail. To him. But...

four more bodies which will act as kind of and we'll have them standing upright so they're going to embalm a descamisado so i don't i mean i don't know whether they kill him first and a member of each of the armed forces you can kind of imagine the pharaonic planning committee kind of working out oh why don't we build a pyramid that's a great idea let's go for that i guess you could say if you wanted to make a serious point it was a sign of how autocratic authoritarian regimes work

is that in the committee meetings, people are just competing to offer ever more radical and demented ideas to please the authorities. So it's actually Dr. Ara who says, yeah, I can't do this. But he says, I couldn't possibly do four more. I don't have enough resources. I would need more assistance. I would need this.

A year after death, 1953, they have gone nowhere. So where Evita is, she is in Dr. Ara's laboratory at the CGT. They've set up a makeshift funeral chapel with sort of lights and a crucifix. And Peron is given a private lift up from the basement.

Now, some people actually say he only went to see it once, but he certainly doesn't go more than three times. Well, it's creepy. I was about to say that. I mean, you know, don't blame him. Would you be hanging around with it? I mean, that would be more weird. Anyway, the cult of Evita, meanwhile, outside the building is absolutely going strong. On the 22nd of every month, the anniversary of her death, there are huge torchlit processions through Buenos Aires.

Then on the first anniversary of her death, the newspaper La Prensa, formerly a newspaper of the elite, but which has subsequently been taken over by the Peronist regime, prints a story and it says, amazing news, Evita's face has been seen in the moon. Of course it has. And after this, there are endless sightings that people can see her face in the stars. And kind of looking like the Virgin. She now has become conflated with...

with the Virgin. There have been kind of demands for her to be canonized, haven't there, immediately in the wake of her death, that lots of people write into the Vatican. And they, obviously, I mean, the Vatican don't want to have her as a saint, but they kind of weasel out of it by saying, well, she hasn't done a miracle. But the Peronist regime have prayers to her effectively nonetheless. By 1953, you are taught this in schools. Our little mother, thou who art in heaven, good fairy laughing among the angels.

Evita, I promise to be as good as you wish me to be, respecting God, loving my country, taking care of General Peron, studying and being towards everyone the child you dreamed I would be, healthy, happy, well-educated and pure in heart. Isn't that nice? So if you're a Catholic priest, you are probably quite perturbed by all this. Peron, we'll get to Peron in the Catholic Church in a second, but Peron is...

He's quite a lonely figure at this point. So he's quite isolated at the top of his regime. I'm trying to be nice to him, Tom, because it's fair to say he lets himself down. Would you agree with that? I mean, I think he lets Evita down. I think he lets Argentina down. But I think worst of all, he very much lets himself down. He does. He now has to play both parts. So we talked before about the political significance of Eva Perón was that in a society where obviously women have just been given the vote...

She can appeal to a different constituency from Peron and do things that he can't do. And he's now having to play both roles and slightly take over her foundation. At the beginning, Peronism is very kind of freeform. Nobody's quite sure where it's going. That's part of the fun of it. And Evita is obviously brilliant at that. But with her gone, it's all becoming a bit formal, a bit ponderous, a bit clueless.

bit clumsy. And that kind of spark of charisma has just gone. And also he has to make choices. So he has to make political choices. And whereas before he could make those choices and she could do all the rhetorical stuff, now he has to do both, especially when times are tougher and there are hard economic choices. It's being reduced much more to the kind of nuts and bolts of ordinary politics. But Dominic, what is it that he specifically does that lets everyone down? Okay. So yeah, one of his ministers says to him,

You should cheer yourself up by doing a very Eva Perron friendly thing. Why don't we set up a Union de los Estudiantes Secundarios, Union of Secondary School Students,

Perron says brilliant. He says actually you know what my summer home at Olivos I don't actually use that that much so you could use part of the grounds athletics for the kids. Great. And he supposedly said initially as a joke wouldn't it be nice you know bring the girls down get them to do their athletics and of course in a kind of authoritarian regime when the guy says it. So the next thing you know there were

There were all these pubescent girls in very short shorts, kind of doing gymnastics outside Peron's bedroom window. And he is absolutely delighted by this. In 1955, a Romanian writer went off to write a biography of Peron. And he said, basically, Peron spent all his time standing at his window, staring out at these girls. Peron would come every day to look at them. It was a very lovely sight.

Now, at this point, it's pure, you know, sometimes people say he's not going to work as much as he used to because he's just hanging around staring at these girls. Is it felt at the time to be pervy? Don't forget, he set up the Union of Secondary School Students. So him being with the youth of Argentina, you know, that's what dictators always do. I mean, now that would be political death for any political leader to spend his time gawping at...

schoolgirls exercising. But at the time, is it felt to be a bit odd? Or is it just, oh, bless him, he's invested in the youth of Argentina? The version that's presented to most people is not odd. But it does then go a bit odd, doesn't it? He would invite some of the girls to lunch during the summer when he's working at the summer residence.

And one of these girls is a janitor's daughter who is called Nellie Rivas. And she becomes a bit of a regular at Perron's lunch table. And he, at this point, is 58 or something. And she is 14. And one day they have lunch and, you know, they talk and they find they've got a lot in common. And they talk long into the night. And Perron says, well, I mean, you know, it's dark and cold. Why don't you stay the night, my dear? Okay.

A week later, he goes to see the boxing matches at Luna Park and he decides to invite Nelly with him. So she comes. Because Dominic, just to remind listeners, the girlfriend he had before Evita, the piranha. She was 17 and he introduced her as his daughter, remember? So I think it's fair to say, Tom, that we have now entered quite murky waters.

And many listeners may rightly be quite harsh on Perron here. I think he has let himself down. However, on the positive side, as he had done with Evita, so now with Nelly, he does introduce her to the biographies of Plutarch, his favourite writer. This is the bizarre thing. So Nelly later on said, he got me a private tutor. He encouraged me to read Plutarch. We know that he wrote letters to her where he signed himself Daddy Plutarch.

His nickname for her was Tinolita, which was also the name that he called one of his poodles. So read into that what you will. I think it is pretty clear, Tom, they did have a physical relationship because after his downfall, there was a kind of investigation and Nellie herself is supposed to have testified that they did have this relationship. So listen, people can make up their own minds about Perron's, I think, very poor behavior here.

Meanwhile, Argentina is getting itself into a terrible economic mess and arguably one from which it never ever recovers. So the balance of its trade is against it. Basically, it's not making enough money anymore from its exports, from its beef and whatnot, and it is importing too much from abroad, things that it's not manufacturing itself, and it's paying for them with dollars and pounds that it just doesn't have. Argentina, as we have said, was a very rich country in the first half of the 20th century. People are used to being rich.

And effectively what happens is successive governments don't want to or can't persuade people that they're not going to be as rich in the future. So they just print money. And so from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, you start to get extremely high inflation. So terrible leader and collapsing economy. I mean, thank God that wouldn't happen here. Well, I mean…

Perron deals with this in a way that will be very familiar to people who've studied any kind of authoritarian regime. He starts to lash out. So most famously in 1953, there's a big rally he has with the union supporters. Bombs go off at this rally. Perron kind of loses it.

and says, we're going to have to go back to the days when we walked around with garrots in our pockets. And then the crowds swarm through the city. They sack the offices of socialist and radical party groups. Why? Because they're not socialists and radicals. The socialists and radicals are Peron's opponents. I mean, this is the weird thing. Peronism is this big...

ambiguous populist movement, big tent, and they attack both Marxist groups on the left, but they also head for the jockey club, the bastion of kind of Anglophile, pro-British, old elite, you know, polo playing, all of that stuff. They set fire to it. They sack it. I mean, this is a big moment in Buenos Aires' history. And they destroy a Goya and a Velázquez, don't they? Yes, exactly. I mean, it is a sign of the ideological incoherence of Peronism, that

that they attack both the socialist buildings and the kind of English gentleman's club. So that's one wing of Peronism, the Descamisados. But what about the army? Are they getting out the sunglasses by this stage and dusting down the electrodes and looking for poets and that kind of thing? The army are definitely becoming anxious. Peronism is becoming much more autocratic.

So by this point, for the first time, Perón is beginning to lock people up in big numbers. Police had, by the way, always used cattle prods on suspected felons, on criminals. But now for the first time, they're using them on political opponents of the regime. And that is a very ominous moment for Argentina. The arrival of the cattle prod as a kind of political prop, it's a path from which they will find it very difficult to turn. So Perón

Perron also, the other big thing he does, we mentioned the Catholic Church. Perron takes on the Catholic Church. I mean, that seems mad. Why is he doing that? Do you know what? Historians don't really agree about that. There's a healthy debate about that. Some people say it's because his ambition is to have a totalitarian Perronist society. I don't think he really did, actually. And the church is an obstacle to that. There's some people who actually say it's actually because of the thing about the secondary school students. Because Perron

The Catholic Church had previously run education and been in charge of youth groups and all that kind of thing. And they're a competitor with his Peronist groups. And basically the confrontation gets completely out of hand. They're all demonstrations and counter demonstrations. He blames two Catholic priests in particular and basically kicks them out of the country.

And in response to that, the Vatican excommunicates him. So very kind of medieval scenes. By this point, the Vatican isn't making a habit of excommunicating. No. It's the first time it's happened since 1890. I mean, he's an easy target, right? I mean, you wouldn't excommunicate Harold Macmillan because Argentina is kind of easy for the Vatican to pick a fight with, I would say. So...

Peron's been excommunicated. The question, I guess, is would Evita have made a difference to all this? Many Peronists think so, and always argued that if she'd lived, this wouldn't have happened. Peron's biographer, Joseph Page, says it is possible, actually, she would have made a difference because the division of roles that is at the heart of Peronism, he does the sensible, pragmatic politics. I mean...

or sensible to Peronists anyway. She does the rhetorical excesses and the melodrama. But in the Catholic sense, Evita had called Peron the face of God in the darkness, which means that she would have this mediating role as the Virgin between God and the sinner. And that was kind of quite important, wasn't it, for the functioning of the regime? Exactly, it was. I think the way it worked was that she did all the sort of melodramatic excesses. He played the benevolent monarch, the moderator.

And with her gone, he has to do both and you can't do both in that regime. And he can't get Nelly to do it, can he? No, he can't get Nelly to do it. So in September 1955, there'd been one previous coup that failed in the summer when they dropped a lot of bombs on the center of Buenos Aires. I mean, their coups are very extravagant, I have to say.

There's a revolt by army units in Cordoba, which is a city to the west of Buenos Aires. And Perón, you know, he's not an especially violent man. He could have fought back. A lot of people think he could actually have suppressed the coup after a lot of fighting. But he chooses, he genuinely chooses not to. You know, there are people who are willing to fight for him. But he says, no, I've had enough. My heart's not in it. I think he actually really enjoyed playing the father of his country. And ultimately, his heart wasn't in being a divisive person.

aggressive, you know, being General Franco. I mean, he'd been to Spain in the Civil War, hadn't he? Or shortly afterwards. Yeah, and being appalled by what he'd seen, yeah. In the musical, there is a scene where Evita is kind of saying, stick with it, you mustn't give up. And he's kind of saying, you know, oh, we could give it up, you know, sipping cocktails on a terrace.

Do you think there's an element of that as the musical picked on an aspect of his character there? I think there is a bit of an element. I mean, he does sip cocktails on a terrace for basically the next 20 years and doesn't seem too displeased by it. Which I assume is what Tim Rice is drawing on there for that kind of thing. I could find job satisfaction in Paraguay. Yeah, well, he does. So that moment, though, for Argentina, that moment when he's kicked out, there's a brilliant passage about this by an Argentine writer called Ernesto Sabato, who was then in the northern city of Salta near Paraguay.

And Sabato says, he's in the living room with this posh house with kind of doctors and writers and other elite people. And they are celebrating Peron's fall because they always hated Peron. And he says, he always remembered that in the corner of the kitchen, I saw how two Indian women who worked in the kitchen had their eyes drenched with tears. And he said, he realized at that moment there would be millions of people like that, like these poor women.

or indigenous people or whatever, who would be crying while they were celebrating because Peron was the only person who had ever done anything for them.

in all Argentina's history. And that is, I think, why when Perón goes, it's not just like any other dictator being kicked out. So a lot of people, he had not been a tyrant. He and Eva had been the people who had given them, you know, orphanages, schools, pensions, all of these kinds of things. Which is why when he goes, they kind of institute legislation, don't they, saying that you can't mention them by name, that you can't have pictures of them in your house, that all this is illegal. You know, all the various organisations that she set up get cancelled and banned. They really...

feel a need to extirpate the very memory of them. Of course, Perron, he has now gone to Paraguay. When he gets there, he writes a letter to Nelly. I miss my little girl and the poodles. Soon I will send for you and the two of us will have a quiet life. You're all I have, the only beloved thing left for me. You can imagine I think of you all day long. Take care of the poodles for me. A big kiss from your daddy. I mean, people may, again, rather raise an eyebrow at that.

The thing is, Perron doesn't wait for her. He buggers off to Panama. And within months, another woman has caught his eye. She's a cabaret dancer. Her original name was Maria Estela Martinez. She's 24, so she's a lot younger than him as well.

But she calls herself Isabel. Now, she just seems to be a very nice, sweet person. She likes dancing and music. Her twin passions, I read, were said to be talking about medicine and eating honey. She has a slightly odd interest, which will be very important later on in this story.

As a teenager, she had lodged with a couple who were really into the occult and spiritualism. And she had got really into it as well. And she had taken, as her stage name, she had named herself after the wife. And the wife was called Isabel. So this is Isabel. Isabel is massively into spiritualism. When she meets Peron after doing her dancing,

She's reading a book about Buddhism and he just thinks, ah, this is an interesting and amusing hobby like eating honey and talking about medicine. So he shacks up with Isabel. Now, meanwhile, what's happened to Nelly? In January 1956, having clearly not heard from Perron, decides she's going to try to find him. The police picked her up, apparently, on the border with Paraguay. She had with her...

a camera, some jewelry, some cash, and these poodles. So no wonder she found it difficult to get across the border with all the poodles. The authorities brought her back to Buenos Aires and they put her in reform school. Life worked out well for her. She married somebody from the U.S. Embassy, I believe.

So Nelly, I mean, whether she was traumatized by this association with Peron, I don't know. It's very sub-ideal. But that's the end of her in this story. Now, there is, of course, another of Peron's women, which we should before we get to the break, which is Evita. Evita has been in this flipping laboratory on the third floor of the union building. When the coup happens and Peron's kicked out, all the army people go up to the laboratory to find her body. Now, one of them is a guy called Francisco Manrique. So he gives us one of the few very good descriptions. He says, it was the size of a 12-year-old girl.

Its skin was waxed like an artificial, its mouth had been rouged, and when you tapped it, it rang hollow like a store window mannequin. The embalmer, Dr. Ara, hovered over it as though it was something that he loved.

Now, the army are desperate to prove that it's a fake because, as you said, Tom, they want to erase the Perons from Argentine history. So they actually cut off one of her fingers and did an X-ray on it. And they were very disappointed to find out it was real. I mean, that does suggest that it's kind of got a real quality of fakeness, doesn't it?

They want to think that it's actually made of plastic. Yeah. But it's covered with this layer of plastic. I mean, the whole thing is so weird. It's like the end of Carry On Screaming. Do you remember where they get turned into mannequins? Or like one of those Doctor Who episodes with the Autons. Anyway, what on earth to do with this body?

They meet again and again, and they eventually decide... Well, I've got a question about this. Why don't they just burn it? They're good Catholics. So they're perfectly happy about using cattle prods and electrocuting poets? No, this isn't the dirty war territory. So they're not executing people or anything at all?

this point. They're not doing any of that stuff. I mean, I wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of them, but equally the cattle prod is not as prominent in Argentine political culture as it would later become. I mean, basically the decision they've what to do with the body. This is where the Martinez novel really starts getting quite Baroque. Can't get more Baroque than what actually happened. Okay. Will you tell us what will happen? And I'll tell you if there are further Baroque details. So eventually they decided they would move it and they would bury it secretly in the big cemetery in Buenos Aires called the Chacarita.

And the head of military intelligence, who was a man called Mr. Maury Koenig, went up there at midnight on the 24th of November, 1955. They have this bizarre ceremony where they carry it out in secret. The people carrying it, the cleaners carrying it, and they're supposedly pale and sweating with emotion and terror.

It's almost like she's an icon of Argentina. So to own her is somehow gives you a supernatural quality of power. Exactly. Why do they think about it in such a histrionic way? Well, I suppose everything's been leading up to this, right? All those rallies, all the mad stuff with when she died.

So it's a very weird story now. The lid was meant to be welded shut. The welders never turn up to close the lid. So that's a slight issue. So the body is now open. Yeah, it's open. Dr. Ara has been sent away. They're like sick of Dr. Ara hanging around, looking incredibly sinister. He's very sad. He's been sent away because they're sick of him. So Koenig, he says afterwards, they took the body away and they left it bizarrely in the back of a truck because it hadn't been welded shut.

And they kept driving it around the city and parking in sort of disused car parks. But every morning when they'd turn up to move it, they would find mysteriously flowers and a single candle by the side of the truck.

This obviously plays with Koenig's... He's the head of their military intelligence, but this massively plays with his mind. And it's because he's thinking either there are traitors in the security services or it is some supernatural manifestation. So he does what I think is a mad thing to do. He says, let's abandon the plan to bury it secret in a cemetery. I'll put it... In a filing cabinet. What?

Well, actually, I believe he puts it in the attic above his storage space, above his office in the military. Imagine this plastic looking body of Evita has now been shoved into this space, literally above the desk at which he is working. So in the Martinez novel, there are two refinements to this. It's briefly stored in the office of an officer who Koenig thinks has gone away. And the officer comes back early and walks into the office and...

What the hell is that? But then it gets even creepier because this must be made up. I can't believe that this is true. There's a major Aranthibia who gets given the body to look after and he falls in love with it and has a kind of necrophiliac relations with it.

gets discovered by his pregnant wife, who he then shoots and claims that he had mistaken his wife for a burglar. I've never heard that version. So the version I'd heard was that Koenig, the head of military intelligence, eventually told somebody he was sweating, looking furtive all this time, like he was a haunted man.

And eventually he told somebody, I've got Evita's body hidden in my office. They told the president. He was sacked at this point. Koenig's gone mad. Yeah, you've gone mad. And the president, who's now called Aramburu, there's been a lot of churn in the regime. He says, look, we've got to sort this thing out. And he basically contacts the Vatican or contacts the Catholic hierarchy and they do a deal. And this is genuinely what happened. This mysterious Italian priest arrived in Buenos Aires and he collected the coffin, which

which they'd prepared. He gave President Aramburu a sealed envelope with details of where the body is going. Aramburu gave this envelope to his lawyer and he said, a month after my death, give this to my successor as president of Argentina. He can open it. He can do what he likes, but then I will be gone and I'll be rid of this. And with that, Evita vanishes. The body vanished. It wasn't mentioned. No one knew where it had gone.

The Italian priest has disappeared with it and no one knows what has happened. But the envelope is still in situ in the Argentine president's office. And of course, this is not the end of the story. And Tom, after the break, we will discover what happened to Peron? What happened to that occult crazed dancer that he was now involved with? And what happened above all to Evita's body? Come back after the break for the mad climax of this extraordinary story.

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♪ ♪

Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History, the final section of our five-part epic on the life of Evita. Dominic, Evita has vanished. Peron is in exile. Before we come to them, what condition is Argentina in by now? Let's fast forward 10 years, 15 years or so, to the middle and the end of the 1960s. Argentina is in a greater mess than ever before. Economic, terrible woes, high inflation, labour unrest.

The army have never been able to set up a workable regime that lasts. And there is now a real romance, a retrospective romance of Peron, of Peronism and particularly of Evita. And we mentioned last time how at the end of her life, when she was on a lot of drugs and in a huge amount of pain, her speeches had become increasingly violent and confrontational. And this is the Evita that is picked up in the late 1960s by students, by radicals,

by this sort of newly emboldened left of Argentine politics, influenced by Castro and the Cuban Revolution. But also the kind of the Soissons-Vita in Paris and Berkeley and all that. All of that, exactly. They take up Evita as their icon. So in 1969, there was an uprising in the city of Cordoba, ironically the place where the coup against Perón had begun.

There was street fighting between students and the police. The government cracks down and declares a state of siege. And that really is the cue for Argentina to descend into a kind of anarchy of competing radical guerrilla terrorist groups. The most famous ones are called the Montoneros groups.

But there's also, I mean, it's real People's Front of Judea stuff, Tom. There's the Peronist Armed Forces, the Revolutionary Armed Forces, the Armed Forces of Liberation, and the People's Revolutionary Army. You don't want to get them mixed up because they'll kill you. You might get shot. Exactly. The estimates are that there were about 40,000 terrorists and guerrillas in Argentina at the beginning of the 1970s.

And these are university educated. So they're kind of posh terrorists. Badermeyerhoff type. Very Badermeyerhoff. We did an episode about the Tupper Maros in Uruguay who are exactly the same, basically.

And Evita is their touchstone. She is their inspiration. So you will see graffiti in Buenos Aires in 1970, 71. Evita viva. Evita lives. And at rallies, they will have open rallies and they will chant, se siente, se siente, Evita está presente. We can feel it. We can feel it. Evita is here. This is one of their great hymns. Are they agitated artists?

by the fact her body's vanished? Do they have any interest in that or is that not really what they're into? People do say, where is she? What has happened to her? I mean, the Peronist movement is very angry about this. That she's vanished? That she's vanished. They've never got their memorial. They don't even have a gravestone. So it is inflammatory that she's disappeared. I can see that they would be into Evita because she's safely dead. But...

But what about Peron? Because Peron must be about 170 by now. No, Peron is only 70, Tom. Very harsh. Okay, that's still quite old, though, if you're a radical student in the late 60s. By the standards of the politics of the United States, he's a... Yes, he's a spring chicken. Yes, exactly. So Peron has since moved to Madrid. He's got married to that dancer, Isabel. He was never massively into Isabel. It's generally thought that he got married, really, to please Franco.

Because General Franco said, you know, I'm all about kind of the family, the Catholic Church, establishment values. I can't have you hanging around Madrid with this dancer. You need to marry her and make an honest woman of her. And Perón, you know, he's still kind of slightly easygoing, says, yeah, well, whatever. He started to use Isabel. She's not political at all. She likes her honey, spiritualism. Talking about medicine. Exactly, talking about medicine. She can travel back to Argentina. She's from Argentina. She's from the city of La Rioja in Argentina. Yeah.

And he says, you can go back and talk to underground Peronist groups and whatnot for me. She will go back and she'll turn up in Buenos Aires. She knows nothing about politics. And all these Peronist youth groups will kind of gather outside her hotel and say, we'll be your bodyguards. Let us carry your bags. And she's not talking to the government, to anti-Peronist forces at this point? No, not really. But she will travel around the country. There's stories of her that during a political campaign in Mendoza in the West, she'll be traveling around and people will come to the side of the road

They will try to lay hands on her as if she's a saint. As if she's Evita, presumably. This is precisely the point. That she is basically already at this point being cast as Evita. The real Evita, the waxwork, has vanished. So Peron is creating his own, which is Isabel. Well, you can see why. I mean, she's young, she's married to Peron, and she's from a theatrical background. Yes, exactly. So...

Now, among the people who attach themselves to Isabel, the new Evita, is a very peculiar man. He is a guy who had once been in the police and seems to have worked as a security man for Perón at some point. His name is José López Rega. And this guy, he follows Isabel back to Madrid, basically carrying her bags.

And somehow he gets a post in the kind of Peron ménage in Madrid as a handyman at the house initially.

Now, José López Rega is obsessed with the occult. That's probably why he and Isabel bonded. He, as a young policeman, had got really interested in a Brazilian cult called Candomblé, which is a sort of syncretic religion that had flourished among slaves in Brazil. A kind of South American voodoo. Yeah. And he wrote books about spiritualism. His masterwork, Tom, was called Esoteric Astrology, Secrets Revealed.

And it was dictated to him by the angel Gabriel while he was asleep. Oh, so he's like Mohammed. Well, the difference, Tom, is that I have no criticisms to make of Mohammed, obviously. But Lopez Rega, as it will turn out, is quite a different kettle of fish. We'll just put that on the record. We are not comparing this guy to the prophet Mohammed. Peron's hangers-on initially treat this guy, Lopez Rega, as a joke. They call him El Brujo, the warlock.

And it catches on. After a while, Peron discovers that the warlock is selling a drug in Brazil that can rejuvenate you. And Lopez Rega is selling this drug with Peron's face on it. Rejuvenate you kind of like Viagra or literally? Literally rejuvenate you. So kind of like a vampire drinking blood. The claim that Lopez Rega makes is he says...

Peron only stays young. I mean, actually, Peron is like pouring industrial quantities of dye into his hair and stuff in traditional exiled Latin American dictator style. But the warlock says the drug is keeping him young. Peron discovers this and tries to kick the warlock out of his house. But then Peron falls ill. He has tumors in his urethra, very unpleasant.

And he needs care. And actually, López Rega returns to the house and he and Isabel become, they basically end up controlling Perón. So they become indispensable to him. So this, Tom, is the situation when in 1971, the new Argentine president, they've had a multitude of presidents. They've got a guy called Alejandro Agustín Lanús, who is the new military president.

And he says, look, we're never going to get out of this mess unless we basically reincorporate the Peronists back into Argentine politics. And the first thing I'll do is I will relax all those laws that had erased them, that had erased mentions of Evita. So now at the beginning of the 70s, the cult of Evita comes back kind of above ground. Fierce Naipaul, the great writer, went to Argentina in 1972 and he said, her

Her pictures everywhere, touched up, seldom sharp, and often they seem like religious pictures made for the very poor. A young woman with great beauty, with blonde hair, a very white skin, and the very red lips of the 1940s. There's a cult of, a massive cult of Evita at the beginning of the 70s, when Argentina is in this terrible economic and political mess. And this, of course, is the backdrop to the making of the musical. Yes. Now, General Lanus thinks, I want to win over the Peronists,

The best way to do that, given the cult that is flourishing, is to track down the body. And so he does that one thing that his predecessors had not done. He opens the envelope. I can't believe that no one had opened the envelope. I mean, it's kind of like saying, don't think of an elephant, isn't it? Don't open the envelope. I would become president of Argentina just so that I could open that envelope. I don't see you as president of Argentina material, to be quite honest with you, Tom. No, but it's kind of like the one reason that I'd want to become president.

the United States is so that I could, you know, tell me what happened at Roswell. I'd want to know this. If I'm picturing you in Argentine politics at the beginning of the seventies, I see you in the back of a boot being driven off to a helicopter. No, I think you're a big fan of Graham Greene, like our producer Tony Pastor. No, not really. In his novel, The Honorary Consul, somebody has taken postage by mistake. Oh, so that would be me. That's got you all over it. Right. So he opens the envelope and it has in it, I mean, it's like such damn brown material.

The name of a priest and the address of a cemetery in Milan. So...

The president sends an army intelligence colonel to Milan and he finds out that the priest has died in the interim. But he goes to the cemetery. He looks through. Is there anyone here from any Argentine connections? Yes. In 1956, there is a widow called Maria Maggi de Magistris who was supposedly born in Italy, went to Argentina, was widowed and then was brought back to Milan to be buried. The colonel

grows a moustache, impersonates this woman's brother, and somehow gets a permit from the Italian authorities to exhume the body. He says he lives in Spain now and to take it back with him to Spain. So on the 2nd of September 1971, this group of very sunglass-wearing, slightly sinister-looking men dig up this body in Milan. They put it in the back of a van. They drive it through Italy, through France,

into Spain. When they get to Spain, they transfer it to another van, an unmarked van. So they're not being stopped on the way by customs officials. Who knows what's happened. So they arrive finally in the Madrid suburb of Puerto de Hierro, which is the house of Juan Perón. And there waiting for them are Perón, Isabel, the warlock, and Dr. Ara, the embalmer. Oh my God, he's come back. They open the coffin and they're hit by a sweet smell, apparently.

And Perron just says, motionlessly, he just says, it's Evita. Now, Dr. Ara says the hair was wet. They unpinned the hair. Isabel starts to kind of smooth the hair and smooth off bits of dirt and rust. Now, they look more closely. The nose has been flattened. It's obviously been hit by the lid at some point. So that's quite like Alexander's nose being knocked off, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But there is no doubt this is Ava.

So what then happens is Isabel takes the body out, washes it and does its hair. I find that quite weird. You know, somebody doing the hair of her predecessor who's been dead for 20 years. Anyway, Isabel does this. Evita's family want it to be buried, of course. They say, for God's sake, give her a decent burial. But Perron says, no, the body is too useful. It's like Ptolemy taking Alexander's body back to Alexandria. Totally. So what he does, which I find absolutely...

unfathomable is she says, just put the body in an upstairs bedroom. That's what they do. But it doesn't end there because you've got the warlock on the scene. Never madness to have a man called the warlock living in your house with a perfectly preserved body.

Asking for trouble. Word leaks out of the Perron ménage that the, you'll never guess what's going on in the upstairs room. That at night, while Perron is retired, the warlock goes up there with Isabel. He gets Isabel to lie on top of the coffin. I'm presuming with the lid on.

I would assume. Meanwhile, he lights candles and burns incense and he mutters incantations. And the point is to basically revive Evita's soul and sort of spiritual essence and somehow integrate it into the mind of Isabel so that she becomes Evita. And now you may say this is absolutely bizarre. Perron's academic biographer, Joseph Page, says, fantastic, but

but entirely credible. So you can see why this would appeal to a novelist raised in the magical realist tradition of South American fiction. It's so implausible, I've no reason to doubt that it happened.

Well, in Argentina itself, the situation has gone completely out of control. There are bombings, there are robberies, there are kidnappings all the time. Perón comes briefly back at the end of 1972 with Isabel. They do this daily routine where a huge crowd will gather outside their window. She will come out with him carrying a huge enlarged photograph of Isabel.

of Evita and she will lead the crowd in the chants, se siente, se siente, Evita este presente. Well, I mean, she literally is, isn't she? Have they taken the body with them? No, the body is back in Madrid. But you could say Evita may well be present if that spell has worked and Isabel is carrying her within her. Who knows?

Right. So now everything is really moving forward towards Peron's political return. In the spring of 1973, there's a presidential election. The Peronists are at last allowed to put forward a candidate, but it's not allowed to be Peron himself.

Perón puts forward a creature of his, this man called Mr. Cámpara, who's a former dentist. Cámpara becomes president and as his minister of social welfare, following in the footsteps of Eva Perón, who do you think he appoints? Isabel. No. You see, I thought you'd say Isabel. Oh, the warlock. He appoints the warlock. So he can use his necromantic powers for the benefit of the Argentine health service. Now, you think this is all a great comedy and a mad comedy.

Actually, there are serious consequences. In June 1973, Perón makes his great, he's already come back once, but now he's going to make his big set piece return to Argentina. And he comes to Ezeiza Airport, the big international airport in Buenos Aires. There are, some estimates, three and a half million people waiting for him there at the airport.

But by this point, Argentine politics has spiraled into such madness that there are rival right-wing and left-wing Peronist paramilitary groups. The left-wing ones are chanting, Peron Evita, the socialist fatherland, and the right-wing ones are chanting, Peron Evita, the Peronist fatherland.

And they're kind of competing with these chants. Then eventually they just start shooting at each other. I mean, that does show the limits of a big tent approach, doesn't it, in politics? And how song contests can quite easily spiral into something more sinister. Anyway, the people on the left always say, you know, we were ambushed by right-wing snipers. The right-wing people say the opposite. Probably hundreds of people were killed at this event.

And Peron's plane actually has to be rerouted and it lands in, unfortunately, titled Moron. Moron. Moron Airport Air Base. He had a heart attack as they were landing. Oh, God. So he's basically dying at this point, but he runs for president anyway. So they have another presidential election. So he's basically dead by this point. Well, you'll see, Tom, whether he's dead or not, or whether he's actually been dead already in a second. Now...

People who listened to the last episode will remember the huge hullabaloo about whether Evita would be his vice presidential running mate. This time, there is no doubt whatsoever. Isabel is his running mate. And since he's at death's door, everybody knows Isabel is going to be president of Argentina.

This is an unbelievable step because she has no political experience, no knowledge of politics. I mean, she must be quite adept at health policy with her interest in medicine. Perron wins this massive landslide and everybody thinks, brilliant, the days of misery are over. By the way, Perron at this point, when he's inaugurated in October 1973, it's four days after his 78th birthday. That is the same age as Joe Biden when he was inaugurated and Trump if he wins again. And

What about the warlock? How is he getting on? A lot of people think the warlock is the real power behind the scenes here. So the warlock, López Rega, he's still the Minister of Social Welfare. He spends most of his time designing a huge pantheon for Evita. But he's also behaving in very peculiar ways. So first of all, he lives with Perón and Isabel in the presidential palace. He puts a listening device on Perón's bed so that he can listen to Perón and listen for unusual sounds at night.

He tells other people in the sort of Peron court, he says, listen, Peron actually is dead. Peron died in Madrid, but I have revived him. And as long as I am with Peron, he cannot die. And also he's kind of raised Evita from the dead, hasn't he? And put her life force into Isabel. So in a sense, he's brought both Evita and Peron back from the dead. And he is their master. But he's telling inconsistent stories there, Tom, because at other times he claims that Peron is actually an Egyptian pharaoh.

Of course not.

Now, this guy is controlling a big budget. And what is more, he is spending some of his budget on right-wing death squads, on anti-communist death squads. So now there are rival Peronist death squads roaming around the country, kidnapping people, shooting people. So the Warlocks one is called the AAA. Who is the rival one? Montaneros. So the left-wing Peronist one. So politics now has become extremely bizarre and troubled. Executives from foreign companies have been kidnapped and murdered all the time.

Perron finally has another heart attack on the 1st of July, 1974. The warlock is there and he grabs, supposedly, Perron's ankles and mutters incomprehensibly a spell of some kind. But for once, it doesn't work. His powers have deserted him. So Perron is dead. The warlock can't bring him back to life. You can only bring people back so many times, I think, is the... I suppose, yeah. So Isabel, a nightclub dancer...

is now president of Argentina. Inflation is 60%. Terrorist atrocities are totally out of control.

It's capital. There are still some shenanigans with bodies. So the Montoneras, the left-wing guerrilla group, on the eve of Isabel's first big loyalty day rally, October the 17th, they stole the body of President Aramburu, the first man with the envelope. They stole his body and they say, we will keep this body until you bring back Evita's body. And so eventually, exactly a month later, the streets of Buenos Aires are cleared.

armed police secure the airport and Evita's body is flown in from Madrid. So Evita's body is now back in the capital. Now the plan is that it will be buried in this huge pantheon designed by Lopez Rega, by the warlock, the altar of the fatherland. But yet again, it is overtaken by a military coup.

So this time, first of all, the warlock is kicked out. The armies say to Isabel, the warlock's got to go. But what about his magic powers? They avail him naught, Tom. What can I say? He flees abroad and vanishes. He lived in hiding, I think, in Spain and Switzerland. He married a pianist. He spent his time writing about Hinduism.

And then in 1986, this is so strange. They're going to make a great Netflix series or something. I think there is a Netflix series about this, actually. His wife, the pianist, decided that everyone must have forgotten about him. So she applied in Miami for him to get a passport so that he could travel. His passport had since expired, you see, in the interim.

She applied for him to get a new passport and immediately came up on the FBI system. This man is wanted in Argentina for death squads, necromancy, gross corruption and madness.

And he was extradited. He died in prison in Argentina at the end of the 80s, but he never actually got to trial. So that was the end of him. Isabel, unbelievably, she lasted until March 1976. She was toppled in a military coup. I mean, a bit like with Vita's body. They kept Isabel locked up under house arrest for five years because they couldn't work out what to do with her. Then eventually they sent her back to Madrid. Be off with you. Don't come back. Tom, it is possible she could be listening to this podcast because she is still alive. She's still alive.

She's 93. She's still going. Wow. That's what comes of eating honey, isn't it? It was the honey. And I guess if you've, well, you've got the life spirit of Evita in you. That's true. So on a less amusing note, with Isabel's downfall, the army take power and they try and crack down on the terrorists, violence and all that kind of stuff. They launched the dirty war.

which we talked about in our Falklands episodes. They killed between 20 and 30,000 people. Now you have the age of the cattle prod really is upon us. People being thrown out of helicopters, rape, torture. In 1982, in desperation, they launched their great gamble. They captured the Falkland Islands. Which I have to say that that

Placed in context, you know, of them attacking Anglophile centres of culture, like the Jockey Club. Seems to be a theme there. So at the end of all this, there was really only one strand to tie up, and that is the body. Yeah. So the new president, Jorge Videla, General Videla, who launches the Dirty War, he wouldn't move into his palace at first because…

They've now two Perron bodies in there hanging around. Not the general. Well, has he been embalmed or is he smelling or? I assume he'd been embalmed in some way. Evita is there as well. That is so weird. Fadella, who's a very hard man, says, look, I'm not living there with two of them. I mean, that's mad.

So they eventually agreed that she would move to a family vault in 1976 in the Recoleta Cemetery, which is the famous sort of very spooky looking cemetery, amazing cemetery, kind of these ornate tombs and memorials in Buenos Aires. And when you go there, I mean, I've been there. It's not one of the spectacular vaults and her name is quite small. There's just a little plaque.

But the story is in the vault, there was a trap door in the floor and that goes down to a subterranean compartment. And that's where the body is. No, there's another trap door.

And then that goes down to another compartment and there is only one key. And the key to that second trapdoor was given to Evita's sister. And is that the one that is proof against a nuclear missile? Supposedly, yeah. And you don't know whether this is, I mean, who knows. If Buenos Aires was ever to come under nuclear attack, this would be the one thing that would survive. And as Evita's biographers, Nicholas Fraser and Marisa Navarro say, the fact that it is down there reflects a fear.

A fear that one day that the body will disappear from the tomb and that the woman, or rather the myth of the woman, will reappear. So, Dominic, I mean, one last obvious question. Who has the key now? I knew you'd ask that. I don't know. Does Javier Millay have the key?

I mean, basically, do you know what? He seems so much more comprehensible with his chainsaw and his mad antics against the backdrop of all this. Maybe he's got it and at some point will unlock it and the corpse of Evita will appear to save her people. I can't think of many other historical figures. Alexandra is probably the only one where you could actually do an episode about their body and the

their sort of political significance and their, frankly, supernatural significance that is attached to the body after their death. It's so redolent of the madness of the 70s, isn't it? Yeah. It's like a horror film. It's got all those kind of elements. I mean, I suppose the themes and the quality of films in that period are informed by the politics, but also the politics perhaps is informed by the films. Well, Evita's politics were informed by the popular culture of the tango and the soap operas that she'd grown up with. A theme throughout this is the interface between

politics and culture. But there's no way, there's no radio soap opera of the 1940s that ends with such a bizarre twist of events as that business with the warlock, the body, the honey, the angel Gabriel and all that stuff. I mean, nobody saw that coming. What a strange story. A very, very strange story. Thank you so much, Dominic, for all that. Absolutely, I mean, amazing story. So we hope you've all enjoyed it. Dominic, thanks ever so much and hasta luego. Hasta luego. Hasta luego.

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