lt was the most remarkable funeral procession in the history of South America.
On the 10th of August 1952,
the body of Eva Peron,
the wife of the President of Argentina, General Juan Peron,
was borne through the streets of Buenos Aires.
Tens of thousands of mourning Argentines
lined the streets to watch the cortege pass.
Eva Peron had never been elected or officially appointed to
any government office.
But she was buried with full presidential honours.
Her husband in full general's uniform followed the coffin.
For seven years she had been the most powerful woman in the world.
The myths surrounding Eva Peron reverberate to this day.
On the 7th of May 1919
an lndian midwife helped
an unwed mother give birth to a child
on the Argentina pampa near the small town of Los Toldos
in the province of Buenos Aires.
This child was to grow up to be Eva Peron,
First Lady of Argentina.
When she was 15,
Eva left her family and made her way to Buenos Aires,
adopting the name of her father, a prosperous landowner.
The adolescent Eva Duarte,
or Evita as she liked to be called,
dreamed about becoming a movie star.
By the time she was 20
she was playing small parts in radio plays.
By all accounts she was an atrocious actress,
but in 1943 she signed a contract to play the title roles in a radio series
about famous women in history...
Evita became Catherine the Great and Sarah Bernhardt.
Soon she would add another name to the list - herself.
Evita's success attracted the attention of a rapidly rising figure
in Argentina's military government, the dashing Colonel Juan Peron.
From 1943, when the military came to power,
he had been building a political base for himself
among the country's trade unions.
Peron provided pay rises, better conditions
and created a bureaucracy devoted to
dealing with labour problems.
By 1945, Peron was Argentina's vice-president
and Evita his mistress.
Evita became part of Peron's political apparatus,
broadcasting a stream of propaganda to the Argentine nation.
She told the people:
''l am a woman like you,
mothers, wives, sweethearts, sisters...
from me came the son who is in the barracks...
or the worker who is creating
a new Argentina by land, sea and air.''
Evita was eager to assume this iconic role away from the microphone.
She was placed in charge of organising the union which represented Argentina's radio workers.
The concessions Peron had made to the workers cemented his popularity,
but by 1945
the military government of which he was vice-president,
and effectively controlling, was deeply unpopular...
rioting broke out in Buenos Aires.
The army moved in to make thousands of arrests.
A state of martial law was declared.
Newspapers were shut down.
Strikes gripped Argentina
Peron's military colleagues decided to
move against him and his mistress.
At the beginning of October he was dismissed,
arrested and briefly exiled to an island off the coast of Argentina.
Peron was rescued by Evita's willpower and by the workers,
the descamisados or shirtless ones as they had been contemptuously
dubbed by the military junta.
lt was Evita who was behind the huge demonstration
which converged on the government's Pink House,
the Casa Rosada, in Buenos Aires.
Many of the demonstrators carried banners
proclaiming ''Peron for President!''
The junta caved in.
Peron was released, to marry Evita
and to run for the presidency.
ln February 1946 his triumph was complete
when he took the oath of office as president.
Evita had been with him every step of the way.
There was no precedent in Argentine politics
for the role Evita was to play.
She made the rules up as she went along.
After her death, Peron claimed that, from the start,
he had prepared Evita for the part she was to play.
But even he could not have foreseen
just what a force she would become.
Even though Peron was twice Evita's age,
they formed a perfect political partnership.
Where Peron was benign and relaxed,
Evita was fiercely passionate.
Her political philosophy was simple - love of the poor,
from whom she had come,
and hatred of the rich who had run Argentina for so long.
Peron's style was avuncular and glad handing.
He once referred to himself as a ''vegetarian lion''.
While he was the man of the people,
Evita was the people.
The Peronist system claimed to have found
a third way between capitalism and communism.
But it was a fascist state
much influenced by Mussolini's ltaly,
where Peron had spent the early war years as a military attache.
lt was ironic, then,
that Juan and Evita had come to power in 1945,
when fascism seemed a spent force.
As the self-styled First Worker of Argentina,
Evita reached out to two powerful forces previously ignored
by Argentine politicians:
women,
for whom she won the vote,
and the workers
who had carried Peron to power.
Self-effacingly,
she said of Peron:
''He is like God for us,
we cannot conceive of heaven without Peron...
he is our sun,
our air, our water, our life''.
ln truth Evita wielded enormous personal power.
She exercised an iron grip on the labour movement.
She owned four of Buenos Aires'
largest newspapers
and had complete control of the nation's radio network.
She worked long hours in her office in the Ministry of Labour.
Up the stairs and into her suite tramped
not only the big union leaders,
to be exhorted or dressed down,
but also a stream of poor people bringing their individual problems
to the young blonde woman who received homage
and dispensed favours from behind her desk.
The military had watched Evita's rise with the deepest suspicion.
The high command regarded her with a contempt
that was repaid in kind.
Evita had a short temper and a long memory.
She waged ferocious vendettas
against all those who had snubbed or patronised her in the past
or who now stood in her way.
ln 1947 the Spanish dictator General Franco
invited Evita to Spain.
The Argentine navy denied her a ship for the voyage,
and she was obliged to fly to Europe.
Peron declared that the trip was unofficial
and Evita claimed that she was financing it out of her own funds.
Whatever the truth,
it was the prelude to a spectacular descent on the Old World by a representative of the New.
ln Madrid the entire Spanish government stood waiting to meet her.
Behind them were 200,000 ordinary Spaniards
who had stood for hours in broiling heat for a chance to glimpse the Lady of Hope.
lt was the biggest reception since
the German SS chief Heinrich Himmler
had visited Spain in 1940.
Himmler was long since dead.
Evita was alive and kicking.
There was the obligatory visit to the bullfights at the plaza de Toros,
where the arena was spread with coloured sand
in the red and yellow national colours of Spain
and the blue and white of Argentina.
ln the Palacio Real,
Franco decorated Evita
with the diamond-encrusted Cross of lsabel the Catholic,
the highest honour Spain can bestow.
Then, her shoulders draped in mink
in spite of the heat,
she addressed a vast throng in the square below.
Evita told them,
''l come as a rainbow between two countries''.
She told Franco.
''Any time you want a crowd of this size
just give me a call.''
Then it was on to ltaly,
the mother country of so many Argentines.
Behind Evita is her brother Juan,
who was Peron's private secretary.
Another tumultuous reception was marred
by clashes between ltalian fascists and socialists.
But there was no denying that
Evita had brought an extraordinary glamour and excitement to a Europe
still struggling to escape from postwar austerity.
She was received by the Pope
but snubbed by the British Royal Family,
who were advised against
meeting Evita in London.
Back in Argentina it was business as usual.
Peron filled the role of ''caudillo'',
the traditional Latin American strongman, fixing the armed forces and the big money interests
while Evita dealt with the unions.
With the unions they used carrot and stick tactics.
Massive pay rises were accompanied
by ruthless purges of any unions
which stepped out of line.
lncreasingly Evita's principal instrument of power
was the Eva Peron Social Aid Foundation.
One of its showcases
was an eerie model village for children,
which only seemed to contain children when important visitors arrived.
Propaganda films,
however corny,
contained the essence of Evita's philosophy -
the betterment of the masses.
ln this she was steadfast.
Her Social Aid Foundation was ostensibly a charity
but woe betide any business or union which declined to make
a substantial donation.
Eventually the Foundation became Argentina's biggest enterprise,
effectively taking over the functions of the Ministries of Health and Education.
Many thousands benefited,
but the fruits of the Foundation were grown in deeply corrupt soil.
At the centre of Evita and Juan's partnership was the sway
they held over the people
from the balcony,
the traditional podium of Latin American demagogues.
Peron had been deeply impressed by the huge demonstrations orchestrated by Benito Mussolini,
and it was in the great gathering in Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo that,
at regular intervals, they rallied and reassured the shirtless ones.
This was Evita's stage,
on which she achieved a fire and resonance entirely lacking in her radio performances
and during her mercifully brief movie career.
ln Peron's words,
she was the ''bridge of love'' between himself and the Argentine people.
She gave the poorest and most exploited Argentines
an understanding of themselves.
Evita declared that the happiness of one of the shirtless ones
was worth more than her life.
Evita, of course, was hardly shirtless herself.
Her wardrobe bulged with hundreds of expensive outfits.
She dripped jewels,
and wore them when she visited the slum dwellers,
telling them,
''One day you will inherit the whole collection''.
But she also took care to cultivate a severely iconic style,
with simple suits and scraped-back hair
emphasising the burning power of her face.
She had no need of children, She was the mother of the nation.
ln retrospect, Evita's political life
seems like a preparation for the agonisingly drawn-out drama of her death.
Her health had always been delicate.
ln 1950 she had been diagnosed as having cancer of the uterus,
but she refused to undergo the operation
which might have saved her.
lnstead she stepped up her workload...
She drove herself on.
The sacrifice she made for the people
would become real rather than rhetorical.
Evita was rushing towards her own appointment with destiny.
Her rhetoric was as fiery as ever...
but a sense of exhaustion was setting in.
Meanwhile, the rolling thunder of Peron's speeches
continued to galvanise the masses with promises of the wonderful future
that his movement would bring them.
And when Evita spoke, it was always as the leading propagandist of Peronismo
ln August 1951,
the Army blocked her bid to become Argentina's vice-president.
She was now so weak
that Peron had physically to support her.
She was saying goodbye to her people.
Evita lived long enough to make
her last public appearance at Peron's inauguration
for a second term as president in June 1952.
Riddled with cancer,
she died on the 26th of July.
As she was prepared for the final futile operation to save her,
Evita had shouted ''Viva Peron!'' with her last strength.
Her death provoked a frenzy of mourning.
Argentina's lnterior Minister, Angel G. Borlenghi,
described Evita as ''the martyr of labour,
protecting saint, haven for the humble
and the quintessence of the people's feelings''
Peron's feelings were all too clear
as he walked slowly behind the gun carriage bearing the tiny coffin.
Evita's enemies rejoiced, but the nation mourned.
Her body lay in state at the Ministry of Labour.
Outside the Ministry colossal queues waited for up to 15 hours in freezing rain
to snatch a glimpse of Evita's wasted face...
Sixteen people died in the crush...
ln a fortnight over two million Argentines
had paid their last respects to Evita Peron.
Walls of flowers channeled the mourners as they shuffled towards Evita's bier.
lnside hysterical women
threw themselves forward to kiss the glass panel on Evita's coffin.
The Peronistas mounted massive torchlit parades in her memory.
But the light of Peronismo was already dimming now
that its beacon was dead.
Without Evita's fire,
the movement she and her husband had created began to wither away at the roots.
Even as she lay in her coffin
the cult of Evita began to falter.
The plans to build a massive memorial to her, the biggest in the world,
never got beyond the model stage.
Peron, taking a stroll with Evita's pet poodles,
cut an increasingly isolated figure.
An economic crisis loomed,
caused largely by Evita's lavish handouts to the unions.
Peron's moment seemed to be passing...
the anti-Peron forces gathered strength and waited for their opportunity.
lt came in June 1955
when navy aircraft launched bombing attacks on the Casa Rosada.
Peron, the vegetarian lion, was now also toothless.
The revolt was put down
but Peron no longer had the stomach for a fight.
When the army rose against him in September,
he fled to Paraguay.
The shirtless ones who gathered in the Plaza Mayo
could not save him now.
A new strongman donned the presidential sash.
ln 1960 Peron settled in Madrid,
where he married his long-time mistress
lsabel Martinez, a former dancer.
By 1972 the 76-year-old Peron
saw an opportunity to return to Argentina,
which had been run into the ground by a succession of military dictatorships.
At home the Peronistas, now an uneasy coalition of forces
on the extreme left and right of the political spectrum,
were clamouring for Peron's return.
When he came back, it was at the invitation of those whom Evita had despised the most -
the army, big business and landowners.
Now lsabel was at his side,
a surrogate Evita but a pale imitation of the original.
The Peronistas chanted the old warcrys,
but they were a tinny echo of the glory days in the late 1940s.
Nevertheless, they were sufficient to secure Juan Peron
a massive victory in the presidential election held in the autumn of 1973.
The old warrior gave a sheepish grin
as the sash was placed on his shoulders.
But Peron's failing health meant that lsabel,
who had consciously modelled herself on Evita,
assumed an increasingly important role
in the governing of Argentina.
President Peron proposed
but his vice-president, lsabel, disposed.
Peron's charisma remained intact
but he could make no impression
on the economic chaos and political violence which bedeviled Argentina.
After Peron suffered a heart-attack
lsabel was sworn in as Argentina's interim president.
But there was no public enthusiasm for the hatchet-faced Evita Mark 2.
Juan Peron died on the 1st of July 1974
The army presence at his funeral was more menacing
than it had been when Evita died.
ln 1952 the army had fed the lines of mourners.
Now they looked ready to mow them down.
But the grief of the Peronistas was genuine enough.
lt was only after Peron had been laid to rest
that Evita's embalmed body
was returned to Argentina under heavy guard.
ln 1956 it had been secretly buried
in the ltalian city of Milan.
Fourteen years later she had been disentombed
and moved to Peron's house in Madrid.
But when he returned to Argentina he had left her behind.
lsabel's decision to bring the body back,
and reunite Evita with her husband,
provoked diehard Peronistas to fresh frenzies.
As Evita's body sped through the streets of the city
she had so dominated
it seemed that the force of her personality
was as strong as ever, even in death.
lt was strong enough to frighten the military junta which deposed lsabel.
They forbade any mention of Evita's name.
But the legend of Evita and Juan Peron
is too potent to be forgotten.