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| Juan and Eva at the height of their power |
The famous
stage musical Evita features, among
other historic characters, Juan Domingo Perón. In it, he is portrayed as a weak,
self-doubting, and confused army officer subject to the will of a sexually powerful
and monumentally ambitious soap opera actress, who goads him with her sharp demands
that he be a MAN. Perón plays Adam to
Eva Duarte’s…well, Eve. This is the Perón
most English-speaking people know.
The facts of
Perón’s life belie this characterization.
In actuality, when he and Evita met, Perón was the powerful one and Eva,
though desperate for success, was only newly arrived from grinding poverty and
nearly total rejection by the entertainment industry of her childhood dreams.
Perón, on the
other hand, grew up with many more opportunities than Eva ever had. He was from a Buenos Aires Spanish-Sardinian immigrant
family, got a good education, and found power in the Army. His paternal grandfather was a prosperous physician;
his father a fairly successful sheep farmer. At the age of nine he was sent to boarding
school and after graduating, joined the military. He became an instructor in military history
at the Superior War College and even published several treatises on the subject. Eventually, he was sent as a military attaché
to Chile, and in a life changing assignment, posted as a military observer to
Italy, Germany, and Spain.
In Europe he
learned from masters how a leader might manipulate the populace. In Rome, he admired the pageantry of Italian
fascism and saw firsthand the crowds in the piazzas, chanting, “Duce. Duce.”
In Berlin,
he stood in the Lustgarten and heard Der Fuhrer harangue a vast mob of
delirious Germans, who then shouted, “Sieg heil. Sieg heil.”
Such power,
such adulation became the stuff of Perón’s dreams.
So
where does refrigeration come into it?
Let’s go back in time and find out.
In the 19th Century, Argentina’s main export was beef. Huge numbers of cattle were raised on the plains
of the Pampas, herded to the port of Buenos Aires, and shipped to Europe—beef on
the hoof. Then, engineers began to
figure out how meat could be kept frozen aboard sailing ships. In 1882, for the first time, a shipment of
meat from New Zealand arrived in London still frozen and turned a profit for
the company involved. By 1895, the year
of Perón’s birth, slaughtering the beasts, packing the meat, and shipping it on
refrigerated ships became the great new technology. Reefer ships plied international waters (NO,
not those kinds of reefers. This “reefer” was short for refrigeration), and Buenos Aires began to change its way of doing
business with the beefeaters of Europe.
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| The first ship to successfully transport refrigerated meat |
Like
all big technological advances, the advent of reefer ships caused profound social
changes. Before refrigeration, there
were two very different Argentinas: Buenos Aires, the port city of white people—original
Spanish settlers and then vast numbers of European immigrants who came as
skilled workers to build elegant buildings and manufacture shoes and textiles. The other was a vast plain, owned by a few
families and occupied by brown South American Indians who herded cattle and eked
out what existence they could in the largely desolate countryside.
Suddenly,
though, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, there were jobs for
unskilled people at the port—in slaughter houses and meat-packing plants. Hundreds of thousands from the interior came
to Buenos Aires in search of work. They
found nasty, difficult job, only hovels to live in, and next to nothing in the way
of social services. Their employers
ignored their needs and created fertile ground for Perón on his path to power.
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President Farrell and Peron
before his was deposed |
Back
in Argentina from his tuition-free education in European populist politics,
Perón became part of a military government.
He held three positions: two very prestigious—Vice President and
Minister of War. The third was a post no
one thought at all important—Secretary of Labor. But Juan Domingo knew better. That rather distained job became the fulcrum he
used to lift himself. He used it to pass
regulations requiring better wages for the low-level workers who were doing the
beef industry’s dirty work in dreadful slums on the periphery of the “Paris
of the South.” He made sure they got
vacations and health insurance. He was the
only person in power who gave a fig about them.
And they knew it. He saw to it
that they did.
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The workers' demonstration at the Casa Rosada,
17 October 1945 |
When
chaos broke out after the end of World War II, with crowds demanding the end of
the military regime, Perón became the target of those demands. All those middle class white people demonstrating
the plazas and along the avenidas,
whether from the left or the right, called for his downfall. In an attempt to quell the tumult, his fellow
officers in the junta deposed him. Their
sop to the populace backfired. The next
thing they knew, all those little brown men from the fringes of the city were
in the center, right in front of their elegant Casa Rosada. And they were chanting—just like those crowds
in Rome and Berlin. But they were shouting
the name of their only benefactor: “Perón.
Perón.”
