Juan Perón

The Life of the People's Colonel

Jill Hedges

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755602681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Within Argentina, Juan Domingo Perón continues to be the subject of exaggerated and diametrically opposed views. A dictator, a great leader, the hero of the working classes and Argentina's "first worker"; a weak and spineless man dependent on his strongerwilled wife; a Latin American visionary; a traitor, responsible for dragging Argentina into a modern, socially just 20th century society or, conversely, destroying for all time a prosperous nation and fomenting class war and unreasonable aspirations among his client base.
Outside Argentina, Perón remains overshadowed by his second wife, Evita. The life of this fascinating and unusual man, whose charisma, political influence and controversial nature continue to generate interest, remains somewhat of a mystery to the rest of the world. Perón remains a key figure in Argentine politics, still able to occupy so much of the political spectrum as to constrain the development of viable alternatives. Jill Hedges explores the life and personality of Perón and asks why he remains a political icon despite the 'negatives' associated with his extreme personalism.

Chapter 1

A BRIEF CHILDHOOD

Dónde estará mi arrabal? Quién se robó mi niñez?

Where has my old neighbourhood gone? Who stole my childhood?

Tinta roja (tango), Cátulo Castillo and Sebastián Piana¹

Founded in 1802 in the environs of a fort constructed in 1779, the town of Lobos, Buenos Aires province, lies around 100 kilometres southwest of the city of Buenos Aires (and around 65 kilometres from Ezeiza airport). The fort, constructed at a time when settled ranching was beginning to supplant wild cattle hunts in the Pampas area, was one of a series of similar installations designed to keep hostile Indians at bay and was staffed by cavalry militias known as blandengues, later incorporated into the army post-independence. It was built close to the Laguna de Lobos, a large lagoon given its name by a Jesuit mission that visited a few years earlier, apparently owing to its large population of otters (known as water wolves, or lobos de agua). By 1871 the railway line had reached Lobos, by then a centre of well-established cattle ranching. Three years later, Lobos came to prominence following the killing there of Juan Moreira, a famous gaucho-turned-outlaw, who is buried in the cemetery there and who would come to play a further supporting role in the early years of Juan Domingo Perón.

With a modern population of around 31,000, the town of Lobos is a popular weekend destination for fishing, as well as its aerodrome, rural activities, camping facilities and restaurants. Its other key tourist attractions include a natural history museum and a second museum, located at 482 President Perón Street and billed as the birthplace of Juan Domingo Perón, on 8 October 1895. The house contains a fairly modest collection of Perón’s belongings, most of them from his adulthood, including some furniture donated by his widow, as well as the skull of Juan Moreira. However, like the so-called birthplace of Eva Perón in Los Toldos, around 180 kilometres to the west, this is a misnomer. As Perón would later say, the house was that ‘of my early years, where I crawled, where I started to take my first steps, but certainly did not see my birth, because that happened in Roque Pérez, Saladillo district’.² (Unhelpfully, if typically, at other times Perón would just as vigorously assert that ‘I was born in Lobos, when my brother Mario was already four years old’ – i.e. in 1895.³)

Located some 30 kilometres south of Lobos, Roque Pérez, currently a town of around 11,000 inhabitants, was and is a backwater, although the area was important enough to the agricultural export sector for the railway to arrive in 1884. The town also boasts another ‘birthplace of Juan Domingo Perón’, this one with a greater claim to have seen his birth, though on 7 October 1893. It is a modest adobe house with a corrugated tin roof and stone floors, not dissimilar to Evita’s childhood home in Los Toldos, and also sparsely stocked for a museum. (The Roque Pérez house, which at the time of Perón’s birth was registered in his mother’s name, was declared of historical interest as his birthplace in 1996.) The key question is perhaps why the confusion over Perón’s date and place of birth has persisted, although it is not out of keeping with the facts of the rest of his life, which are often strangely elusive.

Perón was the second son of Mario Tomás Perón and Juana Sosa Toledo; Mario Avelino had been born in 1891 in Lobos at his mother’s home there and was recorded in the civil registry of Lobos as the ‘natural’ son of Juana Sosa, aged seventeen and single. In effect, Mario and Juana were not married and would not marry until 1901, when their sons were already eight and ten; Juan Domingo was baptized in Lobos as Juan Domingo Sosa, the natural son of Juana Sosa, although he received his father’s legal recognition and surname on his parents’ marriage. Perón would later claim that his baptism certificate correctly stated his date of birth as 7 October 1893 but had ‘accidentally’ been damaged and rendered illegible. (It is not entirely clear who purportedly caused the ‘accident’, but it is notable that documents relating to key life events of both Perón and Evita proved remarkably accident-prone over the years.) While uncertain, it is possible that the document may have been rendered illegible in order to facilitate Perón’s entry into the military academy, where proof of his illegitimacy would likely have disqualified him.⁴

For whatever reason, his father did not go to the registry office in Lobos to record his birth for two years; certainly it was not to conceal Juan Domingo’s illegitimate status given that his parents did not marry for a further six years. In light of Mario’s somewhat lackadaisical attitudes in many areas of his life, it may not have seemed important, or he may have begrudged the little money the trip would cost. Perón may have been correct in later years when he said that it was not seen as urgent given his robust state of health; Mario Avelino’s more precarious health had made it expedient to register his birth in case it soon became necessary to register his death. In any case, when asked by the registrar when his son had been born Mario apparently said ‘yesterday’, prompting the birth record giving a date of 8 October 1895.

The reason for having registered Juan Domingo in Lobos may have been quite straightforward: at the time Roque Pérez had no registry office, and births should have been registered in the district seat of Saladillo, substantially further away than Lobos. Moreover, Mario had work in Lobos and visited it fairly regularly, with registered domiciles in both Roque Pérez and Lobos, while Juana’s family continued to live there. Although the reasons for the two-year delay are less certain, Mario may also have had a logical reason for claiming that his son had been born the day before: having delayed the birth registration far beyond the legal deadline of three days, he could have been subject to a stiff fine.

Mario and Juana came from substantially different ends of the social spectrum, in a country that lacked an aristocracy but already maintained considerable class snobbishness over who came from the criollo oligarchy, the merchant middle classes, the immigrant communities (themselves divided among the northern European, often British, immigrants who worked with the railways or utilities and the southern European, darker-skinned migrant labourers) or descended from indigenous groups. Although the oligarchy might look down on the expanding and politically ever-more-demanding middle classes, Argentina already had a reputation as a country where people could work hard for a better life and see their sons exceed them in social standing and prosperity (‘my son the doctor’ was a popular phrase, especially among immigrants).

In this respect, Perón’s grandfather Tomás Liberato was a success story, even if his grandson may have exaggerated his achievements as he exaggerated his own. Born in 1839 to an Italian father and a British mother, Tomás Liberato Perón Hughes studied medicine and gained a respectable standing in Buenos Aires society as a doctor and chemistry teacher. He married an Uruguayan widow of French Basque descent, Dominga Dutey (or Duteil), who already had two daughters, Vicenta and Baldomera Martirena; Tomás and Dominga would have three sons, Mario, Tomás and Alberto. Perón would later claim that his grandfather had fought in the key battle of Pavón in 1861, which saw the reincorporation of the secessionist Buenos Aires into the new Argentine Republic under President Bartolomé Mitre, leader of the victorious side. He would also say that his grandfather served as a senator, an envoy in France and president of the National Health Department. Certainly he served as a provincial legislator in Buenos Aires province and owned a property in Ramos Mejía, an area home to many of the well-to-do, notably those of British descent, and now part of Greater Buenos Aires.

Tomás Liberato’s upward trajectory was not copied by his eldest son, Mario, who made a vague attempt at studying medicine before going to Lobos to work as overseer at the La Porteña ranch, owned by a colleague of his father, Dr Eulogio del Mármol. Mario also officiated as justice of the peace in Lobos and in Roque Pérez, where he met the adolescent servant Juana Sosa. (Del Mármol, for whatever reason, was in possession of the skull of Juan Moreira and gave it to the Perón family, where it would become a somewhat macabre plaything for Juan Domingo during his childhood.)

Unlike Mario, whose inherited respectable standing gave him his employment as overseer and justice of the peace, Juana was of full or part indigenous ancestry on both sides; her father may have come from the northern Santiago del Estero province, while her mother’s family, the Toledos, were established in the Lobos area and were reportedly of Tehuelche origin. (During the nineteenth century, most notably following the so-called Conquest of the Desert in Patagonia in the late 1870s, many indigenous people from the south were transported to Buenos Aires province, including Lobos and Los Toldos.) Photos of her both as a young woman and in old age show an attractive woman of warmth and apparently strong character. After Mario Avelino was born, Juana and Mario set up home together in Roque Pérez, where she gave birth to Juan Domingo, although Mario was footloose and often away from home, frequently staying in his mother’s home in Buenos Aires. (His father, Tomás Liberato, had died of tuberculosis in 1889, apparently contracted from a patient.) Some time later they seemingly spent some time in Lobos, where Mario continued his functions as justice of the peace, and it is possible that they lived for a time in the house later identified as Perón’s birthplace (despite the fact that the house was not constructed until 1894, the year after his real birth date, and was owned and occupied uninterruptedly by the Moore family from 1894 until it was expropriated in 1953 due to its ‘historical significance’ and turned into a museum and library). While the circumstances are unclear, it has been suggested that Juana and her younger son may have stayed in the house while she acted as wet nurse to Moore’s wife, who was Del Mármol’s daughter. Thus, Perón’s later claim that he had ‘taken his first steps there’ and the reason why the house might have been chosen as his ‘birthplace’ years later, to maintain the secrecy surrounding his illegitimacy and ethnic origins.⁵

There seems to have been no contemporary doubt as to the children’s illegitimacy; Juan Domingo was known locally as Juancito Sosa and the neighbours called him Sosita. However, with relatively few people of exceptional social status in Roque Pérez (indeed, Mario would have been one of the more respected as a justice of the peace), there seems to have been little prejudice against the children for their ‘natural’ status or mixed ethnicity.

Although during most of his public life Perón would make little reference to his mother or her ethnicity, later in life he would speak of her in suspiciously glowing terms (given what is known about their relationship) and also her indigenous origins, noting that his background was the archetype of the ‘overused phrase “melting pot” …. My family did not escape the norm. The Old World’s ancestral culture mixes with local passions.’⁶ The convenience of tying his origins in so neatly with those of the country as a whole is clear and self-serving, as is his observation that his government had passed a law giving ‘natural’ children the same rights as legitimate ones. Nevertheless, his defence late in life of women discriminated against ‘when in reality their only sin was the courage to be single mothers’ while ‘the father was exonerated of all guilt and the son found the doors to his future closed’, if perhaps containing a note of self-pity, was lucid and ahead of its time.⁷ Perón would also note that he was aware of ‘the existence of a cultural clash within [his] own family, a fact that could probably be extended to Argentine society as a whole’.⁸

Curiously, conflicting versions of Juana Sosa’s origins appear to be equally designed to highlight Perón’s ‘Argentineness’. While Hipólito Barreiro would insist that Juana was full-blooded Tehuelche, Ignacio Martín Cloppet would claim that she had Spanish ancestry that could be traced back to the Conquest. Given how few Argentines are of purely indigenous ancestry, the suggestion that Juana had both indigenous and Spanish origins is highly likely. Yet both versions seek to underscore Perón’s claim to being an authentic Argentine caudillo; Barreiro celebrates the fact that he did not take after his father’s fair-skinned and ‘foreign’ family, while Cloppet (who also treats Mario somewhat offhandedly) attempts to highlight Perón’s ancestral links to the ‘Cross and the Sword’ of the Conquest – the Catholic and Hispanic heritage that tied him to a nation with pretentions, at least in some quarters, to inherit the mantle of Catholic, Hispanic leadership in Latin America.⁹

In 1901 Juana formally ceased to be a single mother, apparently at the behest of Mario’s mother Dominga, who had learned that her son had a concubine and two small children. Mario and Juana married at a registry office in Buenos Aires on 25 September of that year, and Mario gave legal recognition to his sons. However, this did little to strengthen the family bond. Mario continued to travel and Juana continued to work outside the home, leaving her children in Lobos to the care of relatives. Juana in particular was charged with looking after the family’s sheep, due to Mario’s still delicate health and frequent absences, and was known as a hard worker and a fearless horsewoman.

The situation would only worsen after Mario, who according to his son felt that Lobos was becoming too urban for his liking, decided to move the family to the distant southern Patagonia region where he proposed to take up management of a remote sheep ranch. While the trek was in preparation, Juan Domingo and Mario Avelino would be left in Buenos Aires in their grandmother’s house, where seemingly their father’s errant ways, their illegitimate birth and the origins of their mother made them the subject of some scorn and isolation. Buenos Aires itself, already a modern city of some 660,000 with a thriving port, railways, museums, theatres, railways, trams, gas and electricity, shops, factories and a sharp divide between the elites and poor workers crowded into tenement housing, must have been intimidating for two small boys from a rural village, in particular when they were not especially well regarded even in the family home. By his own later accounts, Juan Domingo greatly missed his life of liberty in Roque Pérez, spent on horseback and in the company of the rural workers, notably his friend Don Sixto Magallares (‘el Chino’), who taught him to ride.

A year later, Juana and Mario returned for their sons and the family began the lengthy voyage to Patagonia. Arriving in Puerto Camarones, some 1,600 kilometres from Buenos Aires, in what was then the territory of Chubut, the family moved to the La Maciega ranch where Mario was to act as overseer. However, the property was sold a short time later and in 1902 Mario would take his family 1,000 kilometres further south, to the Chank-Aike sheep ranch in the territory of Santa Cruz. The area is still only sparsely populated today; at the turn of the last century, with minimal communications and a bitterly harsh climate, it must have seemed the end of the earth.

Although Perón would later tell the writer Tomás Eloy Martínez that his father had installed all the creature comforts at Chank-Aike, a former inhabitant of the area told that author that the Perón family lived in a corrugated metal house with wooden panels within, in a climate where temperatures below –20 were normal in winter.¹⁰ Perón would also idealize his time there as a childhood of great liberty, in which he and his brother rode horses, hunted with dogs and went out to work with the labourers, most of them Chileans, some of whom would also be charged with acting as his early tutors and would teach him that ‘it is better to learn good things than to learn a lot’.¹¹ He would later describe them, and the workers they had known in Lobos and at La Maciega, as ‘magnificent people’ and ‘like family’, ‘in their infinite humility there was a greatness that I had difficulty finding later in more evolved people’.¹² To this he would attribute his early efforts to improve the lot of rural workers when he came to power some forty years later. For the child, the workers, horses and dogs were his earliest friends and teachers; he would retain a lifelong love of dogs and a respect for their intelligence and loyalty that he rarely displayed in the case of human beings. (Despite his praise for the sheepdogs and greyhounds of his youth, in later life his great predilection was for poodles, of which he always had several – a somewhat counterintuitive choice for the leader of such a machista society and a person so proud of his manly fortitude.) His mother would also ride out with them all day to hunt guanacos, a physically and mentally dauntless figure. One of the few women in that frontier area, she ran both the home and many of the ranch’s activities, did all the cooking for the workers, hunted, and acted as nurse and as midwife on occasion.

Perón would also note, perhaps not entirely accurately, the influence his father had on his early life and thinking, describing him as severe and austere but also humane and decent towards his workers and the indigenous inhabitants of the area who had survived the Conquest of the Desert and the banishment of many family groups to other parts of the country. (The so-called Conquest of the Desert, led by General and later President Julio Roca, in 1879, had largely decimated the indigenous and Chilean migrant population in Patagonia, opening up some 8 million hectares of land that, as had happened earlier in the Pampas region, were largely distributed among a small group of landholders numb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction BACK TO THE FUTURE
• Chapter 1 A BRIEF CHILDHOOD
• Chapter 2 THE ARMY
• Chapter 3 POTOTA AND POLITICS
• Chapter 4 TURNING POINT?
• Chapter 5 IN THE ASCENDANT
• Chapter 6 SAN JUAN
• Chapter 7 SAN PERÓN
• Chapter 8 CANDIDATE
• Chapter 9 EARLY DAYS
• Chapter 10 IF I DEFINE, I EXCLUDE
• Chapter 11 AT THE PINNACLE
• Chapter 12 DECLINE AND FALL
• Chapter 13 ISABEL
• Chapter 14 UNSETTLED EXILE
• Chapter 15 MADRID
• Chapter 16 RETURN
• Chapter 17 THE MOST MARVELLOUS MUSIC
• Chapter 18 LEGACY
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint