Word: evita
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...still makes the decisions in Argentina, but now it is often Evita who follows through. In daily action the two of them constitute a smooth-working team whose wires seldom get crossed. Perón likes the role of the greathearted, affable male. He can afford to play it as long as he has Eva, who is equally at home in the role of the vengeful, bossy female. She draws the fire of cartoonists in neighboring countries (see cut). It is Evita, not her Juancito, who performs most of the hatchet work in Argentine officialdom. Evita, not Juan, slings great...
...Good Angel. As Evita has moved in, she has surrounded the President more & more with her own men, most of them servile mediocrities ready to leap at her bidding. She gives daily orders to ministers, governors and Congressmen, patches up party squabbles, runs her own Peronista women's party (a potential 4,000,000 new votes), bosses the C.G.T., receives workers' delegations, inaugurates public institutions, and-three times a week at the Labor Ministry-dishes out sympathy, advice and loo-peso notes to the poor...
Along with these manifold activities, Evita runs her vast Social Aid Foundation. Before Evita, Argentine charity was_ the special preserve of Buenos Aires' aristocratic Sociedad de Beneficencia, whose honorary president was traditionally the President's wife. When the Beneficencia's haughty dowagers decided that Evita was not good enough, Evita set out to show them. In less than three years, the Beneficencia has vanished, while the organization that Evita founded with $2,092 of her own money has grown into the country's biggest single enterprise...
Though the Foundation's income from taxes, casino profits, company and union contributions and other sources now exceeds $100 million a year, Evita runs the enterprise as casually as a bride's personal checking account. She is not required to make any accounting, and operates a capricious charitable monopoly with strong overtones of propaganda. In Buenos Aires, she has a warehouse bulging with clothes, shoes and Peronista tracts for the deserving. On the theory that nothing is too good for the poor, she has built wastefully expensive homes for the aged, for working girls, for indigent mothers...
When Juan Perón inaugurated the village, he praised it so highly that tears welled in Evita's eyes. The strapping President stopped his speech to kiss her. "These two tears," he said, "point to the great merit in this work, namely, human emotion." Emotion unquestionably moves Senñra Perón. But it is equally true that ( she is one of the country's biggest property holders, the boss of six Buenos Aires newspapers, the radio station El Mundo, and at least two manufacturing plants. It is commonly believed in Buenos Aires that these properties...