Perón’s Argentina has parallels with the world
Eva Duarte (“Evita”) Perón: a note by Tony Leon, South African ambassador to Argentina from 2009 to 2012. I AM delighted my good friend Pieter Toerien is again staging a new version of the acclaimed musical opera Evita in South Africa.
Pieter has asked me to share some reflections on the brief life and extraordinary global and national impact of Eva Duarte Perón, known universally as Evita.
When I arrived in late 2009 to take up my post as South African ambassador in Buenos Aires, Evita Perón had been dead for more than 57 years.
She died in 1952 of cervical cancer, the diagnosis of which was hidden from her, at just 33.
Yet, the iconoclasm of Evita and her memory loomed over Argentinian politics and her country like a giant shadow.
The president of Argentina to whom I presented my credentials, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, saw herself as the political embodiment of Eva Perón.
Monuments, street demonstrations and much of the boisterous political discourse were refracted through the lens of Evita and her husband, Juan Domingo Perón – who served as president of Argentina in the late 1940s and early 1950s and again, briefly, in the mid-1970s.
When I wrote a memoir on my years in Argentina ( The Accidental Ambassador – from Parliament to Patagonia), I was vividly aware of the phantom the Peróns cast over the huge and wealthy but, in so many ways, unhappy Argentina, and so headlined the chapter on its politics “Vote for a Better Yesterday”.
But one of the reasons for the enduring popularity of the musical Evita is that in many ways the story of Eva Perón has some very modern and deep parallels for where both South Africa and the world find themselves in 2017.
Evita never held any formal title or high office, beyond first lady of Argentina. But she was in huge and consequential ways the rocket fuel which allowed her husband to orbit the political firmament of Argentina way above any of his contemporaries and, arguably, any of his successors.
Evita, in many ways, prefigured the rise of populism that we see all around us today. Decades before social media was invented, she used her fame in the most dominant medium of her age, as a radio star, to climb the ladder to social prominence and catch the eye of the thrusting army colonel Juan Perón, who she soon was to marry.
But it was her resentment against the circumstances of her birth – as the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy landowner, raised in poverty – which provided her political mission with passion and purpose.
In her ghosted autobiography, La Razón de Mi Vida (which had been prescribed to every schoolchild during the first Perón government of 1946-1955), Evita wrote: “And the strange thing is that the existence of the poor did not cause me as much pain as the knowledge that at the same time there were people who were rich.”
If populism today is defined as identifying one set of villains for a country’s problems (such as “white monopoly capital”) or simplistic solutions (such as “give back the land”), then in so many ways Evita was an early outlier of this brand of rhetoric.
Indeed there was much good that she did in her few years at the centre of power – rights for women and workers, charitable acts, and institutions targeting the most needy and destitute. But, like all populist movements, its current had a dark and dangerous undertow.
You will get a real sense of the negatives which Evita’s brand of politics created through the medium of the narrator in this musical, another famous Argentine, Che Guevara.
Nobel laureate VS Naipaul visited Argentina in 1974, and perfectly captured the “hate as hope” brand of politics perfected by the Peróns. When I read his short story on arriving in Argentina in 2009, I thought he also could have been describing some of the background noise of South Africa, then and today.
He wrote: “Eva Perón devoted her short political life to mocking the rich, the four hundred families who among them owned most of what was valuable in the million square miles of Argentina.
“She mocked and wounded them as they had wounded her; and her later unofficial sainthood (as ‘Santa Evita’) gave a touch of religion to her destructive cause… And in the
end that was why Argentina (in 1973) virtually united in calling Juan Perón back… He had become the quintessential Argentine: like Eva before him, like all Argentines, he was a victim.”
Of course, there is so much to enjoy in this spectacular show – the riveting music, captivating score, fine costumes, staging and our world-class actors.
But beyond the spectacle there are deep and sometimes disturbing lessons and parallels to draw from the very drama of Evita’s life itself.
Evita – The Musical will be staged at the Artscape theatre from December 1 to January 7. Book at Computicket.