Beloved by millions and detested by the elites, Argentine President Juan Perón’s second wife, Eva Perón, better known as Evita, won the hearts of Argentina’s working class and became known worldwide for her rags-to-riches story and untimely death. But government secrecy, memoirs of dubious origins, and stories melding fact and fiction have shrouded many of the details of her life in mystery. Here are eight true facts about Evita’s life, both before and after her death.
1. Eva’s Family Was Her Father’s Secret Second Family
Born in 1919 in Los Toldos, Evita, as she would come to be known, was the illegitimate daughter of Juan Duarte. Evita herself went to some lengths to obscure some of the circumstances around her birth and childhood, allegedly forging her birth certificate to read “María Eva Duarte,” in contrast with her baptismal certificate, which listed her name as Eva María Ibarguren. Nonetheless, she could not conceal that at that time, Duarte was a wealthy—and married—landowner who already had a wife and children in Chivilcoy. Evita and the other four children he had with Evita’s mother, Juana Ibarguren, who worked on one of his estates as a cook, were a second family, part of his double life.
After his death in a car accident a few years later, Evita’s family fell into poverty. Though Duarte had legally recognized his children, they received no further financial support from his estate—and caused something of a scandal when they showed up at his funeral. They subsisted on the meager income Evita’s mother took in from sewing and that the girls could earn serving on local estancias (farms) and were largely ostracized due to the children’s illegitimacy, a resentment that plagued Evita throughout her life.
2. Her Hair Was Naturally Black
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Sign up to our Free Weekly NewsletterWhile Evita was famous for her golden, nearly white locks, she wasn’t a natural blonde, and her signature hair color and style were part of a makeover she undertook after her career trajectory changed.
Childhood photos show Evita with dark hair, and photos of her as a young actress in Buenos Aires feature a brunette sporting glamorous 1940s Hollywood hairstyles. After she became involved with Perón and his political ambitions, her style began to shift, starting with the adoption of her signature bright blonde hair color. She moved away from the flashy dresses of her acting days, adopting a more reserved—but still high-end—wardrobe marked by furs and Christian Dior gowns, and abandoned the complicated victory rolls for a classic chignon. Though some would question her decision to adopt luxury while laboring for Argentina’s less fortunate, she famously commented, “The poor like to see me beautiful: they don’t want to be protected by a badly dressed old hag.”
3. She Was a Star of the Airwaves
At age 15, Evita moved to Buenos Aires to pursue an acting career. While she had limited success on stage and screen, she ultimately made quite a splash on the radio. In an era when televisions still hadn’t made it into every home, radio soap operas were quite popular. In 1942, she was hired for a daily role on a radio drama broadcast on the country’s largest radio station. She went on to sign a five-year contract with Radio Belgrano and played several parts in its popular drama Great Women of History. By 1943, she was one of the country’s highest-paid radio actresses.
Her profile was high enough that, after a 1944 earthquake in San Juan, she was invited with other entertainers to raise money for victims through a festival organized by then-Labor Minister Juan Perón. The festival culminated in a gala, where Evita and Perón first met. He claims she reportedly told him, “Thank you for existing.” The rest, as they say, is history.
4. She Wasn’t a Feminist
While she has long been associated with early victories for women’s empowerment in Argentina, Evita did not consider herself a feminist—and spoke disparagingly about the country’s feminist movement.
In her own words, “Everything I knew about feminism seemed to me ridiculous. For, not led by women but by those who aspired to be men, it ceased to be womanly and was nothing: feminism had taken the step from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Despite her obvious distaste for the concept of feminism as it took shape in Argentina at that time, she did support some causes that are generally considered feminist, namely women’s suffrage. Whether she truly believed in women’s right to vote or was simply spearheading a drive that would ultimately garner more votes for her husband is a matter of debate, but she campaigned extensively for the cause. Once suffrage was achieved, Evita then organized the newly enfranchised women of Argentina into the Women’s Peronist Party.
5. She Was Almost Vice President
As First Lady, Evita labored tirelessly for Argentina’s descamisados (shirtless ones), the working poor. She earned their devotion—so much so that when her husband’s second term as president was approaching, Perón considered her a candidate for the vice presidency. People turned out in droves, begging her to become his running mate officially, but she ultimately gave a tearful speech renouncing her candidacy—and the true reason is lost to history.
Some scholars argue that Perón was jealous of her popularity and didn’t want a running mate who would outshine him; others suggest the military’s disapproval, appalled at the idea of Evita becoming president should Perón die, turned the president against her.
Another group of researchers believes that her health was already failing—that she was in far worse shape than the public knew—and this prevented her from accepting the role. Whatever the reason, when Perón was reelected in 1951, she had no official position in his government, and by the time he was inaugurated, she could no longer stand on her own. The highest “office” she attained was Spiritual Leader of the Nation, announced in May 1952 as her health was declining rapidly.
6. She Was Lobotomized
As Evita was dying of cervical cancer, ironically the same illness that had killed Perón’s first wife, her diagnosis was kept secret from the public—as well as from Evita herself. Though she knew she was sick, her exact diagnosis was never revealed to her. In the course of her treatment, she underwent a radical hysterectomy and chemotherapy, as well as a more controversial procedure: a lobotomy.
When evidence of the lobotomy first came to light, the explanation was that it was performed to ease pain. More recent scholarship, however, suggests it was actually done in the hopes of managing Evita’s increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior. As her health failed, she became obsessed with her and Perón’s perceived enemies, going so far as to order arms and ammunition to equip trade unions and militias secretly being trained by loyalists.
Did Perón hope to prevent a civil war by using the controversial procedure to tame his outspoken wife? With all parties long dead, the truth may never be known, but whatever the justification, the surgery was performed—without her consent—in a makeshift operating room in the palace in June 1952. It only hastened her decline; after the procedure, she stopped eating. Evita died on July 26, 1952.
7. Her Body Was Stolen
The death of the nation’s spiritual leader plunged Argentina into a period of mourning. Great care was taken to embalm her body, which, after fourteen days of funeral celebrations that reportedly left Argentina completely devoid of flowers, was transported to the headquarters of the country’s largest trade union, its planned final resting place.
Three years later, Perón was ousted in a military coup. Great pains were taken to try to erase Peronism from the country—including Evita, who by this time was viewed by many as a martyr for the people. Evita’s body disappeared. It was stolen from the union headquarters in the middle of the night, and its whereabouts were unknown for decades.
Complicating matters, author and scholar Tomás Eloy Martinez wrote a fictional account of the adventures of Evita’s embalmed corpse, Santa Evita (Saint Evita), published in 1995, and in the years since, fact and fiction have intermingled in the public sphere. For example, it is often claimed that candles and flowers appeared wherever the Argentine military tried to hide Evita’s body—is this true, or simply a bit of fiction that has been misremembered in the public imagination?
While her exact whereabouts were uncertain for several years after her disappearance—angering her millions of adoring fans and turning her into a symbol of the resistance—by 1957, evidence indicates that the Vatican assisted the new Argentine government in transporting Evita’s body to Italy and burying it under a false name. It remained there until the 1970s, when it was finally returned to Perón himself, living in exile in Spain. After Perón and his third wife returned to Argentina, ruling briefly as president and vice president, Evita’s body was brought back to the country and ultimately buried in her family’s crypt—after yet another military coup in 1976.
8. There’s a Campaign for Her Sainthood
Santa Evita may be a work of fiction, but there is a very real campaign to have Evita recognized as a saint by the Catholic Church.
Even before her passing, the Vatican was receiving letters calling for her canonization. Shortly after her death, Argentina’s Union of Newspaper Sellers sent the first request to the Holy See to open a sainthood cause for Evita, but it was swiftly rejected. More recently, in 2019, Argentina’s General Confederation of Labor submitted a similar request: “Saints show us paths to reach Christ and intercede before God for us. In our homeland, one generation after another continues to be converted by the humanist and Christian message of the standard bearer of the humble.”
While the Church is exceptionally unlikely to consider such a request, Evita was and is already regarded as a saint by many. Her ministry to the poor and the sick, as well as her self-sacrifice, continuing her social justice work as she was dying of cancer, led many to call her “Santa Evita” even before her death.
Eloy Martinez attests to seeing altars honoring Evita set up in homes, prayed to like the traditional saints. A poster of Evita titled “Eva Santa del Pueblo” (Eva, Saint of the People) hangs in an Argentine labor union’s headquarters. No formal title is necessary for millions of Argentines who saw and still see Eva Perón as their guardian angel.
