Eva was the second wife of Argentine president Juan Per�n. While in her husband's first term as president (from 1946 to 1952), she developed as an effectual yet unofficial political figure and leader, adored by the masses of the lower economic class.

Her life as a young girl was harsh; she came from a poor family that lived the northwestern town of Jun�n. She stayed there until she was 14, eventually leaving in search of fame and fortune in the big cities, in an attempt to attain her dream of being an actress. After an unremarkable career as a stage and radio actress, Eva Duarte married Colonel Juan Per�n, who was a widower at the time, in 1945. Gradually, she won the adoration of the masses while participating in her husband's 1945 to 1946 presidential campaign. She acknowledged this poor class of people and named them los descamisados (Translated in Spanish: "the shirtless ones").

In spite of the fact that she never had any official government position, Evita performed as minister of health and labor by choice of the public. She bestowed benevolent wage increases to the unions, who in return, responded with overwhelming political support for Per�n. Evita made many more enemies among the established elite, by cutting off government funding to the conventional Sociedad de Beneficencia (Spanish: "Aid Society") and replacing it with her own Eva Per�n Foundation, which was maintained by supposedly "voluntary" union and business donations including a considerable part of the national lottery and other funds. These collected revenues were allocated to create thousands of schools, hospitals, orphanages, homes for the old people, and other altruistic establishments. Evita was mostly accountable for the admission of the woman suffrage law. She later created the Peronista Feminist Party in 1949. At the same time, she also instituted mandatory religious education into all Argentine schools. In 1951, she obtained the nomination for vice president, regardless that she had known herself to be dying of uterine cancer. However the army forced her to withdraw her candidacy later.

The story of what happened to Eva's body after death is almost as fascinating as her life. It is the subject of a recent book, Santa Evita, by Tomas Eloy Martinez, which I have a copy of, but haven't had a chance to finish yet. Once I do, more information will be added here. In the meantime, I'll just include the information found in the Evita programme:

Eva was only 33 years old when she died of cancer at 8:25 PM on July 26, 1952. Her brief life took her from the slums of Buenos Aires to the presidential mansion.

When Evita's immaculately preserved body (the elaborate embalming process took months to complete) was placed on display, 16 people were crushed by hysterical throngs eager to get a last glimpse of their beloved first lady. Another 4,000 persons were treated for injuries in Buenos Aires hospitals, and a 20-block, four-abreast line formed for days and had to be fed by an army field kitchen.

After the funeral in early August, the corpse was moved to the Confederation of Labor headquarters, where it remained for three years, while government officials worked out plans for a monument as huge as the Statue of Liberty. But when the military overthrew Per�n in 1955, a lieutenant colonel with a squad of soldiers seized the building and removed the body, fearful that the Peronistas would snatch it for a totem to rally behind.

Concealed in a plain box, Evita's body was taken in an army truck to a marine base where the truch remained for a day before the commandant discovered its contents and nervously ordered it removed from his jurisdiction.

For lack of a better destination, the truck was simply parked on a street in downtown Buenos Aires. It was Christmas Eve, but the grisly Christmas package was left unopened.

The body was next loaded into a crate marked "radio equipment" and stashed in the office of the army's information chief until he was transferred in June 1956. The crate disappeared, its whereabouts known to onl a few military officers.

In the late 1960's, Argentine journalist Tomas Eloy Martinez learned the closely guarded secret: Evita's body had been sent to Bonn as part of an Argentine military attache's household effects and was buried either in the embassy basement of in the garden of the ambassador's residence.

Martinez and a diplomat did some digging - literally - on the embassy property. But they were too late. The body had already been moved and reburied under a false name in a cemetery in Milan, Italy.

After negotiations with Per�n, who was living in exile in Madrid with his third wife, Isabel, Evita's body was turned over to the Per�ns on September 23, 1971.

The coffin was usually kept in an upstairs room, though visitors sometimes saw it on the dining room table. According to one fascinating report, Per�n's private secretary, Jose Lopez Rega, an astrologer and spiritualist, encouraged Isabel to lie on the coffin to soak up Evita's magic vibrations - while Lopez chanted incantations.

Per�n returned to power in 1973, and after Isabel succeeded him the next year, she brought Evita's coffin back home and put it on display in a Buenos Aires suburb. But the magic proved non-transferrable.

A military junta overthrew Isabel in 1976 and Evita's itinerant corpse was quietly turned over to her two sisters the next year. It now lies in a family crypt in the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires.