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After a week Perón is released from prison. The reason is a mass demonstration of workers on 17 October 1945 on the streets of Buenos Aires. This alarming display of popular support is orchestrated by Eva Duarte, an actress known to her public as Evita. A few days after Perón's release, he and Eva marry. They prove a formidable double act.

Perón stands in the 1946 election and narrowly wins it after a campaign in which the electorate is terrorized by groups of his supporting descamisados. Over the following years Perón uses such gangs of thugs, much as Mussolini used his Black Shirts, to secure his hold on the nation.
         









Perón's policies, unlike those of conventional military juntas, are left-wing. He nationalizes the banks and the railways, spends state money to speed up industrialization, and puts social welfare high among his priorities. The agency distributing benefits to the poor is administered by Eva. This public largesse gives her in the public's mind the status of an angel of mercy (after her death from cancer in 1952, at the age of thirty-free, there are numerous calls for the pope to canonize her).

Perón has been re-elected president in 1951, but without Eva at his side he begins to lose his populist touch. In particular, in 1954, he makes the fundamental error of launching a campaign against the Roman Catholic church.


Measures to secularize the nation's institutions are accompanied by descamisado attacks on church property and even on priests. In June 1955 Pius XII excommunicates all government officials who take action against the church.

These events greatly distress a devout population. Combined with increasing repression and a collapsing economy, they provide a natural setting for another military coup. In September 1955 units of the armed forces begin a 'liberating' campaign in the provinces. The navy and the airforce jointly threaten to attack Buenos Aires if Perón stays. The dictator recognizes the reality of the situation. He slips away to exile, first in Paraguay and then in Spain.
  

Perón has gone but not the Peronistas. He and Eva, with the promise of a more just society (in the social welfare programme which they call justicialismo) have been the first to mobilize the political passions of a vocal but previously unrepresented class, particularly in the cities. Perón and Evita become rallying cries for the left-wing opposition to each successive military or military-approved government after 1955.

Terrorism forms part of this opposition until, in 1973, the military decide to risk a different approach. Elections are held in that year and the Peronistas are allowed to participate. Perón himself is even allowed back from Spain for a brief visit.
         







The result is that the Peronista candidate, Héctor Cámpora, wins the presidential election. A month later Perón returns on a more permanent basis. Cámpora is forced to resign. In new elections in September 1973 Perón is once again elected president. His second wife, Isabel, is returned on the same ticket as his vice-president.

The policies of the old man, now seventy-seven, have veered in his exile from the left to the right of the political spectrum (from either viewpoint his disregard for civil liberties remains undiminished). But he has only nine months in office before he dies of a heart attack. His widow Isabel succeeds him in the presidency.

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