This Day In Latino History

On this day in 1974, Isabel Martínez de Perón was sworn into the office of President of Argentina. This was because her husband, Juan Perón, 35 years her senior, was dying and she was the vice-President. Juan Perón was an interesting character, wasn’t he? He had a penchant for those unorthodox women. First Eva and then Isabel, who he met in Panama when he was in exile from the Presidency of Argentina and she was a a nightclub dancer. Heh. He moved her to Spain with him, but the Catholic powers that be did not approve, so he reluctantly married for a third time, and she became his go-between to Argentina. From dancer to diplomat, just like that.

But Isabel wasn’t like Eva. She had no political experience or aspirations and was really into the occult. She started hanging out with an occult “philosopher” and fortune teller named Jose Lopez Rega who, when her husband returned to the presidency in 1974,  she made Minister of Social Welfare. And when Juan Perón died 9 months later and Isabel assumed his office, it was Rega who set the agenda for much of her policy making. Which was when a lot of the trouble started. She gave him the green light to go on mass murdering sprees of their opponents through the infamous Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, a group that already had 300 murders under its belt when Rega and Perón hooked up with them. For her part, Isabel was content to alienate all of Argentina’s power brokers by hanging out, instead, with the likes of Muammar Qaddafi and the Shah of Iran. Perhaps it was the astrology she was consulting that led her to such ill-advised decisions. Either way, of course, she had to go.

On the evening of March 13, 1976, Perón was deposed and placed under house arrest, which lasted five years before she was finally allowed to flee to Spain. In 2007, she was charged by the Argentine government specifically with the disappearance of Héctor Aldo Fagetti Gallego on February 25, 1976, and more generally for signing into effect decrees calling to “annihilate … subversive elements throughout the country,” but–indicative of her charmed life–Spain refused to extradite her. She remains in Madrid still.