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Olympian View. For Juan Perón, such personal interventions have grown increasingly rare. Nowadays he prefers to cultivate an Olympian air that keeps him somewhat above the humdrum scene. When he steps forward, it may be for some such purpose as opening the Pan-American games, or announcing that an Argentine laboratory has produced atomic energy.
Perón still makes the decisions in Argentina, but now it is often Evita who follows through. In daily action the two of them constitute a smooth-working team whose wires seldom get crossed. Perón likes the role of the greathearted, affable male. He can afford to play it as long as he has Eva, who is equally at home in the role of the vengeful, bossy female. She draws the fire of cartoonists in neighboring countries (see cut). It is Evita, not her Juancito, who performs most of the hatchet work in Argentine officialdom. Evita, not Juan, slings great, vulgar sums of money around. Some people in -Argentina may be able to look upon Perón with a certain amount of detachment; nobody can be neutral about Evita.
The Good Angel. As Evita has moved in, she has surrounded the President more & more with her own men, most of them servile mediocrities ready to leap at her bidding. She gives daily orders to ministers, governors and Congressmen, patches up party squabbles, runs her own Peronista women's party (a potential 4,000,000 new votes), bosses the C.G.T., receives workers' delegations, inaugurates public institutions, and—three times a week at the Labor Ministry—dishes out sympathy, advice and loo-peso notes to the poor.
Along with these manifold activities, Evita runs her vast Social Aid Foundation. Before Evita, Argentine charity was_ the special preserve of Buenos Aires' aristocratic Sociedad de Beneficencia, whose honorary president was traditionally the President's wife. When the Beneficencia's haughty dowagers decided that Evita was not good enough, Evita set out to show them. In less than three years, the Beneficencia has vanished, while the organization that Evita founded with $2,092 of her own money has grown into the country's biggest single enterprise.
Though the Foundation's income from taxes, casino profits, company and union contributions and other sources now exceeds $100 million a year, Evita runs the enterprise as casually as a bride's personal checking account. She is not required to make any accounting, and operates a capricious charitable monopoly with strong overtones of propaganda. In Buenos Aires, she has a warehouse bulging with clothes, shoes and Peronista tracts for the deserving. On the theory that nothing is too good for the poor, she has built wastefully expensive homes for the aged, for working girls, for indigent mothers.
One prize exhibit is her model Children's Village, a compound of small-scale houses, villas, shops, a bank, school_, church and jail—plus luxurious dormitories, dining rooms and playrooms. In theory, 200 poor children from two to five live there and 800 more come in by the day. In fact, after almost two years, the place still has the air of a period living room preserved in a museum. After visiting the village, a diplomat's wife commented: "The wish fulfillment of a little girl who never had a doll house of her own."