The removal of his body with the seal of the army

The Spanish doctor Pedro Ara Sarriá I had embalmed Eve after his death on July 26, 1952. He had worked forty months on his body in a laboratory installed at the headquarters of the CGT. He had removed the grimace of facial pain caused by cancer. The corpse looked like a wax sculpture. Evita was his job.

The truth is that the dark journey of his body began on the night of November 22, 1955, when, on the direct order of the Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, an order of sailors under Lieutenant Colonel Carlos de Moori Koenig He broke into the building of the CGT, upset the bust of To avoid it was on the first floor and with arms forced the door of the chapel to the second floor.

The they burned the Argentine flags arranged on the corpse and urinated on the samebefore taking it. For three days, the body visited different parts of the city, so as not to arouse suspicion, inside a van.

Several destinations

The corpse of Eve He stayed in this truck for several months and wandered in different streets, in military depots and even in the house of an officer because moori Koenig, that belonged to Intelligence Service of the Armyhe put the coffin in his office, with the corpse upright.

The next order from Aramburu was to entrust the colonel Hector Cabanillas to bury the body secretly. The fact became known as the Transfer operation and was designed by the then-lieutenant-colonel – then by the de facto president Alejandro Agustín Lanusse, with the help of the priest Francisco Paco Rotger, who was responsible for making the complicity of the Church.

IN ADDITION:

Eva Duarte and Juan Perón: a love story that started at Luna Park

To avoid: "The standard bearer of the humble", in force a century after his birth

Eva Perón and a childhood that has forged her identity as a fighter

"Santa Evita" and five other books on her silhouette

Words to the facts: the feminism that surrounded Evita

The work and achievements of the Eva Perón Foundation

The mythical figure of Evita told in 10 films

His own mother Juana He walked for several years at different offices and came to the general public. Lonardi, the first provisional dictator of the coup d'etat of 55, in order to know the fate of his daughter and to ask her back, without getting an answer.

The fate that his captors had planned was another: on April 23, 1957, the body was secretly transferred on a ship to Genoa, Italy, in a coffin that belonged to a woman called María Maggi from Magistris and was buried under that name in the grave 41 of field 86 of Grand Cemetery of Milan.

During the 1960s, the fate of the body of Eveuntil 1970, when the organization Montoneros removed Aramburu, required among others the appearance of the body of To avoid.

Operational return

Around 1971, when the conditions of the country were changed and that there was already talk of a possible return of Perón, The dictator Lanusse ordered to run the operative Return and it was decided to unearth the body of Eve to return it to Perón, who was still living Iron gate, in Madrid, with the leadership of the ambbadador in this country Rojas Silveira.

So many years of captivity of the body have not been in vain because it lacked a finger that had been cut intentionally and had a slight crush on the nose.

By a cruel irony of fate, the general Perón he could not have the body of his ex-wife when he returned to the country and as president, only a few months after his death – July 1, 1974 – on November 17, his widow and president Maria Estela Martinez de Perón brought the body of Eve the country and placed it in the fifth presidential Olivesnext to that of Perón.

Until 1976, the military dictatorship that took power on March 24 gave the body to the family. Duarte, who ordered that Eve was buried in the vault that his family has in the Cemetery of the Recoleta de Buenos Aireswhere he has been since.

One of the great Argentine journalists and writers, Rodolfo Walsh, depicts the avatars of everything that happened with the body of Eva Perón in a remarkable story called "This woman", that years later had a movie version called "Eva does not sleep" and led by Pablo Aguero.