The Strange Afterlife of Santa Evita

Eva Perón’s life created a myth; her death produced an even stranger one. When Eva died in 1952 she was twenty-three kilos underweight and ravaged by cancer, yet within weeks she had become the subject of a cult whose political power rivalled that of the Peronist movement itself.

The Argentine writer Tomás Eloy Martínez explores this mythology in his novel Santa Evita. The book follows the bizarre journey of Eva’s embalmed body after the fall of Juan Perón in 1955, when military officers hid the corpse for fear that it would become a political symbol.

Martínez blends fact and fiction. Some episodes are based on archival documents and testimonies, while others are imagined. The narrator himself appears as a character investigating the story, emphasizing the difficulty of separating myth from historical record.

The novel traces the body’s secret transport across Argentina and eventually to Europe. For years it remained hidden in Italy under a false name before finally being returned to Argentina in the 1970s.

Martínez suggests that Eva’s corpse became a mirror of Argentina’s political obsessions. The soldiers guarding it began to project fantasies onto the body; rumors spread that multiple copies existed. The body became not merely an object but a narrative.

The novelist argues that Latin American history often survives through storytelling rather than documentation. Through Santa Evita, he attempts to reconstruct reality through fiction.