Isabel Martínez de Perón

Early life and career

María Estela Martínez Cartas was born in La Rioja, Argentina, daughter of María Josefa Cartas Olguín and Carmelo Martínez Rosales. She dropped out of school after the fifth grade. In the early 1950s she became a nightclub dancer adopting the name Isabel, the Spanish form of Saint Elizabeth of Portugal, which she had chosen as her confirmation name.

Juan Perón

She met her future husband during his exile in Panama. Juan Domingo Perón, who was 35 years her senior, was attracted by her beauty and believed she could provide him with the female companionship he had been lacking since the death of his beloved second wife Eva Perón (Evita) in 1952. Perón brought Isabel with him when he moved to Madrid, Spain, in 1960. Authorities did not approve of Perón's cohabitation with a young woman to whom he was not married, so on 15 November 1961 the former president reluctantly married for a third time.

Early political career

As Perón resumed an active role in Argentine politics from exile, Isabel acted as a go-between from Spain to Argentina. Having been deposed in a coup in 1955, Perón was forbidden from returning to Argentina, so his new wife was appointed to travel in his stead. The CGT leader José Alonso became one of her main advisers in Perón's dispute against Steelworkers' leader Augusto Vandor's Popular Union faction during mid-term elections in 1965; Alonso and Vandor were both later assassinated in as-yet unexplained circumstances.

Isabel met José López Rega, who was a former policeman with an interest in occultism and fortune-telling, during a visit to Argentina in 1965. She was interested in occult matters (and as president reportedly employed astrological divination to determine national policy), so the two quickly became friends. Under pressure from Isabel, Perón appointed López as his personal secretary; López later founded the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A), a death squad accused of perpetrating 1,500 crimes in the 1970s.

Héctor José Cámpora was nominated by Perón's Justicialist Party to run in the March 1973 presidential elections on the FREJULI ticket (a Peronist-led alliance). Cámpora won, but it was generally understood that Juan Perón held the real power; a popular phrase at the time was "Cámpora al gobierno, Perón al poder" (Cámpora in government, Perón in power). Later that year, Perón returned to Argentina, and Cámpora resigned to allow Perón to run for president. He chose Isabel as his nominee for the Vice Presidency to mollify feuding Peronist factions, as these could agree on no other running mate. His return from exile was marked by a growing rift between the right and left wings of the Peronist movement; while Cámpora represented the left wing, López Rega represented the right wing. The latter was, moreover, supported by the CGT labor federation leadership and Isabel herself, and this faction became known by the left as the entorno ('entourage') due to the inner-circle status Perón afforded them. Juan Perón had long been inimical to the left, but cultivated their support while he was in exile. His sympathies ended, however, after the assassination of CGT leader José Ignacio Rucci by the leftist Montoneros in September.

Perón's victory in a snap election called by Congress in September 1973 was always considered likely, and he won with 62% of the vote. He began his third term on 12 October, with Isabel as Vice President. Perón was by then in precarious health, however; a CIA cable at the time described him as alternating between a lucid state and that of senile dependency. Isabel had to take over as Acting President on several occasions during his tenure.

Presidency (1974–1976)

Juan Perón suffered a series of heart attacks on 28 June 1974; Isabel was summoned home from a European trade mission and secretly sworn in as acting president the next day. Juan Perón died on 1 July 1974, less than a year after his third election to office. As vice-president his widow formally ascended to the presidency, thus becoming the first woman in the world to hold the title of "President", although she was not the first woman to lead a country. She was popularly known as La Presidente.

Although she lacked Evita Perón's charisma, the grieving widow at first attracted support from the nation. She pledged to uphold the social market economy policies embodied in the 1973 "Social Pact" as well her husband's long-held orthodox Peronism and economic nationalism; her first significant economic policy decisions were the enactment of a new, pro-labor employment contract law and the granting to YPF a monopoly over filling stations. Even leftist groups, having fallen out with Juan Perón in previous months, publicly offered support to her. However she cancelled meetings with various constituent and political groups, and the sympathy resulting from her husband's death soon dissipated. Her government purged most leftists from university posts and the administration, and (as her husband and other Argentine presidents had done) used federal intervention powers to unseat leftist governors. Following a string of political murders and a break by the Montoneros with the government, on 30 September Perón signed the Anti-Terrorism Law. This was the first in a series of measures which eroded constitutional rights, ostensibly for the sake of combating leftist violence.

Another source of contention between her and the voters was the increasing impression that José López Rega, the Minister of Social Welfare, set the agenda for a broad swath of Perón's policies, vetting nearly all domestic and foreign policy. His public behaviour – which included bizarre actions such as silently mouthing her words as she spoke – began to cost the president much-needed support among the Argentine public. Known to have fascist sympathies, López Rega was also notably corrupt and used his position to secure business partnerships with (ODESSA network principal) Otto Skorzeny, (Libyan leader) Muammar Gaddafi, and (the Italian Fascist) Licio Gelli (to whose P-2 lodge López Rega belonged).

López Rega's greatest influence upon Isabel Perón's presidency came through his recently formed Argentine Anticommunist Alliance (Triple A). A right-wing paramilitary force, between late 1973 and late 1974 the Triple A had already carried out nearly 300 murders, including that of Professor Silvio Frondizi (brother of former President Arturo Frondizi), Congressman Rodolfo Ortega Peña, activist Father Carlos Mugica, Buenos Aires Province Assistant Police Chief Julio Troxler, former Córdoba Vice-Governor Atilio López and former Chilean Army head Carlos Prats. Other prominent public servants, such as UCR Senator Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen, and left-wing University of Buenos Aires President Rodolfo Puiggrós, narrowly survived Triple A attacks; Puiggrós was then removed from his post.

Fall from power

López Rega left the country on 19 July. Shortly afterward, Perón dismissed her protégés in the Economy Ministry, Celestino Rodrigo, and in the Armed Forces High Command, General Alberto Numa Laplane, whom she replaced in August with General Jorge Videla, a quiet career officer with an uneventful military record. The president's appointment of a pragmatic economist, Peronist wheelhorse Antonio Cafiero and her 13 September announcement of a leave of absence relieved ample sectors of society, from labor unions to business. Designating Senate President Ítalo Luder, a moderately conservative Peronist, in her stead, it was widely hoped that her leave would become permanent; but it was not to be.

Limited largely to the murder of security forces and public figures during 1974, political violence escalated during 1975 to include soft targets in the population at large as Trotskyist ERP and fascist Triple A extremists began taking to midnight lightning strikes against each other and civilian targets such as banks, buses, yachts, parking lots, and restaurants. Over 700 people died from political violence during Mrs. Perón's first 15 months in office, of which more than half were subversives and most of the remainder were security forces; by March 1976, civilians comprised fully half of the 1,358 deaths attributable to this conflict.

The Montoneros, moreover, began a series of audacious attacks on military installations, including August dynamiting of the nearly finished destroyer Santísima Trinidad near the port of La Plata and the Operation Primicia, a terrorist attack on a military base in Formosa Province on 5 October. Anxious to placate the exasperated public, the military, hard-line labor leaders (particularly the steelworkers' Lorenzo Miguel), and most other Peronists, on 6 October she and Luder signed new measures giving blanket immunity for the Armed Forces that they may (in her words) "annihilate subversive elements throughout the country" – in effect a nationwide extension of the state of siege that had been imposed in Tucumán. The measure won her just enough support to return from "sick leave" and on 17 October (on Peronists' historically central Loyalty Day), Perón appeared at the balcony of the Casa Rosada, back at her post.

Perón's health remained fragile, however, and a gallbladder affliction forced her to take a second, shorter leave of absence in November. Interior Minister Ángel Robledo's proposal that elections (scheduled for March 1977) should instead be held in November 1976 was approved by the president during this leave, bringing renewed hope that an increasingly rumored coup d'état could yet be averted.

Detention and exile

The majority of Peronist officials in the national, provincial, and municipal governments were promptly arrested, brutally beaten, starved, tortured, and interrogated by military police. Many "disappeared" permanently during the subsequent Dirty War, including numerous right-wing Peronists. Isabel Perón herself remained under house arrest in Villa La Angostura and other secluded locations for five years, and was eventually sent into exile in Spain in July 1981. She continued to serve as official head of her husband's Justicialist Party until her resignation in February 1985, nearly a decade after her fall from power. Though there were some who desired her return and wished for her return to power, she refused to stand for election to the presidency when elections were ultimately called in 1983. She lived in Madrid, maintained close links with Francisco Franco's family, and sometimes went to Marbella. She sold Perón's Puerta de Hierro estate in 2001, and relocated to a townhouse in the western suburb of Villafranca del Castillo.

Following the restoration of democracy in Argentina, Perón was pardoned from charges of corruption during her presidency and returned in December 1983 as a guest of honor at President Raúl Alfonsín's inauguration, and in May 1984 to participate in policy talks arranged by Alfonsín and opposition leaders. Still nominally head of Juan Perón's Justicialist Party, she played a constructive role in the talks, supporting cooperation between the restive CGT labor union (her party's political base) and Alfonsín. The talks concluded with a weak agreement, and she resigned from her post as titular head of the party. She returned to Argentina in 1988 to resolve probate disputes concerning the Perón estate, then resumed residence in Spain under a very low profile. On 17 October 2024 (on Loyalty Day), she met with Vice President Victoria Villarruel, citing the need to show national unity. That same day, she inaugurated a bust of Perón in the Senate.

Arrest in Spain

A judge in Mendoza, Argentina in November 2006 demanded testimony from Isabel Perón, along with other Peronist ministers of her government, in a case involving forced disappearances during her presidency; on 12 January 2007, she was arrested by police in Madrid. She was charged by the Argentine authorities with the disappearance of Héctor Aldo Fagetti Gallego on 25 February 1976, and for crimes related to her issuance of 6 October 1975 decree calling the Armed Forces to "annihilate subversive elements." The Nunca Más ("Never Again") report released in 1984 by the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons recorded 600 disappearances and 500 assassinations under the Peronist governments from 1973 to 1976, and it is acknowledged that the Triple A alone murdered some 600 people.

The 2006 capture in Spain of Triple A death-squad overseer Rodolfo Almirón, who had also been in charge of López Rega's and Isabel Perón's personal security, shed further light on the extent of Triple A involvement in the early stages of the Dirty War. Isabel Perón's extradition to Argentina was refused by Spain on 28 March 2008. Spain's National Court ruled twice that the charges against her did not constitute crimes against humanity, adding that the statute of limitations on the charges expired after 20 years.

The Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina unanimously dismissed on 21 June 2017 the petitions to interrogate Isabel Perón either as a witness or as a defendant.

2020s

In 2024, President Javier Milei called on all the living ex-Presidents to assist at the signing of the May 25th Pact on 9 July 2024 in the Casa de Tucumán. Perón chose not to attend.