ARGENTINA: Little Eva

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Free Hand. Devoted and well aware of his wife's value as a pressagent, Juancito gave her a free hand with her campaign for women's suffrage, her labor reforms and her peripatetic philanthropies. An undistinguished glassblower who had succeeded Perón as Secretary of Labor was moved aside to give Eva office space.

She still has no official title, but every day, after breakfast with her husband at 7, she shows up in her office, to work from 9 to noon receiving delegations of workers and trade unionists, hearing hard-luck stories and doling out advice and aid. A battery of secretaries is always on hand to take notes and handle a voluminous correspondence. In the afternoons, after a quick lunch with Perón, Evita is on her rounds again, visiting factories, addressing workers or distributing largess in the best bread-&-circus style.

The Hearts. In the first eleven months of their joint reign, the Argentine Government announced recently, Eva has given away in her husband's name some $4,280,000 worth of schoolbooks, clothes, shoes, furniture, toys, cakes and cider. The gifts are always accompanied by one of Eva's flowery speeches, with constant references to the "heart of Perón" and the "heart of Evita." So standard have these phrases become that opposition Cartoonist Tristan draws bejeweled Eva as a blank face with a heart-shaped mouth as her only identification. Last November, when Evita traveled to the sugar-rich Tucumán province, where sugar workers live in abject peonage, seven people were crushed to death in the rush for gifts. Eva was cool through it all. "I bring a message of love," she said, "for the workers of Tucumán."

In Argentina Evita holds the official title of "First Samaritan," but whether her unbounded love for the masses has been repaid in kind is open to question. Eva has few close friends and many bitter enemies in the land of her conquest. Even the most ardent Peronistas are divided as to whether she is a boon or a blight. She constantly interferes in state affairs, and certain it is that her highhanded palace intrigues have earned Perón many an enemy he might not otherwise have had. Last fall Eva threw the Argentine Senate into a furor when she charged into a sacrosanct closed session to demand immediate appointment of some friends as judges. The outraged Senators politely told her to scram. When Evita complained to Juancito, the entire body was summoned to the Casa Rosada to be scolded officially for bad manners.

Whether she wills it or not, Eva's reign undeniably has its impact on Argentine politics. Only last week, with the First Lady a safe 6,000 miles away, a bitter debate over her trip led two deputies to send challenges to duel to a Radical Party colleague. Eva's enemies have a way of disappearing from the Government. Her family and friends are equally apt to hang on through thick & thin. Eva's brother is now Perón's personal secretary; her eldest sister Elisa is virtually the political boss of Junín. The husbands of Eva's two other sisters each hold lucrative political appointments.