?I think Peron is a classic and should be understood as such. The classics should always be read. There isn't a poor person in Argentina who doesn't remember Peron.?
Antonio Daniel Di Sabatino, a public accountant who is working on the panel that is trying to create a mausoleum for the Perons
Strongman Juan Peron and his glamorous wife Eva Peron were inseparable in life, but uniting them in death is proving difficult.
Fifty years after their rule in Argentina, construction of a mausoleum for the two is being delayed by fund-raising problems and resistance from at least one of Eva Peron's elderly sisters. The bodies of both Perons, who died decades apart, were unearthed during military rule and their corpses subjected to treatment that sounds like a horror movie.
Americans associate ?Evita? with the Broadway musical smash of the same name, which tells her rags-to-riches story. Argentines remember the Perons for ushering in an era of rapid modernity and creating a welfare state and a system of political patronage that remain to this day.
The long-ruling Peronist Party takes its name from them, but despite the couple's prominence, they are remembered in rival museums and buried in family crypts on opposite sides of Buenos Aires.
Officials in San Vicente, outside the capital, hope to construct a mausoleum on the grounds of the couple's old weekend retreat. The province of Buenos Aires donated the land in 2000, and a well-done but obscure Peron museum opened there in 2002. But that's as far as it's gotten.
?This might get done with little money, or it might never get built,? said Antonio Daniel Di Sabatino, a public accountant who is working on the panel that is trying to create a mausoleum for the Perons.
Argentina remains in a protracted economic crisis. Almost half the nation plunged into poverty in 2002 with a currency collapse, and Argentina owes more than $100 billion to private creditors. In that context, Peron's doctrine on jobs, the poor and rejecting foreign debt deserves study, Di Sabatino said.
?I think Peron is a classic and should be understood as such. The classics should always be read,? he said. ?There isn't a poor person in Argentina who doesn't remember Peron.?
Many Argentines favor honoring the Perons, but not digging them up again.
?From my point of view, they should never be touched again because of the things that happened to them,? said Claudio Vucetich, who leads tourists to Eva Peron's family crypt in the Recoleta cemetery.
At the Chacaritas cemetery, 45 minutes by car across the city, Maria Luisa Sisti Monteros gets angry at the thought of moving Juan Peron's corpse. For more than two decades, the retired nurse has swept around the family crypt of the man whose oratory skills became a cliche of the Latin American strongman.
?This is shameful. It is not possible. You cannot touch Peron,? Monteros insisted, pausing to place plastic flowers on the tomb's door. ?We don't want them moved again!?
Monteros described how in 1987 soldiers beat her, then broke into the crypt and sawed the hands from Peron's corpse to seek a ransom. It was never paid, and the hands have never been recovered.
The story pales compared with the surreal journey of Eva Peron's corpse after her death from cervical cancer on July 26, 1952, at age 33. Her husband had one of the world's top embalmers preserve her body and keep it in lifelike condition while he tried to build a monument.
?She looked almost as if she were alive,? said Pablo Vasquez, head of the library and archives at the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires.
Generals overthrew Juan Peron in 1955, setting Eva Peron's corpse on a bizarre around-the-world journey that lasted decades. Soldiers seized her body from the embalmer, who historians think had fallen in love with the corpse. He also made at least two perfect wax copies, leaving family and foes unsure whether they really possessed her body.
The military rulers who deposed Juan Peron spirited away his wife's real corpse, and historians now know that soldiers repeatedly defiled the preserved body for two years as it was shuttled around the Buenos Aires area. Finally, they secretly sent the corpse to Europe in 1957.
Generals feared Eva Peron's saint-like status in Argentina, and worried that she had powers from beyond the grave. They also worried that her remains could inspire the poor to revolution, and secretly buried her corpse in Milan, Italy, under the name Maria Maggi de Magistris.
After another bout of unrest, military rulers dug up the body in 1971 as a peace offering to Juan Peron. They returned the body to him in Madrid, Spain, where he was exiled. Peron became president of Argentina again on Oct. 12, 1973, but died eight months later, before he could bring the corpse back to Argentina.
His third wife and vice president, Isabel Martinez de Peron, brought Eva Peron's corpse back in 1974 and had Juan and Eva Peron rest in state together. Isabel Peron reportedly stretched herself across the casket in hopes of channeling Eva Peron's spirit.
On March 24, 1976, another military coup deposed Isabel Peron, and Eva Peron's corpse disappeared again. Six months later, the family got it back under a deal from dictators that it be buried under layers of steel in a family crypt, never to be moved again. Today, the Duarte family plot, with plaques dedicated to Eva Peron, draws flower-bearing tourists.
Mausoleum backers said Isabel Peron had authorized moving Juan Peron's corpse, but Eva Peron's elderly sister, Erminda, hadn't yet approved the union of the corpses. Directors of the Evita Museum said the family wouldn't comment on the mausoleum.