La sombra de Evita: Volveré y seré millones

In June of 1947 Eva Perón, Evita, wife of Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón visited Spain, then under the dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In Madrid, she was handed a letter from Alexis, son of Juana Doña, a communist militant awaiting execution for a victimless bomb attack on the Argentine Embassy in Madrid. In that letter, Alexis asked Evita to intercede on behalf of his mother on the grounds that the the attack was perpetrated on Argentine soil and that Argentina had abolished the death penalty. Evita asked Franco for a commutation of Juana's death sentence and Franco, eager to please the Perons, did so immediately (Argentina was the only country willing to sell food to Spain, then an international pariah condemned by the United Nations as an ally of the Axis powers defeated in World War II). A very moving interview with Alexis in old age ends this part of the documentary.

This anecdote is probably news even to many Argentines, and was used as the main plot point of the excellent miniseries Carta a Eva (2012). On this ground only, this documentary should be recommended.

Unfortunately the rest is far less valuable. The newsreel footage has appeared in many other places and is available in You Tube. Worse, this film resuscitates the tired old canard that Peron was financed by "Nazi Gold" that Evita channeled during a visit to Switzerland (the fact that Evita and Peron possibly had accounts in Swiss banks is presented as the only "evidence"). Perón's association with Nazis is treated with dishonesty. A photo of Perón with Austrian ex-SS colonel Otto Skorzeny is succeeded by a photo of Adolf Eichmann (alone) somewhat suggesting that Perón was associated with Eichmann. This is false; Perón was a friend of Skorzeny, whom he admired as a daredevil but he never met Eichmann; most probably he never knew that Eichmann had entered Argentina with false documents.

In fact, the lies about Perón's association with Nazis and Nazi gold were mostly due to the American media, the Argentine yellow press and the American ambassador in Buenos Aires, Spruille Braden in a (failed) effort to prevent Peron's election in 1946. His social reforms were anathema to many Argentine landowners and industrialists and to American businesses trying to gain a foothold in Argentina, and he was perceived as opposing the Latin American machinations of the USA. The truth is that after an initial burst of justice after the war (the Nuremberg trials) former Nazis were recruited in numbers by the governments of the USA, West Germany and other European countries to participate in all levels of the anticommunist crusade. Other European Nazis just got rid of their party card and joined civilian life unmolested. Latin America was just the dumping ground for rejects like Klaus Barbie (who duped the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps about his Soviet expertise but only for a while) or "unusables" like Eichmann.

This documentary contains interviews with several people. Very few have intimate personal knowledge of the Peronist era or have credentials as historians. The others have neither, and the reason for their inclusion is not clear. They contribute nothing of importance.