Isabel Martínez de Perón (, born María Estela Martínez Cartas; 4 February 1931) is an Argentine politician who served as the president of Argentina from 1974 to 1976. She was one of the first female republican heads of state in the world, and the first woman to serve as president of a country. Perón was the third wife of President Juan Perón. During her husband's third term as president from 1973 to 1974, she served as both the vice president and first lady of Argentina. From 1974 until her resignation in 1985, she was also the second President of the Justicialist Party. Isabel Perón's politics exemplify right-wing Peronism and Orthodox Peronism. Ideologically, she is considered by academics to be close to corporate neo-fascism.
Following her husband's death in office in 1974, she served as president for almost two years before the military took over the government with the 1976 coup. Perón was then placed under house arrest for five years before she was exiled to Spain in 1981. After democracy was restored in Argentina in 1983, she was a guest of honor at President Raúl Alfonsín's inauguration. For several years, she was a nominal head of Juan Perón's Justicialist Party and played a constructive role in reconciliation discussion, but has never again played any important political role.
In 2007, an Argentine judge ordered Perón's arrest over a 1976 forced disappearance on the grounds that it was authorised by her decrees allowing Argentina's armed forces to act against "subversives".Warrant for ex-Argentine leader, BBC News, 12 January 2007. She was arrested near her home in Spain, but Spanish courts subsequently refused her extradition to Argentina.
Early life and career María Estela Martínez Cartas was born in La Rioja, Argentina, daughter of María Josefa Cartas Olguín and Carmelo Martínez Rosales.Binayán Carmona, Narciso. Maria Estela Martinez Cartas said one day: Zanga Cutiricutanga, that words were a tipic words in that years. Historia genealógica Argentina. EMECE, 1999, p. 578. 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.The 100 Most Influential World Leaders of All Time (Britannica Educational Publishing 2009 ), p. 249
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.
José López Rega 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.
Rise to power
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.
Aside from those State-sponsored atrocities, some violent acts were also being committed by left-wing civil extremists around the country. Organised in 1968, the anarchist Montoneros kidnapped and killed former head of state Pedro Aramburu, popular CGT union Secretary General José Ignacio Rucci, construction workers' union leader Rogelio Coria, former Interior Minister Arturo Mor Roig and U.S. Consul John Egan, among other murders and kidnappings. Throughout 1974, the rise of a new and nearly-as-violent Trotskyist group, the ERP, added to the cycle of violence. Having gained notoriety after the murder of FIAT executive Oberdan Sallustro, the ERP began the year with a violent assault on the Azul barracks. It murdered, among others, a criminal court judge, Jorge Quiroga; the writer Jordán Bruno Genta; and the publisher of La Plata's centrist El Día, David Kraiselburd. The kidnapping of Esso executive Victor Samuelson, freed for a ransom of US$12 million, ignited what would become a rash of such crimes. However, the government and paramilitaries used this environment to target and murder many legitimate opponents of the regime, as listed above.
Following the murder of Buenos Aires Police Chief Alberto Villar (one of López Rega's closest collaborators in the Triple A) and his wife, as well as amid increasing activity by the ERP in the Province of Tucumán, Perón was persuaded to declare a state of siege on 6 November (suspending, among other rights, habeas corpus). Censorship also increased markedly, culminating in the closure by decree of one of the leading news dailies in Latin America (Crónica) and several other publications, as well as the banning of Argentine television figures such as talk show host Mirtha Legrand and comedian Tato Bores.
Operation Independence began in Tucumán on 5 February 1975. This military campaign, though successful from a military standpoint, gained notoriety for its brutality; in addition to going after insurgents, it attacked elected officials, magistrates, University of Tucumán faculty, and even secondary school teachers.
The government turned on the labor movement, the mainstay of Peronism for the better part of a quarter-century, classifying it as "subversive" and subject to reprisals. The November 1974 election of a left-wing union shop steward at a Villa Constitución steel mill and its disapproval by steelworkers' leader Lorenzo Miguel (a leading figure in the paramount CGT), resulted in a brutal 20 March 1975 police assault on the facility. The raid, executed jointly with Triple A heavies, led to the "disappearances" of many of the 300 workers arrested.
López Rega, meanwhile, arranged the dismissal of many of the most competent policy makers Perón had inherited from her husband's brief presidency; by May 1975, both Economy Minister José Ber Gelbard and Central Bank President Alfredo Gómez Morales had been replaced with right-wing López Rega loyalists.