Eva Perón

Born into poverty in Los Toldos in 1919, María Eva Duarte left for Buenos Aires at fifteen to work as an actress in radio and film. She met Colonel Juan Perón at a charity event in January 1944, married him the next year, and became First Lady when he won the presidency in 1946. From that perch she took de facto control of the Ministries of Labor and Health, launched the Eva Perón Foundation, championed women's suffrage, and founded the Female Peronist Party - building a base among the descamisados, the "shirtless ones," who saw her as their own. In 1951 she announced a run for vice president with massive popular support, but the military and the bourgeoisie forced her out, and her health was already failing. She died of cancer in July 1952, thirty-three years old, titled by Congress as "Spiritual Leader of the Nation" and given a state funeral - a ghost who has never left the Argentine imagination.