Juan Perón

Juan Domingo Perón rose through military ranks after entering college in 1911, spent 1939-41 as an attaché in Mussolini's Italy where he developed his core ideas, and joined the 1943 revolution that made him Minister of Labor. His labor reforms won a mass following; when political rivals forced his arrest in October 1945, workers flooded Plaza de Mayo demanding his release, propelling him to the presidency in 1946. Alongside his wife Eva Duarte, he industrialized Argentina, made university free, granted women the vote, and built half a million houses - while firing dissidents and sheltering Nazi fugitives. Re-elected in a landslide in 1951, his second term unraveled after Eva's death and a clash with the Church that ended in a bombing of Plaza de Mayo that killed 300 civilians and a 1955 coup. Eighteen years of exile across four countries ended when he returned in 1973 amid the Ezeiza massacre, won a third term, and died in office nine months later, unable to stop the violence between left- and right-wing factions that would consume Argentina for years.