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Tomas Eloy Martinez. Santa Evita. Buenos Aires. Planeta. 1995. 398 pages. ISBN 950-742-651-5.
Santa Evita was published one week before the forty-third anniversary of Eva Peron's death; with it, Tomas Eloy Martinez complements his own 1985 Novela de Peron and Abel Posse's 1994 Pasion segun Eva. Where the latter is a historical novel of some interest but virtually an example of official hagiography, Santa Evita is a liquidation of the master narrative of a historical figure who became a dominant cultural icon of an entire nation. Martinez writes from the proposition that Peron, in contracting the embalming of Evita's body (a still uncommon practice in Catholic Argentina) in order to use it as a political symbol, had no idea that he was burdening himself and Argentina with an albatross of monumental proportions. At the end of a novel an Argentine president is quoted as supposedly having said, "We are all that body. It is the country."
Until its eventual burial in a specially equipped crypt in Buenos Aires twenty years later, during the years after her death in 1952 Evita's body became an obsession, both for those who wished to recover it and utilize it to reinforce a Peronism identified with Eva Peron and for successive military regimes that were as much appalled by the legacy of the woman as they were by the fear that her body would be recovered and so utilized....