The threat of civil war still hung in the air. Eva Duarte took to carrying a grenade in her handbag, while her lover defiantly proclaimed: ‘Everybody is demanding my head, but thus far no one has come to get it.’
He spoke too soon. Some of his fellow officers had finally had enough. But, ironically, it was not Perón’s heavy-handed dictatorship which provoked them into plotting his downfall. They simply could not stand his girl friend. They had watched with mounting embarrassment and anger as Perón turned more and more to Eva Duarte for political advice. As soldiers, they were supposed to be running a military dictatorship. Yet a woman pulled the strings. It outraged their sense of dignity and their masculine prife. No Argentine dared laugh at them, of course, at least not to their faces, anyway. But they were uncomfortably aware that ribald cartoons undermining their authority had appeared in the newspapers of neighbouring countries.
The final indignity, as far as they were concerned, came when Eva arranged for her mother’s latest boy friend, a postal clerk named Oscar Nicolini, to become Director of Posts and Telegraph, a position once held by her first military lover, Colonel Imbert. No sooner had Nicolini taken over his new job, than Eva moved right in to the office next to his. There was no doubt in the minds of senior army officers that Colonel Perón’s mistress had deftly placed herself in control of all of the nation’s communications. They were not going to tolerate it. She had to go.
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