On September 30, 1955, the military junta that had overthrown Juan Perón two weeks earlier declared Peronism illegal, banned the movement's symbols, and prohibited the display of Eva Perón's image. She had been dead for three years.

The junta was still afraid of her.

Eva María Duarte de Perón was born in 1919 in Los Toldos, Buenos Aires province, the illegitimate daughter of a landowner and a seamstress, in a country where illegitimate children did not have the same civil standing as legitimate ones. She moved to Buenos Aires at fifteen, became an actress in radio and film, and met Juan Perón at a charity fundraiser in 1944. They married in 1945.

Between 1946 and her death from cervical cancer in 1952, she built a political machine of her own. She created the Eva Perón Foundation, which distributed direct aid to Argentina's working class — medical equipment, sewing machines, school supplies, food — outside the existing charity bureaucracy that had been controlled by elite women's organizations that had previously excluded her. She organized and personally funded a massive clothing drive, a housing program, and a mobile medical service. She established Argentina's first national women's football league.

She also ran the Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Labor through Perón's allies, securing labor legislation and the eight-hour day. She organized the women's Peronist Party. She led the successful campaign for Argentine women's suffrage, enacted in 1947.

She died at thirty-three. The Peronist movement continued without her. The junta that overthrew her husband in 1955 recognized she was still more dangerous dead than most politicians alive.