workingclasshistory:

On this day, 7 May 1919, Eva “Evita” Perón, actor and later wife of president Juan Perón was born. Commonly seen as a hero of workers and the poor, the reality was very different. Evita and her husband were admirers of the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini, and were influenced by some of their policies, particularly trying to integrate the working class into the state machinery.
While some of their early reforms helped improve living standards, after the 1949 stock-market collapse they slashed wages by a third, and declared military rule to stop a rail workers’ strike.
During World War II they maintained relations both with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy until they were eventually pressured to drop them in 1944, although they maintained relations with fascist Spain from the time of general Franco’s (pictured) victory until his death, even sending aid to the country in the 1940s. After the defeat of the Nazis, the Peróns offered safe haven to hundreds of Nazi and fascist war criminals, like Adolf Eichmann, architect of the Holocaust, Joseph Mengele, the Auschwitz “Angel of Death” and the genocidal Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić. Responsible for the deaths of 100,000 people in just one concentration camp alone, including 90% of Croatia’s Jews, Pavelić was given sanctuary by Perón who then hired him as an adviser.
Perón himself claimed that he hosted several thousand Nazis “for humanitarian reasons” as well as around “five thousand Croats threatened with death by [Yugoslav communist leader Josip] Tito”.
The Peróns also helped launder hundreds of millions of dollars from Nazi corporations like Mercedes-Benz, while keeping a cut for themselves. During their time in power the Peróns amassed a huge fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, much of which they held in overseas bank accounts. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1419903818194764/?type=3