Democratic-socialist Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez finally agrees with President Trump about something: they both seem to think she has something in common with the wife of a pro-Nazi South American dictator who impoverished his country with misguided redistributionist policies.
In response to reports that the president had once compared her to Argentina’s Eva “Evita” Perón, AOC tweeted out quotes from Evita gloating over the benefits that she and her dictator husband, Juan Perón, supposedly bestowed upon their country’s women and poor workers.
Useful idiots in America have long idolized the Peróns, especially after Hollywood immortalized Evita in a heavily-fictionalized biopic, seeing them as glamorous young leftists who can show America what we can achieve if only we embrace socialism. Thankfully, historians have developed a much fuller picture of the awful reality of life under Perón, and AOC’s invocation of “Evita” met with righteous and appropriate anger.
The Peróns’ Nazi sympathies, for instance, are quite well established. In the 1930s, Juan Perón made no secret of his admiration for Italian Fascism and German National Socialism. During World War II, he may even have tried to broker an arms deal with the Nazis.
But Perón’s antics after the war were even more egregious. As president, he approved the forged documents and clandestine immigration that made Argentina the number one destination for Nazi war criminals and collaborators. This assistance allowed some of the Third Reich’s most notorious mass murderers — such as Holocaust “architect” Adolph Eichmann and Auschwitz's “Angel of Death,” Dr. Josef Mengele — to escape justice for decades.
Focusing on the Peróns’ Nazi sympathies, however, almost misses the point. The real reason that Americans in 2019 should be concerned about a congresswoman citing Eva Peron as a hero is that Eva and Juan Perón were “democratic” socialists who used their cult of personality to implement many of the same policies that AOC is demanding today — and which brought Argentina to ruin in the process.
After a period of political instability, Eva was instrumental in organizing Argentina’s workers and activists to elect her husband, Juan, as president in 1946. They promised expanded healthcare coverage and more money for the poor.
Once in power, they patronized their supporters with handouts. They nationalized Argentina’s industries and instituted “five-year plans” that wouldn’t look out of place in AOC’s “Green New Deal.”
As with all mass redistributions of wealth, however, the Peróns eventually ran out of other people’s money. Inflation spiraled out of control as they tried to print more money. Argentina’s export-reliant industries stagnated, suddenly finding themselves unable to compete after decades of prosperity. The very people the Peróns were supposedly helping, Argentina’s poor, suffered the most as the economy collapsed under the strain of their misguided policies.
The Peróns soon had to rely on repression to maintain their grip on power. The free press was suspended, uncooperative labor union leaders were replaced, universities were forced to preach the glories of the failing Peronist socialism, and supporters were mobilized to make sure Argentines voted the right way.
“Evita,” AOC’s hero, was no passive bystander in this. She played a key role in cultivating the Perón regime’s soft, friendly “Robin Hood” image that American liberals have bought hook, line, and sinker for decades. She assumed the role of a pseudo-religious mother figure and became essential in whipping up the fervor of her husband’s poor supporters, who formed mobs to intimidate the opposition.
Juan even tried to make Eva his Vice President shortly before her dramatic death at age 33. Not to be denied, the dictator appointed her to the bizarre role of “Spiritual Leader of the Nation."
After a 16-year exile, Juan Perón returned to power and made his next wife, a “nightclub dancer” with a fifth-grade education, Vice President of the world’s 14th largest economy. Months later, upon Juan’s death, Isabel Perón became the unelected President of Argentina, and instigated one of the most disastrous periods in Argentine history.
Hundreds of people were murdered as her secret police struggled to keep her in power while Argentina’s economy continued to pay for the socialist insanity her husband had unleashed. The echoes of that rapid inflation and economic collapse are still felt in Argentina today.
If Republicans want to fault AOC for embracing Evita Perón’s legacy, they shouldn’t stop at pointing out her ties to Nazism. They should also make the case that Peronist socialism is a fundamentally destructive, totalitarian ideology. It’s inexcusable that an elected American official would seek to impose that same “democratic socialist” nightmare on the American people.
AOC apparently wants to do it the same way the Peróns did — with a self-serving power grab propped up by unsustainable handouts promised by a pretty, young figurehead who is the grand marketer for chaos, anarchy, and death.
President Trump’s comparison of AOC to Evita — made when AOC’s political career was still in its infancy — was impressively insightful. Her enthusiastic embrace of that unflattering comparison, on the other hand, is downright puzzling.
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