Isabel Peron

Isabel Peron was the first woman to lead a republic as head of state anywhere, and was removed by the coup that began Argentina's dirty war. She was a nightclub dancer named Maria Estela Martinez when she met the exiled Juan Peron in Panama in 1956; they married in Madrid in 1961 and she acted as his emissary to Argentina during the years his movement was banned. When Peron was allowed to return and stand in 1973 he put her on the ticket as vice-president, over the objections of most of his party, and she succeeded him on his death in July 1974 with no political base of her own. Real power went to Jose Lopez Rega, her social welfare minister and an astrologer, who ran the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, the death squad that killed hundreds of leftists before the military took over the task. Inflation passed three hundred per cent, the Montoneros and the ERP were waging armed campaigns, and in February 1975 her government signed the decree ordering the army to annihilate the insurgency in Tucuman - the legal instrument the junta later cited. She was deposed on 24 March 1976 and held under house arrest for five years, then went into exile in Spain. A Spanish court refused Argentina's extradition request in 2008 on charges relating to the disappearances, and the case has not been tried. She has lived in Madrid since 1981 and has given no interviews of substance. The Peronist movement has largely written her out of its own account of itself, which is easier than explaining why Peron chose her. She was briefly detained in Madrid in 2007 on an Argentine warrant. Her full name is Maria Estela Martinez Cartas de Peron, and Isabel was her religious name.

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