Eva Perón Foundation

The Eva Perón Foundation was a charitable foundation begun by Eva Perón, a prominent Argentine political leader, when she was the First Lady and Spiritual Leader of the Nation of Argentina. It operated from 1948 to 1955.

Social welfare in Argentina was highly underdeveloped before Juan Perón was elected president in 1945 and his wife, who had been born into the working classes, was aware of this. Most charity work was undertaken by the Sociedad de Beneficencia, which was controlled by eighty-seven elderly women of the upper-classes. The orphans whose care the Sociedad controlled had to wear blue smocks and have their heads shaved; at Christmas they were put out onto the streets of Buenos Aires with collecting tins. Their policies are supposed to have been the inspiration behind Evita's famous declaration that, 'When the rich think about the poor, they have poor ideas.'

The chairpersons of this society were traditionally the Papal Nuncio to Argentina and the First Lady, but the society refused to extend the invitation to Evita when her husband was elected president. At first they insisted that it was because she was too young; but it was widely interpreted as an insult to the new First Lady. Evita was furious and moved against the society, effectively bringing it to an end. She then created her own foundation to replace it. ‘It is time,’ Evita declared, ‘for [real] social justice.’

On 8 July 1948 the María Eva Duarte de Perón Foundation was established. Its name was later changed to the simpler Eva Perón Foundation. Its opening charter declared that it was to remain ‘in the sole hands of its founder… who will… possess the widest powers afforded by the State and the Constitution.’ The Foundation's aims were to provide monetary assistance and scholarships to gifted children from impoverished backgrounds, build homes, schools, hospitals and orphanages in underprivileged areas and ‘to contribute or collaborate by any possible means to the creation of works tending to satisfy the basic needs for better life of the less privileged classes.’ Initially work began with nothing more than garden parties for single mothers or Evita’s personal trips to the ghettoes of Buenos Aires to hand out aid parcels.

By the end of the 1940s, Evita and her team of advisers had worked so effectively that the Foundation was better-funded and organised than many departments of State. It had funds of over three billion pesos, controlled $200 million on the exchange rate, employed over 14,000 workers, purchased 500,000 sewing machines, 400,000 pairs of shoes and 200,000 cooking pots for distribution annually and it had succeeded in building numerous new houses, schools, hospitals and orphanages.

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