Suit Won't Let Peron's Corpse Rest In Peace -- Paternity Claim May Reopen Casket In New Chapter Of Argentinian Saga

BUENOS AIRES - Gen. Juan Domingo Peron - thrice elected president of Argentina, patriarch of a historic Latin American political movement, husband of the beloved and ubiquitous Evita - does not rest in peace.

In fact, there is little peace in Argentine cemeteries. Politicians, lawyers, pathologists, soldiers and grave robbers are forever disturbing the corpses of the Perons and other famous dead people.

Argentines have an obsession with illustrious cadavers, a penchant for shrouding their fallen leaders in nostalgia, superstition, intrigue and political symbolism. Recent history is full of episodes in which corpses have been dug up, desecrated or revered in outpourings of nationalism. Author Tomas Eloy Martinez believes that necrophilia - of the emotional, rather than physical, variety - is a national pastime.

"Since the nation's origins, necrophilia has been almost a sign of Argentine identity," said Eloy Martinez, an authority on the Perons. His novel, "St. Evita," describes the odyssey of Eva Peron's corpse, which was smuggled out of Argentina and not returned here until 1974, 22 years after her death.

In the latest morbid episode, a federal judge has authorized pathologists to open the coffin of Juan Peron as soon as this week and extract a DNA sample from the remains. The procedure is to be part of a lawsuit by a woman who claims to be the general's illegitimate daughter and wants a share of his fortune.

The news brought moans from Peron's legion of admirers. Norma Kennedy, a veteran leader of the ruling Peronist party, went to court yesterday to try to block the procedure. She railed against "the offensive and denigrating intention of touching his sacred remains."

It will not be the first time those remains have been touched. Two years after Peron's death in 1974, a hostile military regime removed his coffin from the official grave on the presidential estate and banished it to the family crypt in a Buenos Aires cemetery. In 1987, despite elaborate security defenses protecting the coffin, robbers broke into the crypt, smashed through a slab of bulletproof glass and removed the general's hands with an electric saw.

The mystery of the stolen hands remains "one of the great enigmas of Argentine history," the newspaper Clarin said recently.

Interpol debunked a theory that the robbers wanted to use the general's fingerprints to get into his Swiss bank accounts. There was talk of vengeful rightists and Masonic rites. In a letter to the president of the Peronist party, a group using the enigmatic nickname "Hermes and the 13" demanded an $8 million ransom for the hands.

The aftermath was sinister: The party president, the magistrate assigned to the case, the chief investigator, the cemetery watchman, and other witnesses and investigators all met violent or suspicious deaths. The hands were never found. The case is being investigated by its fourth magistrate.

This bizarre story is one of many. In 1990, the chemically preserved heart of a 19th-century priest, an architect of Argentine democracy, was plucked from his casket and then returned days later without explanation. Last year, the cadaver of a cousin of Juan Peron disappeared from a provincial cemetery.

And in June, Zulema Yoma, the estranged wife of President Carlos Menem, got a court order to exhume the body of their son Carlos, who died in a helicopter accident last year. She wanted to make sure another body had not been substituted for his. She alleges the accident resulted from foul play, though no evidence supports that claim.

Menem himself, according to Eloy Martinez, is a master of the populist tactic of "using corpses as political weapons." Menem oversaw the transfer in 1991 of the remains of Juan Bautista Alberdi, an architect of Argentina's constitution, from Buenos Aires to Bautista's native province, Tucuman. The president took advantage of the occasion to endorse a candidate for governor.

In the name of "national reconciliation with the past," the Menem administration brought back to Argentina another long-deceased leader, dictator Juan Manuel Rosas, who died in exile in England. The fanfare distracted the public from economic worries in 1989, according to skeptics who believe the timing was no coincidence. Members of the National Congress introduced a flurry of proposals to relocate the graves of other leaders.

Politicians hold up the dead as talismans "to try to distract attention from other things and to excite national pride," Eloy Martinez said. Funerals of luminaries have often been passionate and dangerous, with mourners stampeding to touch the casket, he said.

When she died of cancer in 1952, 33-year-old Evita Peron was adored as a saint by working-class Argentines. They venerated her charisma, her scorn for the rich, her fairy-tale benevolence. She returned their love by giving them houses, medicine, clothes and other gifts.

Evita is considered the soul of Peronism. Accordingly, the saga of her corpse was more spectacular than that of her husband's. In the days after she died, hundreds of thousands of mourners waited in the rain to kiss the dead Evita.

Gen. Peron hired the best embalmer money could buy, the meticulous Dr. Pedro Ara of Spain, to preserve the body in lifelike perfection. The process took six months. The body was kept for three years in the headquarters of the Peronist trade union.

In 1955, a military coup overthrew Peron. The new rulers decided that Evita's corpse was a potent political symbol that had to disappear. Soldiers spirited the corpse to Europe - the start of a shadowy odyssey that lasted nearly two decades. In 1971, the corpse was returned to Peron in Madrid, where he had gone into exile.

Evita's cadaver left a wake of myths, rumors and legends that Martinez followed in writing his extensively researched "St. Evita," published here in 1995 and an acclaimed best-seller. It is a hallucinatory tale of obsession and intrigue in which the dead Evita is worshiped, caressed, lost, found, stolen, copied by a sculptor and hidden in an ambulance, a movie theater, a ship. Those who cross its path - the embalmer, spies, soldiers - end up haunted or dead.

In 1974, soon after the aging Juan Peron returned from exile to assume the presidency once more, he brought Evita back to her homeland with pomp and circumstance.

Her voyage ended in the Recoleta cemetery in the same elegant neighborhood, also called Recoleta, that in her speeches she often threatened to burn down. The cemetery is a necropolis of stone and marble walkways lined with ornate, closely packed mausoleums the size of small houses.

In Buenos Aires, the most fashionable enclave in the city is named after the city of the dead at its heart, where Evita rests - at least until further notice.