70 years after the death of Eva Duarte de Perón, the miniseries Santa Evita premiered this Tuesday, starring Natalia Oreiro, as the former first lady, and Darío Grandinetti as former president Juan Domingo Perón. The Star+ production focuses on what happened to the embalmed body of one of the most loved and hated women in Argentine political history.
The series is based on the homonymous novel by the writer and journalist Tomás Eloy Martínez (1934-2010), which was published in 1995. The work is not exactly a biography of Eva Perón and despite its title it does not treat her as a “holy ”, but consists of the combination of real and fictional events that begin with the day of the death of the “spiritual leader” and focuses on the stormy fate of her remains.
“Santa Evita” was recorded in more than 40 locations and has the participation of 120 actors and actresses and an important work in the reconstruction of the time.
The series tells the story of Evita’s body after her death and the legend that has since been born. Thus, in addition to knowing a little about the life of who she was the first lady of Argentina, it will also be seen how she went through the disease from which she died at the age of 33 and what happened to her corpse. The body of Eva Duarte de Perón was kept waiting to be buried for three years for the construction of a mausoleum that never materialized.
In 1955, the Argentine military forces overthrew President Juan Domingo Perón and hid Evita’s body for many years, in order to prevent it from becoming a weapon against the regime. In this way, he will tell how his embalmed remains, after being veiled before millions of people, were kidnapped by the 1955 military dictatorship calling itself the Liberating Revolution. Before her death, Eva had become a great political figure and everything that happened after her death influenced the politics of the country until today.