When the Argentine vice president Victoria Villarruel shared photographs of herself holding hands with Isabel Perón in a Madrid living room in October 2024, the images ricocheted through Latin American political commentary. Here was the current vice president of Argentina clasping the hand of a woman removed from power by military coup half a century earlier – the first person in history to hold the title of president, still formally accused of complicity in the deaths of over a thousand citizens. “Me alegro mucho que extrañen los viejos tiempos,” Perón told a reporter from Clarín in March 2026, stepping out of a hair salon in the Spanish capital. I’m so glad people miss the old times. She was ninety-five, and she had not spoken publicly in decades.
The remark detonated across Argentine social media days before the country commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the 24 March 1976 military coup – a coup that, according to human rights organisations, led to the disappearance of up to thirty thousand people. The timing was not lost on anyone. Isabel Perón, it seemed, was not sorry for the violence that had defined her presidency. She was nostalgic for it.
A Dancer’s Ascent
María Estela Martínez Cartas was born on 4 February 1931 in La Rioja, a provincial capital in the foothills of the Andes. Her father was a branch manager of the National Mortgage Bank, her mother a homemaker. She was the third of five siblings. She left school after five years of formal education to study ballet, Spanish dance, French, and piano. In her twenties, she joined a troupe of travelling folk dancers, working nightclubs and theatres across Latin America. She adopted the stage name Isabel, after her confirmation saint, Isabel of Portugal.
It was a peripatetic existence, the kind that offered spectacle without security. Then, in 1956, during a tour in Panama, everything changed. She was introduced to Juan Domingo Perón, the exiled former president of Argentina, ousted in a 1955 coup and living under Franco’s protection. Perón had already lost his first wife, Eva Duarte de Perón – the legendary Evita – whose death in 1952 had left a political void that, in time, Isabel would fill. Argentina in the mid-twentieth century was a crucible of cultural and political ferment, producing figures as disparate as the pop artist Marta Minujín and the Peróns themselves.
The attraction was not purely romantic. Perón needed a confidante, a secretary, someone to manage the endless stream of visitors to his Madrid home. Isabel, disciplined and attentive, became indispensable. She cooked for him, typed his letters, drove him to appointments, and absorbed his political philosophy – Peronism, a populist ideology blending state-directed economics with charismatic authoritarianism – with the earnestness of a convert. In 1961, under pressure from the Catholic Church, they married. She was thirty. He was sixty-five.
From Secretary to Vice President
During the long years of exile, Isabel transformed herself. She visited Argentina alone in the 1960s and early 1970s, representing her husband, mediating disputes among Peronist factions, and building a political profile of her own. She met Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai in Beijing on Perón’s behalf. She was no longer merely the dancer from the nightclub. She was a political operative, albeit one whose authority was always derivative.
The political landscape shifted in 1973. Argentina’s electoral ban on the Peronist Justicialist Party was lifted. Héctor Cámpora won the presidency in May, clearing the way for Perón’s triumphant return. When Perón touched down at Ezeiza airport on 2 June 1973, hundreds of thousands thronged to greet him. What followed was a catastrophe. Snipers fired from the presidential reception box into the crowd, killing and wounding dozens of young Peronist militants in what became known as the Ezeiza Massacre. The attack was organised by José López Rega, a former police corporal turned spiritual adviser who had attached himself to the Perón household and who, by 1973, wielded extraordinary influence.
López Rega, nicknamed “El Brujo” – The Warlock – for his obsession with mysticism, had been instrumental in selecting Isabel as Perón’s running mate. When Perón won the presidency in September 1973 with 61.85 per cent of the vote, Isabel became both First Lady and Vice President. Perón, by now in visibly failing health, had suffered a series of heart attacks. When he collapsed on 28 June 1974, Isabel was summoned home from a European trade mission and secretly sworn in as acting president. Three days later, on 1 July 1974, Juan Perón was dead.
Isabelita, as she was affectionately known, had become the first woman in the world to hold the title of president.
The Warlock’s Shadow
The distinction matters. Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon had become the world’s first female head of government in 1960 as prime minister. But the office of president – with its connotations of head-of-state authority – had never before been held by a woman. Isabel Perón broke that threshold. The irony is savage: she did so not through feminist conviction or popular mandate but through the accident of marriage, widowhood, and the machinations of a man who practised astrology and ran a death squad.
López Rega’s influence over Isabel was, by all accounts, total. A US State Department cable from December 1975 described him as “widely suspected of controlling and protecting” the Triple A – the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina. This organisation, operating under the Ministry of Social Welfare which López Rega controlled, was responsible for what Judge Norberto Oyarbide later ruled constituted “the beginning of the systematic process directed by the state apparatus” of political violence.
The CONADEP commission – Argentina’s National Commission on the Disappeared – documented 1,122 killings attributed to the Triple A between 1973 and 1975. Other estimates place the figure closer to 1,500. Targets included left-wing Peronists, Montoneros, trade unionists, and Jesuit priests. The group’s first public act was the car-bombing of Senator Hipólito Solari Yrigoyen on 21 November 1973.
Among the dead was the Jesuit priest Carlos Mugica, murdered in May 1974, and Silvio Frondizi, brother of former president Arturo Frondizi. The CONADEP report recorded nineteen homicides in 1973, fifty in 1974, and 359 in 1975 – a trajectory of escalating state-sanctioned terror. Isabel Perón’s defenders have argued she could not have anticipated López Rega’s activities. The evidence suggests otherwise. She signed the decrees. She maintained him in power until the Peronist unions forced his removal in July 1975. By then, the violence had already metastasised.
Economic Collapse and the Coup
The Triple A was only one dimension of the crisis. Isabel inherited an economy in freefall: rampant inflation, soaring unemployment, and a fiscal deficit her government attempted to address through the printing press. In mid-1975, López Rega, before his ousting, installed the economist Celestino Rodrigo as economy minister, who imposed brutal austerity measures known as the “Rodrigazo.” The resulting backlash further destabilised a country already on the brink.
On 24 March 1976, the military intervened. General Jorge Rafael Videla led a coup that toppled Isabel Perón’s government. She was arrested at the presidential residence, flown by helicopter to a naval base, and eventually placed under house arrest. Her brief presidency – one year and 267 days – ended not with a whimper but with the beginning of Argentina’s bloodiest chapter: the “Dirty War” of 1976–1983, during which an estimated thirty thousand people were disappeared by the military junta. The Triple A’s violence had, in effect, been a rehearsal.
Isabel was held for five years before being convicted of corrupt practices. She was paroled in 1981 and exiled to Spain, where she has lived since – a fortified existence in a three-storey chalet in Villanueva de la Cañada, outside Madrid. Her life is guarded by a twenty-four-hour security system valued at two hundred thousand euros, staffed by a permanent circle of twelve lawyers, assistants, and domestic workers. She receives a military pension. Her personal fortune is estimated at over four million euros. She has not returned to Argentina in any official capacity.
The Far Right’s Favourite Ancestor
In January 2007, Argentine judge Norberto Oyarbide issued an arrest warrant for Perón, charging her with responsibility for the disappearance of a leftist activist. Interpol agents detained her briefly in Madrid before Spain’s National Court refused the extradition request, ruling the charges constituted neither crimes against humanity nor crimes within the statute of limitations. The case was closed. Isabel Perón was, legally speaking, untouchable.
But politically, she remained relevant – if only as a symbol. In October 2024, Vice President Victoria Villarruel travelled to Madrid to meet her, posting photographs of the encounter on social media with the caption: “Con Isabel Martínez de Perón, primera presidente mujer del mundo y de la Argentina constitucionalmente elegida. Vicepresidente como yo y argentina bien nacida.” The gesture was unmistakable: the current Argentine vice president, a member of the far-right bloc, was claiming lineage from the first woman president not as a feminist milestone but as a Peronist one.
Analysts noted the broader pattern. “The extreme right, in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, have been exacerbating the security agenda which is creating false nostalgia for times of dictatorship, particularly among young men,” political scientist Sofía Riffo told Argentina Reports. “We have failed as progressive groups, as an inclusive society.”
When asked, in that March 2026 interview, what she would say to Argentines fifty years on from the coup that removed her, Isabel Perón offered no apology, no contrition. “Me alegro mucho que extrañen los viejos tiempos,” she repeated. She smiled. The cameras clicked. And then she returned inside, behind the iron gates and the twenty-four-hour monitoring, into the golden exile that history had – reluctantly, disastrously – granted her.
Isabel Perón once wrote her own epitaph: “I’m a humble woman of the people whose only merit is to have been a disciple of Perón and my love for Perón and the Argentine people.” History, which has never been kind to Argentina, has not been kind to that sentiment either. The first female president left behind a country convulsed by violence, governed by a warlock, and haunted by thirty thousand ghosts. The old times were not kind. And some Argentines, it seems, have not yet learned to stop missing them.
