The unfinished monument.

• Author: Eloy Martinez, Tomas
• Position: Excerpt from 'Santa Evita' - Fiction

In July 1951, Evita conceived the idea of a Monument to the Descamisado. She wanted it to be the tallest, the most massive, the most costly one in the world, one that could be seen from a long way off, like the Eiffel Tower. This is what she told the deputy Celina Rodriguez de Martinez Paiva, who was to present the project in Congress. "The work must serve to rouse the fervor of Peronists and be an outlet for their emotions forevermore, even when none of us is still alive."

At the end of that year, Evita approved the model. The central figure, a muscular worker one hundred eighty feet high, would stand on a pedestal two hundred fifty feet high. There would be an enormous square, three times larger than the Champs de Mars, surrounded by statues of Love, Social Justice, Rights of the Elderly, and Children: The Only Privileged. In the center of the monument a sarcophagus would be constructed, like Napoleon's at Les Invalides, but made of silver, with a recumbent image in relief. The immense structure, almost the same size as the Statue of Liberty, was to be placed in an open space between the law school and the presidential residence. Evita was so excited by the model that she gave orders that the figure of the muscular worker be replaced with a statue of herself. Congress hastened to approve the idea twenty days before she died, and Evita herself refers in her last will and testament to that illusion of eternity: "I will thus feel forever close to my people and will continue to be the bridge of love linking the descamisados and Peron."

After the funeral rites, the euphoria occasioned by the monument gradually waned. The foundations began to be dug at a pace whose slowness was fraught with meaning. When Peron fell, there...