'He was tasked with making the body disappear': The macabre kidnapping of Eva Perón's corpse

Argentina's iconic first lady died in July 1952. Sixty years on, the BBC looked back at her cadaver's bizarre disappearance – and its 16-year journey around the globe.

A few hours after the death of Eva Perón, on 26 July 1952, Dr Pedro Ara got to work. The renowned Spanish anatomist was tasked with embalming the Argentinian first lady's body in the same way the Russians had preserved the remains of Lenin and Stalin. The corpse of Evita, as she was affectionately known, was kept in the Ministry of Labour building, where a monument to workers was due to be built, with a glass coffin at its base that would be her final resting spot.

Warning: This article contains details that some may find distressing. 

Yet three years later, in September 1955, her husband, President Juan Perón, was deposed in a military coup and went into exile. The new regime decided to steal Eva Perón's body – setting off a macabre 16-year odyssey. Her cadaver would be held at the Centre for Military Intelligence, stored in a van, buried in Milan, and transported to Madrid before it was eventually returned to Buenos Aires to be laid to rest in a heavily fortified crypt.

After Eva Perón died of cervical cancer at the age of 33, her husband had political reasons for having her embalmed. Her poor rural background and her charitable works as first lady had won her fervent working-class support. "So he wanted to preserve that, [by] preserving the body," Flavia Fiorucci, a historian of Peronism, told the BBC in 2012. "It also had to do with the importance that Perón and Peronism gave to symbols, and Evita was a symbol."

That was clear in the weeks after her death. Dr Ara was able to embalm Evita's body in a lifelike state using a paraffin and glycerine injection technique. Two million people visited her coffin as she lay in state in Congress for 14 days, the devotion she'd inspired while alive continuing after her death.

And the symbolism of Evita's body was the reason for the long meandering journey it took over the next 16 years. When Perón was deposed in 1955, the dictatorship led by Gen Pedro Aramburu aimed to quash all aspects of Peronism – and feared that her corpse could become an emblem of resistance.

Lt Col Carlos Moori Koenig, head of the Army Intelligence Service, moved it around Buenos Aires, paranoid that Peronists might attempt to retrieve it. Evita's cadaver was said to be hidden in a van parked on the streets of the capital, behind a cinema screen, and inside the city's waterworks – and wherever it went, flowers and candles appeared.

Koenig then moved the body to his office, where he allegedly stood the coffin upright, and showed it off to visitors. He was said to have become obsessed with her corpse. "I knew him from military school. He was completely normal, but after getting his hands on the body, he went mad," said Col........

© BBC