Franco’s support for the Axis powers during World War II took its toll. Spain was isolated and impoverished by the boycott imposed by the United Nations. The triumphant democracies left Spain isolated internationally.
Only Perón came to his rescue. He signed an agreement with Madrid to sell him his wheat on credit, defended him at the UN and sent an ambassador to Madrid. In exchange, he obtained products necessary to industrialize his country.
A diplomat, Franco awarded Eva Duarte, Argentina’s first lady, the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, which she accepted with delight and announced that she would collect it personally.
On June 7, 1947, the long-awaited Evita landed at the Barajas airport, decked out for the occasion. The next day, nearly half a million people crowded the Plaza de Oriente to see the first lady of Argentina.
His visit was tremendous, his stay in Spain lasted 18 days and began in Villa Cisneros, in the Spanish Sahara, where he reviewed the soldiers mounted on camels, then visited in the company of his Spanish counterpart, Carmen Polo, in addition to Madrid, Toledo, Granada , Seville, Santiago de Compostela, Pontevedra, Zaragoza and Barcelona, ??where he stayed for three days. There she coincided with the Caudillo and both followed a folk festival in Plaça de Sant Jaume.
Around nine at night, Evita returned to the Pedralbes Palace where she was staying. The next day she left for Rome to visit Pius XII. Since her departure was not until the afternoon, the shops and offices delayed her arrival at work until five o’clock so that the “crowd” could see her off. Before, he made a proclamation very typical of Peronism on Radio Nacional: “I collect your applause, Spanish workers, because they are the expression of your rejection of those agitators who stir up the people with utopian promises, to abandon them once they have secured their fortunes ”.
On June 25, on the steps of the plane, dressed in a striking printed suit and a huge flower in her hair, she said a grateful goodbye to the Franco couple. Ten thousand people came to see her off.
Acclaimed and protagonist of all the nodes, she had achieved, among other achievements, the freedom for a 29-year-old communist, sentenced by the Franco regime to die by firing squad.
Franco put on a poker face, while his particular Evita, Carmen Polo, maintained a strained relationship with the attractive Argentine ambassador who insisted on visiting public hospitals and working-class neighborhoods instead of Madrid, the Austrians and the Bourbons. Knocked out by the beauty and the gift of people of the young woman of only 28 years, the Spanish first lady suffered in privacy.
But Evita’s visit did an effective job of legitimizing the Spanish government. In his speeches, he did not stop flattering Franco, diverting the attention of the Spanish from deprivation and international isolation.
Spain’s agreement with Argentina ensured the supply of wheat and palliated Spain’s exclusion from the Marshall Plan.
