Peron's appeal for national unity did little to satisfy his followers:
• The Peronistas who had worked for his return found that he had lost his revolutionary drive.
• The middle class and the trade union members in the party were disturbed by Peron's declared aim of seeking 'an integrated society'; which they took to mean that he intended to remove the privileges he had previously granted them in return for their support.
• He upset another of his traditional props, the military, by intimating that while he intended to build up the army as a modern professional force he also planned to lessen its political influence.
For all his apparent wish to see Argentina become an integrated democracy, Peron was still prepared to use his customary methods of repression. In order to destroy the Left-wing organizations of which he disapproved, he gave his backing to an undercover unit, known as the Triple A, whose methods for crushing communists and socialists included kidnapping, torture and assassination.
Whatever Peron's intentions may have been when, in October 1973, he became president for the third time, the reality was he was no longer in a position to direct events. He was 78 years old and had less than a year to live. During his last months he rapidly lost his sharpness of mind and political acumen, a consequence of the Alzheimer's disease which had begun to afflict him. He relied heavily on his third wife, Isabel Cartas, whom he had married in 1962 and who had been elected as his Vice-President. By the time Peron died from a heart attack in July 1974, she was, in effect, running the presidency, something which she then did formally in her own right as President after his death.
World History
