In 1949 the most familiar scene in Argentina was the one played out almost daily at the Ministry of Labor in Buenos Aires. There, under the glare of camera lights, a former radio star and movie actress, now the most powerful woman in South America, would enter her office past a crush of adoring, impoverished women and children. Evita Peron, the wife of President Juan Peron, would sit at her desk and begin one of the great rituals of Peronism, the political movement she and her husband created. It was a pageant that sustained them in power. She ....