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Although Evi­ta Per­on has enjoyed a rep­u­ta­tion as a friend of Argenti­na’s down­trod­den, she was also instru­men­tal in help­ing to build the large Nazi and fas­cist emi­gre com­mu­ni­ty that devel­oped in that coun­try in the post-World War II peri­od. Dur­ing a 1947 tour of Europe, Evi­ta touched bases with Swiss and Span­ish gov­ern­ment offi­cials and Pope Pius XII (among oth­ers) in order to facil­i­tate the trans­port of numer­ous Nazis to Argenti­na. Juan Per­on (her hus­band) was not only the dic­ta­tor of Argenti­na but an ardent and open admir­er of Nazism and fas­cism. The “rat lines” that Evi­ta helped to devel­op were real­ized with the assis­tance of the large Ger­man-Argen­tine com­mu­ni­ty, ele­ments of the SS and its ODESSA net­work, Swiss gov­ern­ment offi­cials and pri­vate bankers and Argen­tine secu­ri­ty offi­cials employed by her hus­band. In addi­tion the wealth that many of the Nazi emi­gres brought to Argenti­na, the Nazi exiles con­tributed their tech­ni­cal exper­tise to the devel­op­ment of Argenti­na’s mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex. Ulti­mate­ly, the fas­cist roots that this Third Reich estab­lished in Argenti­na and else­where in Latin Amer­i­ca grew into the mur­der­ous fas­cist dic­ta­tor­ships that plagued the region in the 1970s and 1980s. (Record­ed in Feb­ru­ary of 1999.)