The 1955 Argentine coup d'état, which deposed Juan Perón, altered the conditions that had allowed European Nazi fugitives to find refuge in Argentina. In the novel’s account, the coup is more than a change of government: it interrupts the protection and escape arrangements linking Perón’s Argentina with Clara Stauffer’s network in Madrid.

Background and Perón’s rule

The coup belongs to a longer history of political exile. After being overthrown by fellow officers in September 1955, Perón lived in exile in Venezuela, where he began his relationship with Isabel, then a cabaret dancer performing under the stage name Isabel Gómez. She shared his exile across several countries before they settled in Madrid and married in 1961. Their lives thus connect Argentina’s political upheaval with the Spanish setting of the novel’s postwar escape networks.

The coup and its consequences

The account identifies the 1955 military coup as the event that displaced Perón and sent him into exile. Its importance extends beyond the personal fate of the former president: Perón’s government had offered hospitality to European fugitives, and Argentina had served as a destination for people helped along by Nazi escape networks. The regime change therefore undermines the political shelter on which those routes depended.

The refuge network

The book places Stauffer’s Madrid organization alongside networks operating through the Vatican, describing their habitual cooperation and their shared reliance on the refuge Argentina afforded their protégés. The Vatican-linked route carried fugitives through Italy toward South America; Stauffer’s organization was larger and more effective still. Together, the networks represent a practical system of escape and impunity, rather than the all-powerful organization imagined in the later myth of ODESSA.

That system’s success, the narrative says, was interrupted in 1955 when the military coup overthrew Perón. The coup thus supplies a political endpoint to a period in which Madrid-based assistance and Argentine hospitality reinforced one another. Its significance lies not only in who held power in Argentina, but in how a change of government could constrict the routes and protections available to fugitives.