Juan Perón's death and Isabel Perón's succession to the presidency mark a decisive political transition in Argentina: after Perón died on 1 July 1974, his vice president took office, remaining president for more than a year and a half before the military coup of 24 March 1976. The account sets that succession within Isabel’s passage from exile and political partnership with Perón to the presidency, then traces the junta’s seizure of power and the regime that called itself the National Reorganization Process.

Isabel Perón’s path to the presidency

María Estela Martínez de Perón, known as Isabel or Isabelita, had been a dancer using the stage name Isabel Gómez at the Passapoga cabaret in Caracas when she began her relationship with Juan Domingo Perón in late 1955. Perón was then living in exile after being deposed by fellow officers that September. Isabel shared his exile in several countries before settling with him in Madrid, where they married in 1961.

From 1965, Isabel made several trips to Buenos Aires to prepare for Perón’s return. When he won the 1973 presidential election, she stood second on his electoral list, placing her directly in line to succeed him. That political role became the constitutional hinge between his death and her accession to the presidency.

Death and succession

Perón died on 1 July 1974. Within hours, Isabel, then vice president, became president of Argentina. She remained in office for more than eighteen months, until the armed forces overthrew her government on 24 March 1976. The compressed interval between the death and transfer of office gives the succession its immediate force in the narrative: private bereavement and public continuity are followed, within less than two years, by military seizure of power.

The coup and its aftermath

The coup leaders deposed Isabel and detained her, confining her to a villa in Neuquén Province in remote Patagonia. They then established a dictatorship under the name National Reorganization Process. Its governing structure was a three-service junta: Lieutenant General Jorge Rafael Videla represented the Army as its commander general, Admiral Emilio Eduardo Massera the Navy, and Brigadier General Orlando Ramón Agosti the Air Force.

Although authority was presented as a three-way arrangement, Videla acted as the Process’s leader until 1981, when a new junta headed by Lieutenant General Roberto Eduardo Viola replaced the first. Two further juntas followed. The military rulers eventually had to relinquish power and call elections after Argentina’s defeat in the Falklands War, the spread of protests within the country, and the loss of international support; the elections took place in October 1983.

Narrative and historical significance

The succession is presented not as an isolated change of office but as the brief interval before a dictatorship. Isabel’s rise from exile alongside Perón to the presidency connects the story’s account of political displacement with the immediate vulnerability of the government she inherited. The coup’s detention of the former president and the military junta’s changing leadership extend that transition into a prolonged period of rule, while the final return to elections supplies the episode’s political endpoint.