Peronist March

The story

The "Peronist March", officially "Los muchachos peronistas" ("The Peronist Boys"), is the anthem of the Peronist movement founded and led by Juan Domingo Perón and the official song of Argentina's Justicialist Party. The English article credits its present words to the education minister Oscar Ivanissevich in 1948 and its music to Juan Raimundo Streiff, who wrote it as a football club anthem; the Spanish article calls the march anonymous, noting that several composers have claimed its words and music. According to some accounts it was first sung at the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace, on 17 October 1948.

The music historians Néstor Pinsón and Ricardo García Blaya, weighing every published account, concluded that it grew from two melodies of the later 1920s. The tune of the refrain came from a murga, a carnival street band, of the working-class Buenos Aires district of La Boca. The verses came from the march of the Barracas Juniors football club, with music by Streiff, a bandoneon player and post office clerk, and words by a neighbour known as "El turco Mufarri", a writer of murga songs. A phrase of the words goes back to the railway workers' union leader José Domenech, a socialist, who had introduced Colonel Perón at a union meeting in Rosario as Argentina's first worker.

Hugo del Carril recorded it in 1949, the most popular of many versions; Héctor Mauré and Francisco Canaro's orchestra also recorded it, and it has been played as tango, jazz, carnavalito, chacarera, waltz, folk, cumbia, rock and heavy metal. A version for Eva Perón, "Evita Capitana" ("Captain Evita"), was the official anthem of the Female Peronist Party and has become popular among Peronist feminists, and the "Marcha Perón-Ibáñez", with words by Alberto Marino, was performed by Héctor Ángel Benedetti in 1953 to mark the friendship of Perón and the Chilean president Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. After Perón went into exile in September 1955 a version was made calling for his return.

The words have stayed the same, but groups within Peronism have added their own verses, among them the Montoneros and Guardia de Hierro, and in recent years verses about the governments of Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. The tune of the refrain has also passed into sport, where crowds sing it to cheer on a champion.

What it says

The anthem of a political movement, in praise of Juan Domingo Perón and the working people who followed him; festive and rallying.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so the Institute does not print them itself: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.