Eduardo Vuletich

Argentine President Juan Peron and Eduardo Vuletich (image published with permission of the Vuletich family - all rights reserved retained) One of the Argentines of Montenegrin origin who left the deepest impression in the recent history of that South American country, it is certainly Eduardo Vuletić. He was born on September 29, 1909 in Dolores, Buenos Aires province. Eduardo is the son of Dušan Vuletić, a Montenegrin emigrant from a marriage with Uruguayan Juana Paredes. He was only five years old when it happened to him his father's death, after which he moved to Buenos Aires with his mother. He finished prestigious school in Ameghino, where he graduated in pharmacology. Very early he starts working as a radio journalist, where he achieves significant success. In the early fifties, he was elected as a well-known trade union activist for the general secretary of the federal union of pharmacists. It comes in those years in contact with the Peron family, with whom he soon becomes very close. After the death of Eva Peron, with whom he was a close friend, on October 28, 1951 appointed to the post of general secretary of all labor unions in Argentina which he covers until October 1955. At the same time, he became president of the executive committee of the Peronist movement and president of the foundation Eva Peron, the foundation that continued the works of Eva Peron after whom it is named humanitarian actions made Peronism recognizable. It broke out in 1955 the revolution that brings the end of the Peronist era, Juan Peron goes to exile to Spain, and Eduardo, who was loyal to him to the very end, refuses cooperation with the coup plotters, who put him in prison, where he is in very difficult conditions spent 30 months under conditions without any verdict or charge. It finally happens released only thanks to an agreement between Juan Peron and Dr. Arturo Frondisi according to which Peron from exile supports Frondisi as president candidate. Tortured by imprisonment and all kinds of mistreatment, Eduardo died forever withdrew from political life, which was the opposite of his expectations like-minded political people. He died at a very old age in 1983 parkinson's disease. The family of Eduardo Vuletić lives in Buenos Aires today, descendants of Dušan brother who arrived with him on the soil of South America, mostly live in Montevideo in the Republic of Uruguay. We thank his son Dr. Jorge Daniel Vuletich for his help in collecting biography about Eduardo. Gordan Stojovic www.montenegro.com

The Montenegrin-Argentine community

Where the community came from. Most Montenegrins who reached Argentina arrived in the decades around 1900, part of the mass movement from southern Europe into the River Plate. They came disproportionately from the coast and the poorer inland districts, and they arrived without an independent state behind them to register or represent them.

How it organised itself. As with other small communities, associations, churches and mutual-aid societies did the work that consulates did for larger nationalities — keeping records, arranging burials, teaching the language to children born in Argentina. Those bodies are the reason individual lives from this period can still be traced at all.

Why individual figures matter. In a community this size, one person reaching public life leaves a disproportionate documentary trail — and that trail is often the only route back to the ordinary migrants around them, who left no papers of their own.