San Vicente, Argentina ? A lavish reburial ceremony for Argentine strongman Juan Domingo Peron degenerated into violence Tuesday, as rival factions hurled rocks at one another and riot police dispersed them with rubber bullets and tear gas.

The fighting between club-wielding groups of men on the fringes of a large and mostly peaceful crowd of thousands resulted in at least 40 injuries, according to local media reports. One man was televised firing a gun.

The violence apparently was sparked by members of rival factions of the Peronist party angry about not being able to gain entrance to the ceremony, according to local TV and newspaper reports. However, authorities had no immediate confirmation on the motives for the battles or the groups involved.

As Peron’s cortege traveled from his old tomb in downtown Buenos Aires to the new mausoleum at his former weekend estate, thousands of weeping admirers tossed carnations and confetti.

Riot police tightly ringed the flag-draped coffin as it made its way toward the new crypt. As Peron’s body was laid into the new mausoleum, hundreds of supporters clapped and yelled “Viva! Long live Peron!”

The independent television network TodosNoticias captured the midafternoon violence and showed one man with what appeared to be a handgun in a small group of men. The televised footage showed his gun recoiling four times in a matter of seconds, smoke rising from the barrel.

Before Peron’s body arrived, men outside the estate, shirtless, unleashed a fusillade of rocks and sticks against the stout wooden entrance gate. The violence lasted several minutes before groups inside put ladders up against the brick walls of the estate and lobbed rocks back in defense.

People run beside the motorcade carrying the coffin of former Argentine leader Juan Domingo Peron in Buenos Aires while traveling to his final resting place at his former weekend estate of San Vicente, 28 miles southwest of the capital. Peron, who dominated Argentine politics for years, was being buried for a third time since his death in 1974, having first been interred at the presidential palace and later moved to a family plot.

“This was supposed to be a fiesta, a historic day. Instead it is a great shame,” said one woman fleeing with her family. Others left in cars with windows shattered by rocks.

Removed from the Peron family’s relatively humble crypt at the Chacarita cemetery in Buenos Aires, Peron’s body was borne in a coffin topped by a military cap and saber in an hourslong procession led by guards on horseback to a new $1.1 million mausoleum outside the capital. Authorities closed a major highway ahead of the sunset reburial – Peron’s third since his death in 1974.

Peron dominated Argentine politics like no other 20th-century leader with his glamorous wife Evita at his side, cultivating an enormous working-class following by redirecting agricultural wealth to legions of urban poor through projects to build schools, hospitals and homes.

First elected president in 1946, Peron was ousted in a coup in 1955 amid economic turmoil and went into exile for 17 years.

In the early 1970s, Peron returned to Argentina from exile in Spain and ruled briefly until his death in 1974 at age 78. He was succeeded by his third wife, Isabel, who brought Evita’s body to rest by his in the presidential residence in Buenos Aires. Evita Peron died from cancer in 1952 at age 33.

After Isabel Peron was ousted in a 1976 coup, the military quietly dispatched the bodies of both Juan and Evita Peron to their families’ respective crypts.

Supporters say Peron deserves a resting place befitting a national hero, a place more grand than the crowded urban cemetery where grave robbers broke in and stole his hands in 1987.

Relatives of Evita Peron have opposed moving her coffin from her family’s tomb in the Recoleta cemetery in downtown Buenos Aires to lie beside her husband.