Victoria Villarruel

Victoria Eugenia Villarruel (born 13 April 1975) is an Argentine politician, lawyer, writer, and activist who has served as vice president of Argentina since 2023. Described as a conservative politician, she is the founder of the civil association Centro de Estudios Legales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas, which she has chaired since its inception. She was a member of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies from 2021 to 2023. Villarruel belongs to the La Libertad Avanza political coalition. She has been accused of Argentine state terrorism denial by several media outlets and human rights organisations. Villarruel denies such accusations, maintaining that she does not support the National Reorganization Process.

Early life and education
Villarruel was born on 13 April 1975. Her grandfather was a historian who was employed by the Argentine Navy; according to her, he survived four guerrilla bombings. Her father was a high-ranked Argentine Army member. In 2008, she took a course in Inter-Agency Coordination and Combating Terrorism at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, a U.S. Department of Defense institution based at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

Activism
Villarruel hosted a radio programme called Proyecto Verdad in the early 2000s. She began her political activism as part of the group of Karina Mujica, president of the association Memoria completa, according to statements by retired Major Colonel Pedro Rafael Mercado, Cecilia Pando's husband. Villarruel was also part of the Association of Relatives and Friends of Political Prisoners of Argentina (AFyAPPA), of which Pando was president. She protested in front of the Comodoro Py courts together with Pando to demand the release of those convicted of crimes against humanity during the National Reorganization Process. According to Mercado, between 2001 and 2003, she was part of the meetings that would later give rise to Jóvenes por la Verdad, a group of which he was a member, dedicated to organizing visits to Jorge Rafael Videla while he was under house arrest, and which was also in charge of collecting letters for ESMA repressor Ricardo Cavallo while he was imprisoned in Spain, and Villarruel personally arranged for Mercado and his son to meet Videla.

In 2003, she founded the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV), which several human rights organizations in the country repudiated for having denialist views and vindicating the theory of the two demons. On 21 December 2005, she participated in the first march of the Association of Relatives and Friends of Political Prisoners of Argentina (AFyAPPA), which criticized Cristina Fernández de Kirchner for calling "those who saved us from subversive terrorism criminals". AFyAPPA is an association that considers military and security forces personnel prosecuted by the civilian justice system for their participation in state terrorism during the last military dictatorship to be political prisoners and calls for their release.

Speaking at the Oslo Freedom Forum in 2011, Villarruel challenged what she described as "the official history" of modern Argentina. According to that history, terrorism took place more or less exclusively during the Dirty War, when the nation was under a military junta; Villarruel's point of view was that organized terrorism also occurred between 1973 and 1976, when it had a democratic government. She postulated that the two major Argentine guerrilla groups of that era, the People's Revolutionary Army and Montoneros, had links with the Castro regime in Cuba and with the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), with at least one of the groups training Islamists in the Middle East and supplying the PLO with weapons that were used in deadly attacks on Israel. Villarruel said that this history was later covered up by the Kirchner government, that the terrorists of the 1970s went on to enjoy the Kirchners' protection, and that many of those former terrorists held positions of responsibility in the Argentine establishment, citing civil servants or journalists. In her talk, Villarruel also accused the Kirchner government of acting in complicity with Iran.

Los otros muertos, Villarruel's 2014 book about focusing on Argentine conflicts, has been alleged to include methodological errors, such as listing 84 N.N. (identity unknown) victims from dates prior to the founding of the groups she denounces as terrorists, victims of other groups like the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, and failing to differentiate between civilian deaths and military casualties. According to Villarruel, the majority of their crimes had in fact been committed during the three years of democracy immediately prior to the 1976 military coup. Because of her criticism of the terrorists and of their rehabilitation, she has been accused of defending the Dirty War.

Political career
In 2020, Villarruel signed the Madrid Charter, a document drafted by the far-right Spanish party Vox that describes left-wing groups, such as the São Paulo Forum and the Puebla Group, as enemies of Ibero-America and accuses them of engaging in "a criminal project under the umbrella of the Cuban regime" that "seeks to destabilize liberal democracies and the state of law". In the 2021 Argentine legislative election, Villarruel was elected to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies, a position she maintained until 2023; she was an independent politician until she joined in 2022 the conservative Democratic Party. She was also the running mate of Javier Milei in the 2023 Argentine general election as part of the La Libertad Avanza coalition, and was elected Vice President of Argentina.

During their presidential campaign, observers pointed to several differences between Villarruel and Milei. Villarruel supports civil unions but not same-sex marriage in Argentina, and disagrees with Milei on questions like organ trade legalization, on the grounds that the human body is not a good; their differences of views have been explained as philosophical issues due to Milei's economist background. They also held different views on the National Reorganization Process. While Milei publicily expressed that he is not a defender of it, Villarruel is the daughter of a military officer and has been accused by some of historical revisionism in her accounts of the period. Despite this, she had a significant influence on Milei during the campaign.

During a September 2023 debate, Villarruel was accused by Agustín Rossi, the vice-presidential candidate from the Union for the Homeland, of "infiltrating democracy", while the leftist vice-presidential candidate Nicolás del Caño from the Workers' Left Front asked Villarruel about her meetings with Videla and what they talked about, referencing the Etchecolatz case. In late August 2023, it was made public that Villarruel's name and mobile phone number were written down in handwriting by Miguel Etchecolatz, who was convicted of kidnapping and murder in the Night of the Pencils, in the diary where he was preparing the defence of his trial in 2006 for crimes against humanity. Referencing one of the military dictatorship's most infamous members, a former marine officer also known as "the Angel of Death", Rossi told Villarruel: "I think that, deep down, you vindicate the dictatorship. I've never heard you criticize the torture, the rapes, or the stealing of babies. You remind me of Astiz, you know how he infiltrated the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo organization?" In response to Rossi's claims that she does not believe in democracy, Villarruel said: "Not only do I believe in democracy, but I have also been calling for democracy to recognize the civilian victims of terrorism that were attacked by the armed organizations you are implicitly defending."

In a November 2023 debate between the vice-presidential candidates, Villarruel denied the existence of 30,000 missing persons and defended the role played in the illegal repression by Juan Daniel Amelong, an Argentine Army lieutenant colonel who has accumulated five convictions for crimes against humanity committed in Rosario, Santa Fe. Her denialist statements attracted criticism not only from the human rights secretary Horacio Pietragalla Corti and Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel but also from leaders of the conservative Juntos por el Cambio coalition, the Radical Civic Union deputy Mario Negri, and Pablo Avelluto, who criticized Patricia Bullrich for having praised Villarruel's performance in the debate.

Political positions
Politically, Villlarruel has been described as a conservative and a right-wing nationalist. On social issues, while she is favorable to civil unions for same-sex couples, she is opposed to same-sex marriage. She has defended the National Reorganization Process, which along with some of her views on the military junta period, have garnered criticism. Those stances have attracted controversy, including accusations of Argentine state terrorism denial. In a 2011 interview, Villarruel asserted that opposition politicians in Argentina avoided speaking about the victims of 1970s terrorism. She said that the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism had managed to identify by name 13,074 victims of terrorists, of which 1,010 were assassinated, and added that this figure was only preliminary. Villarruel's views on social issues are heavily influenced by her traditional Catholic faith, as she attends a church from the Society of Saint Pius X.

After the end of the Kirchner era in early 2016, Villarruel continued to criticize the presidencies of Néstor Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, alleging that they defended left-wing terrorists, and engaged in whataboutism regarding victims of terrorism to deflect from those of the junta. She said: "For the past twelve years, the Kirchner governments have glorified the armed struggle of the guerrillas. In Argentina, if you don't support the guerrillas, people assume you support the dictatorship." As a result of her statements, critics accused her of trying to rewrite the history of the military dictatorship and of whitewashing the junta, charges that she denied.

As Vice President, Villaruel has opposed plans by Javier Milei to deploy the Argentine military to intervene in domestic security operations, particularly in the context of increasing drug-related violence in Rosario, saying that "The role of the armed forces is not to fight civilians."

Personal life
Villarruel is a traditionalist Catholic and attends the Tridentine Mass at the chapel of Our Lady Mediatrix of All Graces in Buenos Aires; the chapel is operated by the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), a traditionalist Catholic group which is not in full communion with the Holy See. According to Father Javier Olivera Ravasi, she is not a member of the SSPX but attends such chapel because it is the only one offering the Tridentine Mass in the area, and she also attends the mass of Paul VI elsewhere in the city.

In addition to her native Spanish, Villarruel is conversational in English and Japanese.

Publications

 * Los llaman... jóvenes idealistas (They Call Them... Idealist Youth), 2010.
 * Los otros muertos. Las víctimas civiles del terrorismo guerrillero de los 70 (''The Other Dead: The Civilian Victims of Guerrilla Terrorism in the 1970s), 2014, co-written with Carlos Manfroni.