Victoria Villarruel

Villarruel was born on 13 April 1975.[5] 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.[6] In 2008, she took a course in Inter-Agency Coordination and Combating Terrorism at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies,[7] a U.S. Department of Defense institution based at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.[8]

Villarruel and Admiral Julio Horacio Guardia with an image of Eliana Krawczyk

Villarruel has lectured on human rights and the victims of terrorism in many countries around the world, including the United States, Norway, Spain, Italy, France, Colombia, Uruguay, Peru, and Mexico. She has also been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, the Spanish newspaper ABC, and many other major world media.[9]

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.[10]

Los otros muertos, Villarruel's 2014 book about focusing on Argentine conflicts, presented methodological errors; she included 84 N.N., victims dated before the foundation of the groups she denounces as terrorists, victims of other groups like the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance, and did not differentiate between civilian deaths and military casualties.[11] 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.[6] Because of her criticism of the terrorists and of their rehabilitation, she has been accused of defending the Dirty War.[6] According to Villarruel, she received numerous threats, and consequently is obliged to take extensive precautions.[6]

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".[12][13][14] Villaruel is the running mate of Javier Milei in the 2023 Argentine general election. She 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.[15] They also held different views on the Argentine military dictatorship. While Milei publicily expressed that he is not a defender of it, Villaruel is the daughter of a military personnel and engages in historical revisionist accounts of the dictatorship.[16][17]

On social issues, while she is favorable to civil unions for same-sex couples, she is opposed to same-sex marriage.[15] She has defended the National Reorganization Process and has engaged in revisionist accounts of the military junta.[17] Those stances garnered controversy and criticism, and accusses of Argentine state terrorism denial.[18][16] In a 2011 interview, Villarruel asserted that opposition politicians in Argentina avoided speaking about the victims of 1970s terrorism. She engaged in some forms of historical denialism, and said that CELTYV 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.[19]

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."[6] As a result of her controversial statements, critics accused her of trying to rewrite the history of the military dictatorship and of whitewashing the junta, charges that she denied.[6]

• Los llaman... jóvenes idealistas (English: They call them... idealist youth), 2010.[9]
• The other dead (Los otros muertos), 2014, co-written with Carlos Manfroni.[7][10]

• CELTYV