Victoria Villarruel
| Victoria Villarruel | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| |||
 From: December 10, 2023 | |||
| President | Javier Milei | ||
| Predecessor | Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner | ||
| Successor | Incumbent (no successor) | ||
From: December 10, 2021 – December 10, 2023 | |||
| Predecessor | Carlos Néstor Onteiro | ||
| Successor | María Fernanda Araujo | ||
| Information | |||
| Party | Democratic Party from the coalition "La Libertad Avanza" (Liberty Advances) | ||
| Religion | Traditional Catholic (Assists a church of the  Society of Saint Pius X)
| ||
Victoria Eugenia Villarruel (born 13 April 1975) is an Argentine conservative politician, lawyer, and activist who is the vice president of Argentina. She won presidential election along with Javier Milei to form first conservative government in Argentina since four decades of leftist domination. Villarruel is a Traditional Catholic that attends the Society of Saint Pius X, is pro-life, opposes same sex marriage, defends family values and the military men who fought against terrorism and guerrillas on the 70s.
Political Career
In 2006 she created the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV) to seek reparations for the victims of the Montoneros and the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP), Argentine guerrilla organizations active since the early 1970s, before the military coup of 1976.
The Montoneros had Peronist roots, linked to the movement created by former Argentine President Juan Domingo Perón; the ERP was a Trotskyist-oriented organization.
Daughter, niece and granddaughter of military men, Vicky, as her followers call her, has said that Argentina hid that part of history.
"We are managing to address a lot of ideas that were unthinkable, that were untouchable, that could not be questioned," Villarruel said in the final stretch of the first round campaign, in an interview with Cadena 3 radio, from the province of Córdoba.
Milei's now vice-president continued to have no direct involvement in party politics until she joined her running mate. Victoria Villarruel only began to become known nationally when she was sworn in as a federal deputy in December 2021.
"For the victims of terrorism," she said at the microphone, at the inauguration ceremony at the National Congress.
That December 2021, Victoria Villarruel and Javier Milei inaugurated the small group called La Libertad Avanza (LLA), a movement through which they ran for the presidency after a meteoric growth.
"She has already said, for example, that she wants to implement laws to compensate guerrilla victims and create a monument to remember them. Whether she will achieve it or not, we don't know," he continued.
Villarruel affirms that "there are 1,094 victims of terrorism in the seventies" who "were never recognized by the State". According to Reato, who knows the subject from the research and interviews he conducted for his books, the relatives of these dead "never received any compensation".
Villarruel has been questioned for having gone to visit former president Jorge Rafael Videla in prison before his death in 2013. In response, she says she went to interview him for her historical books about the 1970s.
She repeated that, once in power, she will promote a review of the compensations granted by the State to the victims who were subjected to State repression.
The lawyer does not speak of numbers, but in her speeches she mentions that the guerrillas were killed in combat or the militants committed suicide in prison out of loyalty to their movements, should not be recognized by the State.
"Security management in the last twenty years has made an enormous effort to demonize those who wear uniforms and whose role, on the part of the state, is to protect citizens, their property and their freedom," said Villarruel, in an interview with the daily newspaper El Tribuno, of Salta Province, prior to the elections.[1]
