Argentina's potential far-right Vice-President, a divisive figure reopening old wounds

In August, far-right presidential candidate Javier Milei won Argentina's primary election, typically regarded as a preview of how the Latin American nation's presidential election will go in October this year.

As Argentina grapples with a hard-hitting financial crisis, Milei, a self-described "anarcho-capitalist" has risen from a TV pundit to a presidential candidate, pledging to fix the nation’s deep-seated economic woes.

The political outsider pushes for fiscal balance by stopping money-printing, lowering public spending, reducing the size of the State by cutting 11 ministries including Education, Health, Social Development and Labour to form a single entity, imposing cuts to politicians' pensions and dollarising the economy. Milei refers to Argentina’s political establishment as the "caste," denounces the fight against socialism and champions private gun ownership.

The outsider politician is garnering the attention of influential conservative actors from the Global North. On September 8, former Fox News star Tucker Carlson tweeted a photo of himself alongside Milei, writing “enemy of the Washington Post and probably the next president of Argentina”. Local reports claim the Conservative pundit approached Milei for a highly-viewed interview that aired in mid-September.

While Milei continues his political ascent, his potential Vice-President, Victoria Villarruel from his Libertad Avanza coalition (LLA) is likewise garnering widespread attention.

Political rise

In 2021, Villarruel began her political push, putting herself forward as a candidate to become a national lawmaker for the City of Buenos Aires alongside Javier Milei, explains Cristian Nicolas Palmisciano, a researcher at Mar Del Plata’s National University.

“In those elections they were the third most voted political force in the country's capital,” Palmisciano tells TRT World.

Before Villarruel positioned herself in different political spaces.

Although she held no formal position, from 2015-2019 she was aligned with the Cambiemos party during Mauricio Macri’s presidency and before with the right-wing NOS party, led by the retired military officer, Juan Jose Gomez Centurion who participated in army-rebellions against Raul Alfonsin’s democratic government in the so-called "carapintadas uprisings," explains Palmisciano.

Now Villarruel’s hardline rhetoric appears to be reopening historic wounds from a dark-chapter in Argentine history.

Between 1976-1983, 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured, murdered or disappeared by State forces during Argentina’s civic-military government, according to rights groups.

“The Military Family”

Born in 1975, Villarruel is a graduate of law from the University of Buenos Aires, a lawyer and part of the so-called "military family" - a grouping of families tied to the military that Palmisciano argues since 1985 have sought “different ways to avoid trials of soldiers responsible for human rights violations during the dictatorship.”

Villarruel’s uncle and grandfather were servicemen. Her father, Eduardo Marcelo Villarruel participated in Operation Independence against the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) in the northern city of Tucuman and the Malvinas or Falklands War.

In the early 2000s Villarruel began aligning with groups tied to the so-called “military family,” such as the Asociacion Unidad Argentina and Jovenes por la Verdad.

In 2006, she founded the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV), a civil association pushing for State recognition of what she considers terrorism victims. Palmisciano explains this includes civilians murdered or kidnapped by political-revolutionary organisations like the Montoneros and the ERP and armed and security forces who died from attacks or were murdered.

Villarruel has pushed for the notion of “complete memory,” relating to such events, according to Valentina Salvi, a researcher at the National University of Tres de Febrero.

Salvi tells TRT World that CELTYV’s objective is to reassert the “notion of war," denying the dictatorial atrocities and notably "State terrorism committed in more than 350 clandestine detention centres."

CELTYV has participated in different international spaces related to terrorism and victims, alongside the United Nations, the EU and the 10th anniversary of the Atocha attack in Spain’s capital, Madrid, explains Palmisciano.

Christian Conservatism

Villarruel is reportedly part of an ultraconservative and controversial Catholic breakaway movement, the 'Society of Saint Pius X' (SSPX) or the Lefebvrists, founded in the 1960s by French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.

The SSPX opposes the Second Vatican Council, relating to the Church's 20th Century social doctrine proposing greater equality through class conciliation and improved quality of life for workers, allowing Milei’s political space to oppose notions of “social justice,” - an important tenet of the ruling Peronist coalition, explains Pablo Villarreal, a researcher at the “Laboratory of Studies on Democracy and Authoritarianism” at Argentina's National University of General San Martín.

After peddling Holocaust denialism to German media, in 2009 Cristina Fernandez's government expelled the SSPX’s then ex-communicated Archbishop Richard Williamson from Argentina.

This September at the Buenos Aires City Legislature Villarruel honoured those killed by left-wing rebel groups, holding talks with three people whose family members were slain in the 1970s prior to the military coup.

Amid tight security, Villarruel told those gathered that “after 40 years of an amputated vision of history, of tearing us away from our loved ones, of demonising us and trying to put a gag in our mouths, we say that we are not afraid of them.”

Rights groups mobilised in the capital to condemn Villarruel, viewing it as a “provocation,” and vindication of the autocracy.

Villarruel added,“Those who prevent our pain from being remembered are the ones who, in the name of human rights, only seek democracy for themselves and human rights exclusively for themselves."

Accusations of denialism

However, Palmisciano describes her "worrying" ambiguities regarding the autocracy.

"She has not publicly spoken out in favour of soldiers convicted of crimes against humanity, when she is consulted about her position regarding the dictatorship she responds through euphemisms and vagueness," he says, adding she does not deny crimes from that period but often appears "to justify them."

CELTYV pushes "The Theory of the Two Demons," arguing in the 1970s the military and civilians were victims of the “guerrilla” - a position held by Argentina until 2003, positing the armed forces and the guerrilla fought on equal footing, Villarreal explains.

Argentina’s position on the autocracy

"Under this theory, during the government of Raul Alfonsin (1983-1989), trials were held against the military leadership and the heads of the guerrilla organisations, leading to serious sentences against both," he says.

Argentina’s 1985 trial is the only occasion a democratic government has carried out a large-scale civil judicial case against dictatorial participants.

Amid a push for national reconciliation, President Carlos Menem's government from 1989-1999 enacted the Due Obedience and Full Stop laws, granting amnesty to both military personnel and guerrilla leaders, explains Villarreal.

Later under President Nestor Kirchner, the laws were repealed, abandoning “The Theory of Two Demons.” Instead, it contended between 1976 and 1983 the State’s actions should be considered as crimes against humanity and thus not imprescriptible, he argues.

Villarreal notes "the most emblematic moment" was Kirchner's visit to the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) previously used as a clandestine site of torture for some 5000 people who were later thrown alive in “death flights” into the ocean or river and now a UNESCO site. Military-leader Iconography from that period was removed while Kirchner gave a speech, apologising for the State’s "terror" from 1976-1983 and transforming the site into a site of "Memory, Truth and Justice."

"This new human rights policy brought the government closer to a series of groups historically linked to human rights and memory, such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and HIJOS," he says.

Under Kirchner, military junta trials also resumed, explains Villarreal, with numerous convictions, including prominent figures like Rafael Videla and head of the police investigations, Miguel Etchecolatz whom Villarruel both visited at the time of their trials and imprisonment.

Since 2006 when an amnesty law was struck down, Argentina has held 296 trials tied to crimes against humanity, resulting in convictions for 1,115 people.

Villarruel’s rhetoric

While her detractors have accused her of denialism, as a co-author of a 2013 book entitled “The other dead: The civilian victims of guerrilla terrorism in the 1970s,” Villarruel insists she is not a “denialist.”

She says there are victims of "left-wing tyranny,” who have not received justice, nor reparations.

However, during Alfonsin's tenure, numerous "guerrilla leaders" were imprisoned, others remained in exile avoiding prosecution, despite being sought internationally while others were murdered, according to Villarreal, adding the guerrillas' sentences were significantly fewer than the military as there were less of them.

Villarruel has also criticised the president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, calling her missing daughter a "terrorist".

Such remarks to unassuming people, Palmisciano argues, may result not only in the perception that Carlotto's daughter was part of a revolutionary group but potentially that any supposed "terrorist can be murdered or disappeared by State agents."

Local reports suggest if Villarruel becomes Vice President she plans to carry out an audit relating to State compensation to victims, having already taken aim in this regard at the Interior Minister Eduardo De Pedro whose father Enrique De Pedro disappeared during the dictatorship. The judiciary also determined his mother Lucila Revora, a Montonero and her then partner, Carlos Fassano were killed in an operation by State forces in 1978.

Salvi describes Villarruel's presence as the “consequence of the extreme political polarisation” between Argentina’s ruling party and the opposition.

Salvi describes a "sharpening" of this polarisation in Argentina, arguing it has engulfed the country's socio-political landscape.

Argentina’s recent pivot to the right

The initial years of the Kirchner government from 2003 onwards are perceived by many Argentines as largely bringing economic prosperity - from salary increases, economic stability and containment of inflation, explains Villarreal, acknowledging some backlash from groups defending military figures facing prosecution.

However, from 2008 onwards, a conflict between the government and agro-exporter sectors led to a political schism.

Villarreal argues it laid the foundation for "anti-interventionist, anti-statist and anti-egalitarian ideological discourses," related to State redistribution and "articulated from pro-military and denialist positions concerning State terror during the last military dictatorship”.

He suggests Milei's prominence in Argentina’s politics is predicated both on the failure of Macri’s government between 2015-2019 and Alberto Fernandez's government, amid a "generalised fatigue and disillusionment," by traditional Peronist voters opting for something "new" from an "outsider."

The long economic stagnation and spiralling inflation across Argentina's political landscape, has driven political positions closer towards Milei’s hardline discourse, Villarreal argues. In an "underhand manner" he suggests Villarruel's vindication of the military finds space in his discourse, contravening the State's official narrative over the last 20 years.

He says Milei's rhetoric places all those to his left politically as “communists."

"In this regard, it very much resembles the positions adopted by (former presidents) Donald Trump in the United States and (Jair) Bolsonaro in Brazil. At the same time, in recent times threats of violence against all “leftists” have increased, with allegories relating to the State’s actions during the last military dictatorship," Villarreal tells TRT World.

Ahead of October’s presidential election, Palmisciano notes Villarruel’s professional training from US institution, the ‘William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense’ which is part of the National Defense University and has been engulfed in numerous controversies relating to alleged human rights abuses. He underscores that if Milei is elected, then Villarruel would oversee policies related to defence and security.

On Wednesday night Argentina's five vice-presidential candidates participated in a fiery television debate. Agustin Rossi of the Union por la Patria debated Villarruel, exchanging a number of barbs. Villarruel defended her visits to military personnel convicted of crimes of humanity, claiming it was research for her book while Rossi hit out at her, alleging she vindicates the dictatorship.

"I have never heard you criticise torture or the theft of babies. Do you know who you remind me of? Of (former military officer Alfredo) Astiz, did you see that he infiltrated the Madres organisation (Madres de la Plaza de Mayo)? You are an infiltrator of democracy, you do not believe in democracy," said Rossi.