Victoria Villarruel: Argentina’s hardline vice-president seeking to rewrite its history

When Argentines elected their new president Javier Milei, a libertarian economist promising drastic reform, he came as a package with a very different political figure: vice-president Victoria Villarruel, an activist who has built her career on hardline cultural conservatism.

Villarruel, 48, now leads the senate and is first in the line of succession for the presidency — a crucial position, analysts say, given that Milei’s status as a political outsider with few congressional seats raises a real possibility of him not finishing his four-year term.

Yet, unlike Milei, Villarruel has little record in dealing with the economic issues that dominate Argentina’s political debate.

Instead, her focus has been on changing how Argentina understands its 20th-century history. Villarruel has spent the past two decades, as an NGO founder and frequent television panellist, denouncing crimes committed by leftist guerrilla groups in the early 1970s — a campaign her opponents say implicitly justifies the violent rightwing dictatorship that took power in 1976.

She is a more polished political performer than Milei, an eccentric known for irascible rants and a wild haircut. At his inauguration, Villarruel made headlines by greeting the delegation from Japan in Japanese, which she speaks conversationally, along with advanced English and a strikingly well-enunciated, staccato Spanish.

Villarruel closed her first senate session in mid-December with a barb directed at left-leaning Peronist legislators, whom she accuses of cronyism.

“Now we have to legislate and ensure that Argentina is a place for everyone, not just [your] friends,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

Early indications suggest Villarruel, who was elected to congress alongside Milei in 2021 for his La Libertad Avanza movement (LLA), will play a frontline role in his government, said Juan Germano, director of political consultancy Isonomía. 

“She is no second-rate cast member,” he said. “She’s a figure with her own agenda — an extremely clear one.”

Meanwhile a close collaborator of Villarruel said: “She didn’t get here by being a pretty face; her ideas brought her here. She has been preparing for this for years, because she feels there’s a large part of society that has not been listened to for a long time.”

However, Villarruel’s role in Milei’s team has been somewhat scaled back in recent weeks as he built an alliance with Argentina’s mainstream rightwing PRO party. While Milei said during the campaign that Villarruel would oversee his security and defence policy, he handed those ministries to the PRO’s former presidential contender Patricia Bullrich and her vice-presidential choice Luis Petri.

After graduating from law school, Villarruel began her activism in the early 2000s, around when Peronist president Néstor Kirchner took office. She sought to defy the cultural consensus championed by Kirchner and his wife and successor Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Villarruel’s causes have included opposing the 2020 legalisation of abortion, a position Milei shares. She has condemned “the indoctrination” of children in school classes on LGBTQ rights, and what she calls “impunity” for criminals in Argentina.

But her core issue has been challenging the narrative of the late 20th century established by Argentina’s human rights movement, much of which is aligned with the Peronists.

“Everything you have heard about Argentina’s past in the last 40 years is false [and] constructed by the left,” she told a conference in Madrid in 2022.

The daughter of a general who took part in the repression of leftist guerrilla groups in the mid-1970s, Villarruel founded an NGO dedicated to the rights of victims of those groups in 2006. They were previously largely excluded from Argentina’s national efforts to commemorate the period, which focused on widespread state violence during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.

She said in Madrid that Argentina had experienced “a war” in the early 1970s, in which “far-left armed groups . . . attacked the state and terrorised the population . . . There were abuses by the state during their combat against those armed groups.”

In November, Villarruel proposed turning Buenos Aires’s memory museum, which is housed in a former clandestine detention centre that operated under the dictatorship, into schools. The museum commemorates crimes including torture, the throwing of prisoners into the sea from planes in “death flights”, and the kidnapping of detained mothers’ babies who were then given to other families.

Villarruel has rejected estimates by human rights groups that 30,000 people were murdered or “disappeared” by the regime.

Cristián Palmisciano, a human rights specialist at Argentina’s national research council, said academics accepted that the 30,000 figure, based on several pieces of data, might be imprecise.

“The problem is that Villarruel uses these few real points of uncertainty . . . to question sensitive parts of Argentina’s democratic consensus about the crimes of the dictatorship. She suggests that the guerrillas’ crimes and the military’s crimes were equivalent,” Palmisciano said.

Villarruel met Milei in a television studio in 2017. According to Milei’s biographer, Juan Luis González, he then called her in 2021 when he was founding LLA and a strategist advised him to find a polished “posh” figure outside the then fringe libertarian movement to share his ticket for congress.

Adriana Amado, an Argentine political columnist, said Villarruel’s skill as a communicator, particularly during a widely-praised debate performance against the Peronists’ vice-presidential candidate, was crucial to the campaign.

“I think her presence as a more controlled, serious speaker added a counterweight to Milei’s crazy persona,” she said.

In an election fought largely around Argentina’s worst economic crisis in two decades, it is unclear, pollsters say, what proportion of the 56 per cent of Argentines who backed Milei in November’s second-round run-off share Villarruel’s cultural conservatism.

The vice-president’s close collaborator said Villarruel recognised that Argentina’s economic crisis was the government’s “urgent” priority. “Once that is resolved, though, she will surely start working to build consensus on the wider ideas that she holds and that are part of LLA.”

One business leader who met her last year said they “sensed an internal disconnection between her and Milei. When you ask her about his positions, she doesn’t want to speak about him . . . I feel they have fundamentally different values.”

But Villarruel scored an early win for Milei’s government last month. Despite LLA having just seven of 72 senators, she gathered 39 votes to approve the coalition’s candidate as back-up leader of the senate, who stands in when the leader is away and is second in the presidential line of succession. Villarruel overcame an effort by Peronist legislators to install their candidate.

“The little we’ve seen of her so far suggests an ability to build agreements and deliver her objectives,” said Germano, of Isonomía. He noted that her “very effective, very severe” communication style might warrant a spokesperson role, beyond the traditionally low-key image of vice-presidents in Argentina.

One diplomat in Buenos Aires said he expected Villarruel to mount her own political project, and potentially a presidential run, in the future. 

“I think you have to watch her closely,” he said. “She is ready . . . for anything.”