God, the liberal philosopher Ayn Rand and the economist Murray Rothbard They have two things in common.
One is that, Javier Milei says and thinks, They maintain dialogues with the most voted candidate in Argentina for at least four years. The other is that all these supernatural beings agree, according to the coiled labyrinth that is the mind of the libertarian, that he is the one chosen by the Supreme. That he has a “mission” that is none other than to become president to defeat the “evil one,” as he calls socialism.
However, God’s plans are mysterious. That is why he never revealed to Milei who had to be his partner for this path. That did not fall within his divine designs.
Instead, Victoria VillarruHe came to it almost by chance. It was, in that 2021 when La Libertad Avanza was beginning to form, the third option.
First, the Milei team had thought about Rebecca Fleitas, a member of the Libertarian Party who would end up becoming a Buenos Aires legislator. Then the alternative that was considered was that of the actress Lizy Tagliani. It was a fleeting idea that did not prosper, but between them they consumed time and energy in that campaign.
This is where luck or, Milei could say, the hand of God, came to play. It was the time it took to find a candidate and the insistence of Mario Russothe economist’s then strategist, to look for someone “who seems the girlfriend of Recoleta of the southern biker” the one that ended up changing the focus. And it was only at this curve that Villarruel came in, almost like a carom, when Milei remembered that one day he had crossed her in a television studio and that he had liked her.
This all seems like ancient history. Now, two years later, she established herself as a political leader, became one of the popes in the space with the most votes in the PASO and could be the vice president of the country in less than four months. And she is not the only one who fights to control the future: she also got into the thorniest and most painful chapter of the Argentine past. And she did it with a novel and cunning strategy, which seeks to dispute the meaning of who were the true victimizers during the last dictatorship.
As historian Eric Hobsbawm once said, When history is used intelligently it can be as dangerous as a Molotov cocktail. That is the risk behind returning to the past.
Crazy boots. Luis Abelardo Patty He has three life prison sentences for kidnappings and murders between 1976 and 1983. He is what is called, in Creole, a repressor. Villarruel, of course, shouldn’t see it that way. She makes some sense: she comes from a military family that was part of the process, and she was also for many in that world the gateway to achieving a hand-to-hand meeting with Jorge Rafael Videla. This happened when in the early 2000s his group “Youth for the Truth” coordinated interviews with the detained dictator. Although she is still fearsome, Patti is no match for Videla.
Would Villarruel have accepted money from the bloodiest genocide that occurred in this country? It is counterfactual, impossible to know. Although what about Patti can serve as a clue: she accepted contributions from him for the 2021 campaign. He went to see him and took his financial support, which was more symbolic than monetary. What would be the message hidden behind that envelope? Are the repressors with you? If you come to power, remember us? These are questions that remain floating, reinforced because another person who received money was Raul Granillo Ocampo, Carlos Menem’s Minister of Justice and author of the pardons for almost two hundred Armed Forces officers accused of crimes against humanity.
The thing is that Villarruel moves along that delicate line, fine as a thread about to break. She is much more sophisticated than the leaders who preceded her and who shouted her support for the genocidaires out loud. He understood the spirit of the times better: he says that the 30,000 missing people are “mythology,” that “on March 24 only part of history is remembered,” that in “a war it is legal to kill the enemy” and that from After the coup, “the population began to be more protected.” But she is careful, to the extreme, to speak in favor of or justify the dictatorship. She does not condemn her – she speaks of a “de facto government”, she refers to Videla as a “de facto president” and says that state terrorism did not exist – but, with strategic skill, she avoids defending her.
Villarruel dances on that limit. Provocation, the attempt to stretch what is politically incorrect as far as it can go, is its best weapon. Through successive slaps at the established discourse on human rights, thanks to fights on the Intratables panel starting in 2017 and other television crossovers, she became known. She so she was she building the figure of her. His great political capital, the one who allowed him to occupy second place in the 2021 formula, is that: presenting himself as the face of extreme nationalism.
“To those who call me genocidal, a fascist, a racist, a denier, I tell you that I receive all of that with a smile. They are the same ones that justify the crimes of communism. We don’t have to ask permission or forgiveness for how we think. If defending impunity for terrorism is from the left, gentlemen, I am from the right. If voting for laws like the Micaela law, the law that introduces inclusive language, if agreeing with the gender ideology that discriminates between men and women is on the left: I am on the right,” he said at the closing ceremony of the campaign. 2021, while the crowd in Parque Lezama shouted that “the caste eats it.”
To build your profile dand “Iron Lady”, as she is called in space, also makes other gestures. As soon as she arrived at the Chamber of Deputies, she hired as an advisor Marcelo Cinto Courtaux, the eponymous son of one of the most brutal repressors in local history, sentenced to life for crimes against humanity to 87 people. He also put into play his bond with Voxthe ultraconservative party of Spain.
She cultivates a close relationship with Javier Ortega Smith, the second of that organization that has Argentine roots. When he comes to the country she is his host, and even goes out to eat with his sister and him. Not only that: for Villarruel he is a role model, and he even studies the speeches of the politician who likes to record himself while practicing target shooting. She was the deputy Milei’s link with Voxwhich materialized in October 2022. There the economist traveled to Spain to participate in an event organized by them – in which Trump and the Italian Meloni also sent videos -, where he assured that “he would always feel comfortable” among those They fight against “the threat of communism.”
Villarruel’s last act, which sparked controversy throughout the country, was the event he held to commemorate the “victims of terrorism” in the Buenos Aires Legislature. It happened on Monday the 4th and, like all of his provocations, it had a particular addition.
The host of the event was the LLA legislator Lucia Montenegro. She came to her seat thanks to the agreement that her political boss, José Bonacci, made with Milei in 2021: the former exchanged Unite, his party with legal status, in exchange for the place for Montenegro. Bonacci He is recognized in his native Rosario for his Nazi sympathies. And if that was not enough, He was a disciple of Aldo Rico and partner of Biondinithe most famous philonazi in Argentina, in several elections.
Antonio, the father of the current legislator who was a great friend of the carapintada Seineldín, also closed political agreements with the Biondini family in the past. With a bonus track: Montenegro’s daughter, as soon as she took over her bench, she hired Ricardo Yebra Díaz, Biondini’s historic right-hand man, as an advisor. Everything is between friends.
Fachoslibertarios. Villarruel is much less loved than one thinks in the military world. The thing is that in the military sphere she is accused of being “opportunistic” for readapting her speech for “personal ambitions,” as Cecilia Pando’s husband told her, Major Pedro Mercado. There they remember that she began her militancy in the nineties in the Argentine Unity Association (AUNAR), an organization dedicated to the defense of imprisoned military personnel that had the vindication of the last dictatorship much more present in her speech. Seen from the outside, it seems like a minimal difference, but within this galaxy it is gigantic: on the one hand there are the relatives who defend the detained repressors and on the other the relatives of the victims of the Montoneros or ERP attacks.
Villarruel, according to his critics, founded the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (Celtyv) in 2006 with the idea of readjusting the approach and beginning to grow his figure. It is clear that this rhetoric is much friendlier than the other: no one – or almost no one – can feel offended if the murder of an innocent civilian victim is remembered. Those who treated her for years in this world assure that here is the key to understanding her turn. And they say something else, as the NOS representative, Segundo Carafí, told her: that the books that she signed as her own were actually written by Alberto González, an ESMA repressor whom she regularly visited in prison. In these weeks it was also known that Miguel Etchetolatz, a repressor who was sentenced to life in prison and who is presumed to have been behind the disappearance of Julio López, had written down Villarruel’s name in one of his notebooks.
In the military world tooThere is some rejection of Villarruel’s political incursion into LLA. It makes some sense: many of Milei’s libertarian ideas (the free carrying of weapons, the privatization of part of education and health, the separation of Church from State, the thesis that convicted soldiers should be detained, just to name a few ) do not go down well in this area. Villarruel is aware of this delicate reality, and that is why he has strong ties with Milei from time to time. Unlike almost everyone in this space, she has no problem letting God’s presumed chosen one know when something is bothering her. In the 2021 campaign she thought several times about lowering her candidacy, when she felt that in the campaign they ignored her figure, they did not give her importance in interviews nor did they send her funds to support herself like other candidates.
Since then heThe relationship with Karina, the candidate’s sister, comes with sparks. In this hectic year, that suspicion has been growing. There is a competition there not only to compete for the place of the strong woman of the space, but also for access and control over Milei. The thing is that, in addition to being the candidate for vice president, Villarruel is the guarantor of the conservative turn of Milei and La Libertad Avanza.
The libertarian himself began to publicly deny the 30,000 missing people, something he had never done before gaining confidence with his running mate, while the “Iron Lady” is the one in charge – as happened in a recent interview in TN- to stop the libertarian when he begins to talk about how his hypothetical government would relate to the Church. In the background, and very beneath the surface, in La Libertad Avanza there is an invisible struggle to see which sector prevails: whether the leg that proclaimed itself liberal or the conservative nationalist one. The person who personifies this tension these days is Guillermo Montenegro, the deputy’s political operator, who intends to grow his influence in the Security and Defense portfolios. The thing is Villarruel goes for everything. For power in the future, but also for rewriting the past.
