Victoria Villarruel

Victoria Eugenia Villarruel is an Argentinian lawyer and activist who is the founder and president of the Centro de Estudios Legales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas, known as CELTYV (in English, the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims). Founded in 2006, the Center's goal is to secure the rights of victims of terrorism and to bring their stories and those of their families into public awareness.^[1]

During the 1970s, Villarruel maintains, 1,094 civilians were killed by leftist guerrillas in targeted assassinations and bombings or as “collateral damage.”^[2] According to Vice News, Villarruel is “the best-known figure demanding justice for victims of the rebels.”^[2]

Early life and education

Villarruel was born on 13 April 1975.^[1] Her grandfather was a historian who was employed by the Argentinian Navy and who survived four guerrilla bombings.^[2]

In 2008, she took a course in Inter-Agency Coordination and Combating Terrorism at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies,^[3] a U.S. Department of Defense institution based at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.^[4]

Career

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 so-called “dirty war” of 1976-83, when the nation was a dictatorship; Villarruel's point was that organized terrorism also occurred in Argentina in 1973-76, when it had a democratic government. She charged that the two major Argentinian terrorist groups of that era, the ERP (or People's Revolutionary Army) and the Montoneros, had links with the Castro regime in Cuba and with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, with at least one of the groups training Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and supplying the PLO with weapons that were used in deadly attacks on Israel. From 1969 to 1980, according to Villarruel, over 21,000 terrorist attacks were committed in Argentina, which averages out to seven per day. Villarruel maintained that this history was later covered up by the Kirchner regime, that the terrorists of the 1970s went on to enjoy the Kirchners' protection, and that many of those former terrorists, as of 2011, held positions of responsibility in the Argentinian establishment – for example, as civil servants or journalists.

By contrast, the thousands of anonymous Argentinian citizens who were assassinated, kidnapped, tortured, crippled for life, or otherwise impacted by terrorism continued, under the Cristina Kirchner regime, to be deprived of recognition as victims and were not taken into account in government policies relating to the period during which those terrorist actions were committed. These victims, Villarruel asserted, have spent decades awaiting justice and watching helplessly from the sidelines while the government protected their assailants instead of supporting the victims' own rights. No effort to secure rights for these victims, noted Villarruel, have ever succeeded in Argentinian courts; on the contrary, judges have consistently served as “guarantors of terrorists' impunity.” Meanwhile, people at the highest levels of government who profess to be defenders of human rights have actually protected native terrorists and refused to deport foreign terrorists.

In her talk, Villarruel also accused the Kirchner regime of acting in complicity with Iran.^[5]

In a 2011 interview, Villarruel asserted that even opposition politicians in Argentina avoided speaking about the victims of 1970s terrrorism, while members of the Kirchner regime treated them as non-persons. Consequently, a generation of Argentinians has grown up ignorant of the complete history of that period. She said that CELTYV had so far managed to identify by name 13,074 victims of terrorists, and added that this figure was only “preliminary.”^[6]

After the end of the Kirchner era in early 2016, Villarruel complained that during the presidencies of both Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, the leftist guerrillas of earlier decades had been rehabilitated, pardoned, and even “glorified” by the government. Meanwhile, those terrorists' victims have been denied justice. Villarruel lamented that these former terrorists enjoyed widespread sympathy in Argentina because they had purportedly been rebelling against the military dictatorship, even though, according to her, the majority of their crimes had in fact been committed during the three years of democracy immediately prior to the 1976 military coup.

Because of her criticism of the terrorists and of their rehabilitation, Villarruel has been accused of defending the Dirty War. “In Argentina,” she has said, “if you don't support the guerrillas, people assume you support the dictatorship.” She has received numerous rape and death threats, and consequently is obliged to take extensive precautions.^[2]

Books

In 2010, she published the book Los Llaman: Jovenes Idealistas (The Call: Young Idealists).^[7]

She and Carlos Manfroni wrote the 2014 book The Other Dead (Los Otros Muertos)^[3][5]

Other professional activities

Villarruel has lectured on human rights and the victims of terrorism in many countries around the world, including the U.S., 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.^[7]

Memberships

Villarruel is a member of the Human Rights Commission of the Bar Association of the Federal Capital.^[7]

Honors and awards

In 2012, she received in 2012 the Friend della forze dell'Ordine award from the Association of Prison Police in Venice, Italy.^[7]

References