Vice President Victoria Villarruel vowed to reopen criminal cases against guerrilla groups in the 1970s during an “homage to the victims of terrorism” event she staged at the Argentine Senate on Tuesday afternoon. The statute of limitations on most crimes committed by guerrilla groups, contrary to the crimes against humanity committed by the military junta, has already lapsed.

“We will reopen all the cases of victims of terrorism so that justice can do what it should have done more than 20 years ago,” said Villarruel during her speech at the event.

Villarruel and several speakers paid homage to Argentine victims of different terrorist attacks, focusing on killings perpetrated by the country’s left-wing guerrilla groups before the 1976 coup by the “National Reorganization Process” (the junta’s name for the military dictatorship).

They also paid tribute to the victims of the Buenos Aires Embassy of Israel and the AMIA Jewish community center attacks in the early 1990s. The list also included Argentines who died in terrorist attacks in other countries, like 9/11 or Hamas’ attack on Israel in 2023. 

“All the Montoneros must be in prison, answering for the bloodshed of our nation,” she added, referring to the left-wing Peronist guerrilla group that operated in the country during the 70s. “They wanted national dissolution, disunity among Argentines and to make a red cloth wave as a flag in our country, alien to our customs,” she said, a derogatory way of referring to the left.

However, there was no mention of the 30,000 victims of state terrorism in the 1976-1983 dictatorship, which Villarruel has referred to as “a war.”

Since 1985, the Argentine judiciary has been investigating and convicting the members of the dictatorship responsible for kidnapping, torturing, and murdering 30,000 people, called desaparecidos, Spanish for disappeared. In the 1990s, President Carlos Menem pardoned the members of the military junta but the Supreme Court declared those pardons unconstitutional in 2003 under President Néstor Kirchner. Cases against former members of the armed forces for crimes against humanity were reopened: so far, 347 trials have been conducted and 12 are ongoing.

Villarruel has opposed the trials, lending credence to a discredited theory known as La Teoría de los Dos Demonios (“The Theory of the Two Demons”), which holds that the Argentine military and guerrilla fighters were two opposing forces in a civil war. Her father, Eduardo Villarruel, was a member of the Army during the dictatorship, and her uncle, Ernesto Guillermo Villarruel, was a captain within the structure of the Third Regiment of La Tablada, which managed the clandestine detention center “El Vesubio.”

Villarruel has a history of defending convicted dictatorship-era repressors and spearheaded a similar tribute last year at the Buenos Aires City Legislature when she was still a candidate, a move that caused uproar at the time.

Speakers at Tuesday’s event echoed language used by organizations representing victims of the dictatorship. The announcer demanded “truth, justice, and reparation for terrorism victims,” whereas human rights groups historically demand “truth, memory, and justice” for the country’s 30,000 desaparecidos.

The first speaker was Claudia Rucci, director of the Senate’s human rights observatory and daughter of José Rucci, a right-wing Peronist leader killed by left-wing Peronist guerrilla group Montoneros in 1975. “My father was assassinated by a Montonero group during a democratic government when I was only nine years old,” she said. Rucci added that her family was “constantly escaping from death threats” and that she had learned to live without using her true name.

“They stole our identity,” she said.

Gloria Alejandra Paulik, daughter of Juan Paulik, a sergeant killed in a bombing in 1976, also took the floor. “We were invisible for a long time, do not let anyone cover us up, disappear us, forget us.”

Villarruel hosted the event as controversy over LLA deputies visiting incarcerated dictatorship-era repressors continues to belabor the ruling coalition. One of the deputies who went to the prison, Lourdes Arrieta, said that the true goal of the visit was to discuss a bill to release the repressors and published two alleged drafts on X.

The visit, which happened in July, further strained the relationship between Milei and Villarruel. Deputy Lilia Lemoine, close to the President, has blamed Villarruel and accused her of “washing her hands” of the visit in a post on X.