Vice-President Victoria Villarruel promised Tuesday to reopen criminal cases investigating the deaths of victims of left-wing guerrilla fighters who fought against Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.
The move sparked criticism from human rights groups, who said the conservative leader was disregarding the “genocide” committed during the dark era.
Rights groups estimate that 30,000 people were disappeared under the military junta’s rule.
Villarruel, who comes from a military family and has close ties to the Armed Forces and prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity, has previously questioned the number of missing, claiming the true figure is closer to 8,700.
She backs the so-called "two demons theory," which justifies the violence meted out by the military regime as having been necessary to combat leftist guerilla groups, who did not occupy terrain.
"Argentina deserves not to be a nest of impunity and for that we need to build on the foundations that are made with justice," said Villarruel, who is also president of the Senate.
"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," she continued.
“Argentina, our beloved homeland, in order to live its dawn, its rebirth with justice, must do so only with this courage,” added President Javier Milei’s second-in-command.
Villarruel added that "all the Montoneros have to be in jail," referencing members of a leftist guerrilla group that formed in the 1970s under a previous military regime proclaiming “national socialism” and was later crushed by the 1976-1983 junta.
“Only with the murderers in prison can we, in unity and with our duty done, put our beloved Argentina back on its feet," she declared.
Local news outlets reported that the reopening of such investigations would be carried out by the Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales sobre el Terrorismo y sus Víctimas (CELTYV), a civil association founded by Villarruel.
Villarruel’s remarks were made during a ceremony at the Senate paying "homage to the victims of terrorism." It was attended by the relatives of victims of attacks carried out during the dictatorship and the bombings of the Israeli Embassy and the AMIA Jewish community centre, in 1992 and 1994 respectively.
Like President Milei, Villarruel maintains that the junta's violence came as part of a "war" in which state forces committed "excesses" – a framing labelled as "denialist" by human rights experts.
In her speech to the Senate, the vice-president demanded to know "the complete truth" and accused former Peronist presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of "glorifying … atrocious crimes of terrorism."
H.I.J.O.S., a civil society group formed by children of the kidnapped and disappeared, said in a statement it "repudiates the glorification of state terrorism by the vice-president."
The NGO accused Villarruel of “ignoring the genocide" and "the crimes against humanity committed at more than 800 clandestine [detention] centres.”
The Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales (CELS) NGO said that Villarruel "says that the armed organisations got off scot-free, [but] they did not: their members were tortured and thrown into the sea."
Argentina's dictatorship was one of the most brutal of the slew of military regimes that sowed terror in Latin America between the 1960s and 1980s.
In 1985, following the return to democracy, the nation held a historic trial of the military juntas, putting its leaders on trial.
Survivors gave accounts of a systematic plan to persecute and assassinate opponents, many of whom were thrown drugged and unconscious into the Río de la Plata in so-called "death flights."
After annulling amnesty laws in the mid-2000s, Argentina’s justice system has convicted more than a 1,000 people in some 330 trials of crimes against humanity committed during the dictatorship era.
Dozens of proceedings are still ongoing, according to judicial data, but they have been affected by the Milei administration’s defunding and obstruction of investigations.
On Wednesday morning, the Milei administration sought to distance itself from Villarruel’s remarks.
Casa Rosada sources, quoted by the Infobae website, stressed that the remarks were made on the vice-president’s own initiative. “It is not our issue,” they said.
Villarruel’s speech comes in the same month a group of lawmakers from her and Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza, visited prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity at a prison in Ezeiza, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires.
WhatsApp messages leaked by a lawmaker from the party earlier this week reveal a group of libertarian deputies are working on a plan that would see the criminals released from jail.
Infobae reported Tuesday that Villarruel’s CELTYV association would file legal complaints with the courts in order with “the aim of making the victims visible, working for the recognition of their rights and contributing our efforts in pursuit of the historical truth."
– TIMES/AFP/NA
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