Victoria Villarruelthe candidate for vice president of Javier Mileiwas an active participant in the marches he organized Cecilia Pando to demand the freedom of the detained genocidaires. Although the national representative does not publicly show her support for the dictatorship and she says that she only visited repressors because she was conducting research for her books, Page 12 gathered photographs that show her demonstrating outside the Comodoro Py courts in favor of those they call “political prisoners”—that is, those who kidnapped, tortured, raped, murdered, disappeared and even appropriated the sons or daughters of their victims— .
Pando made its appearance on the national scene in 2005 through a letter from readers sent to the newspaper The nation to defend the military bishop Antonio Baseotto, who had written that “those who scandalize children deserve to have a millstone hung around their neck and thrown into the sea” after the then Minister of Health Ginés González García spoke out in favor of the decriminalization of abortion. Baseotto’s defense served as a springboard for Pando to become one of the spokespersons of the extreme right, but she distanced her husband, Major Pedro Rafael Mercado, further and further from her military career.
Pando closed the year 2005 with the company presentation of the Association of Relatives and Friends of Political Prisoners of Argentina (AFyAPPA). The place chosen was the federal courts of Retiro, where cases for crimes against humanity are processed. On December 21, 2005, the first mobilization took place in which leaflets were distributed calling for “confronting arbitrariness, authoritarianism and injustice with determination and courage.”
From the head of the march, Pando shouted the slogans of his group: “We demand freedom now for all those detained without sentence or trial for alleged crimes from the 1970s. A Christmas without political prisoners will be the first step to end this critical process of revenge”. In the front row were other women who, like her, were wearing a white AFyAPPA t-shirt.
In a third row, you can see the face of a young woman with dark hair and sunglasses worn as a headband. It is Victoria Villarruel, the current national deputy and vice candidate of La Libertad Avanza (LLA).. She was photographed by photojournalist Enrique García Medina. In the image you can see Villarruel next to a yellow sign that says: “Kirchner calls those who saved us from subversive terrorism criminals.” The image suggests that it is Villarruel herself who is carrying the banner.
From allies to enemies
Villarruel is part of the military family. His father, Eduardo Marcelo Villarruel, retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel from the Army. He was proud to have been in the Malvinas and in the fight against «subversion» in both urban and rural areas. The deputy’s uncle, Guillermo Ernesto Villarruel, was detained for crimes against humanity. Her maternal grandfather, Laurio Helvedio Destéfanis, was an important Navy historian.
Pando does not have military lineage. In 1988 – as Guido Braslavsky states in the book intimate enemies— met her husband. Mercado’s father had wanted to be an aviator. Pedro Mercado had achieved a promising career in the Army until his wife’s emergence onto the public scene as a detractor of Kirchnerism’s policy of truth and justice. His retirement was decided a week after the march in the Comodoro Py courts on December 21, 2005. Despite the lack of scrolls, Pando became one of the most passionate defenders of the military family over the last 18 years.
Earlier this year, Pando was interviewed by Patricia Soprano, a pro-life lawyer and YouTuber., who asked him to define certain leaders in a few words. When he asked him about Villarruel, Pando replied: “It’s a good policy.” After a while, Soprano questioned him and Pando did not do much to hide his anger: “I have known Victoria for 18 years.”
«Do you defend the cause of political prisoners?» Soprano asked him.
–And… I defended her at the time. You know that I learned about the issue of political prisoners through Victoria Villarruel, because she took me to prison to meet them. She encouraged me to form an association that would protect the military. who were illegally detained. We did many things together, but he saw that it was a pretty heavy cause.
–Did they form any association?
–Yes, we form an association called AFyAPPA. She spent very little time working because it was a very heavy case and she preferred to go with the victims. See with the victims there is not much to say…
In the same report, Pando said that the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (Celtyv) was focused on seeking compensation and He complained bitterly because Villarruel abandoned the meetings with the genocidaires: “Before, I was going to visit them a lot. Now as a deputy, no.”
Part of the relationship between the two far-right women had come to light from a post by Mercado on Facebook in which he recalled that Villarruel had been with his wife on March 8, 2006, when Pando interrupted a speech by Néstor Kirchner.. After that “prank”, Mercado, Pando, Villarruel and her husband went to dinner in Puerto Madero to celebrate the feat. According to Mercado, he had never felt on anyone’s left like he did that night.
The plaintiff lawyer Guadalupe Godoy He also found a record of Villarruel entering the Marcos Paz prison to visit the ESMA repressor Norberto Cozzani. Her name was next to Cecilia Pando, so it is presumed that they went together.
Before the primaries, Pando exploded when Milei said that he was not considering a pardon for the repressors. From Twitter He accused his former crony of having signed books that, in reality, were written by Alberto González, a repressor from the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA) sentenced to life imprisonment. Mercado, for his part, recalled that Villarruel coordinated visits to Videla while she was under house arrest. These revelations forced the LLA deputy to acknowledge that she had encounters with criminals against humanity, but she sought to clarify them: she said that they were interviews for her books.
The photo that now reveals Page 12 shows that Villarruel was united by something more with the repressors of the dictatorship than a mere investigative interest, and that was part of a claim that Pando maintains to this day – that of the freedom of the genocidaires.
A processist past
Villarruel usually says that she only played for Celtyv. This is what she told sociologist Cristian Palmisciano when he interviewed her for her master’s thesis. However, in the trial for Operativo Independencia in which she testified as an expert witness, she had to admit to prosecutor Agustín Chit that she had a previous militancy: in the Argentine Unity Association (Aunar).
Aunar was formed towards the end of 1992 and obtained its legal recognition in 1993. The civil association Aunar came to occupy the place left empty by Relatives and Friends of Those Killed by Subversion (FAMUS)which had become extinct in 1991 after Calos Menem’s pardons.
According to a pamphlet by Aunar, it was created due to «discredit, the ‘official’ adverse propaganda against the institutions of the Republic, such as Justice, the Catholic Church and the Armed Forces.» The founder and soul of Aunar was Fernando Exequiel Verplaetsen, who was head of intelligence in 1976 of the Military Institutes Command based in Campo de Mayo. He was also the last head of the Bonaerense. And a crusader in defense of dictatorial repression. In mid-1983 –as he rebuilt Marina Franco in Democracy, zero hour–, Verplaetsen said publicly that there would be no ceasefire and that he was willing to fight to the last consequences. Raúl Alfonsín responded in a press conference that, in this way, there would be no democracy possible.
In the mid-’90s, Verplaetsen rebuked Martín Balza after the Army attempted a self-criticism about his crimes. Aunar also opposed the extraditions of soldiers that Judge Baltasar Garzón demanded from Spain. The organization was a staunch opponent of the policy of prosecuting Kirchnerism and even released statements asking if there were ever 30,000 missing people – a catchphrase that Villarruel and Milei now amplify.
The lieutenant colonel served in their ranks Emilio Nani –protagonist of the trials against humanity and the marches for «complete memory»– and the lieutenant colonel Enrique Treglia, who in an open letter spoke of the «supposed flights of death» while ranting because Public Television gave space to denounce the crimes of the dictatorship. The Commodore was also there Julio Boitierpress officer of the Foreign Ministry during the years of the «Process».
In 2006, Aunar formed a new «branch»: Celtyv, which ended up in charge of Villarruel and it was part of the strategy that sought, based on complaints against militants in the ’70s, to force a general amnesty that would benefit the military and police who acted during the years of state terrorism.
When prosecutor Chit asked Villarruel if she knew Verplaetsen, she sought to avoid the question and said that they had not met in Aunar. Verplaetsen, in addition to being a crusader of dictatorial repression, garnered two convictions for his actions in Campo de Mayo.
Aunar remained active on social networks until 2021. Last year, she was one of the organizers of the event at the headquarters of the Federal Security Superintendence (SSF) that ended with a vandalization of the Rodolfo Walsh subway station. In the last papers that Aunar presented to the General Inspection of Justice (IGJ), one of Verplaetsen’s descendants appears as a member of the board of directors –Eduardo Carlos Verplaetsencurrently dedicated to private security. The imprint of the former Campo de Mayo intelligence chief has hardly been erased from the association he founded.