MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina: Milei picks Vice-Presidential candidate

As a lawyer, Victoria Villarruel has long defended the military officers who fought Montoneros and ERP terrorists in the 1970s

Argentine Libertarian Deputy Javier Milei has announced that fellow Congresswoman Victoria Villarruel will be his running mate.

Villarruel, the daughter of a 1982 war veteran, is a 48-year-old lawyer from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) who also has a degree as a security technician from the National Technological University (UTN). In 2008 she attended a course on inter-institutional coordination and counter-terrorism at the William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, an institution under the National Defense University based in Washington D.C., USA.

She is also known for standing for the victims of guerrilla in the 1970s, for which she founded the Center for Legal Studies on Terrorism and its Victims (CELTYV), from where she strongly defended the military accused of crimes against humanity.

Villarruel's father took part in the 1982 Malvinas War campaign under Aldo Rico and in the Independence Operation ordered by the constitutional government of María Estela Martínez de Perón to “annihilate” the “subversion” in the province of Tucumán, which was headed by General Antonio Domingo Bussi.

She is also the granddaughter, on her mother's side, of Rear Admiral Laurio Hedelvio Destéfani, a naval historian and author -among other works- of the ten volumes of the Argentine Maritime History.

After announcing his running mate, Milei traveled Monday to Tucumán to give his support to Bussi's son Ricardo for the coming gubernatorial elections after his candidate Martín Menem finished third in La Rioja last weekend.

Milei supporters in Tucumán were handing out blue caps reading “Make Tucumán Great Again,” clearly following former US President Donald Trump's motto.