Victoria Villarruel

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.

She and Carlos Manfroni wrote the 2014 book The Other Dead (Los Otros Muertos)

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

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.

In a 2011 interview, Villarruel asserted that even opposition politicians in Argentina avoided speaking about the victims of 1970s terrorism, 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.”

In 2010, she published the book Los llaman... jovenes idealistas (They are called... young idealists).

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

Victoria Eugenia Villarruel (born 13 April 1975) 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).

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