Argentine ruling party La Libertad Avanza (LLA) is facing a new scandal after one of their recently elected senators decided to resign her seat over a 24-year-old drug-trafficking case.
National deputy for Río Negro province Lorena Villaverde planned to give up her current post in order to become a senator on December 10, after being elected back in October. But the upper house blocked her from taking her seat over the allegations, and on Thursday she finally decided to remain in the lower house.
“I refuse to be used as a tool to harm the government,” she wrote in a statement.
The scandal hinges on a case from 2002, when Villaverde was arrested in Florida, the United States, for allegedly being in possession of a kilo of cocaine. Her case was later dismissed by the local judiciary.
Last week, she was not sworn in along with the rest of the 23 new senators after the heads of the opposing Senate blocs decided to postpone her designation.
They requested that the constitutional affairs commission revise her situation after December 10. The same commission had already issued a verdict contesting her designation two weeks ago.
Last month, Villaverde had filed her resignation to the lower house so she could become a senator, but she withdrew it amid the scandal on Tuesday.
The case against Lorena Villaverde The drug accusations against Villaverde had already made headlines when she was elected deputy in 2023. They resurfaced now after Peronist senators filed a complaint looking to prevent her from taking her seat as senator.
According to the complaint, Villaverde was arrested on July 17, 2002 at the Sarasota airport alongside “Cuban and Colombian accomplices” while they were trying to enter the United States with a kilogram of cocaine. They were also in possession of US$17,000 in cash.
Villaverde was indicted for drug trafficking. The complaint adds that she was also accused of conspiracy and money laundering linked to drug trafficking after police found financial movements between Villaverde and Miami bank accounts.
She was ultimately released and she returned to Argentina. The case against her was eventually dropped.
In an interview with Infobae she defended her innocence, saying she had been caught up in a police raid at the parking lot of a shopping center where she intended to buy clothes for a business she had in Miami at the time. She had gone there with an acquaintance, a man who was arrested during the raid, she said.
According to authorities, drugs were being sold at the place. “I was declared guilty of conspiracy because I was carrying US$12,000, but the judiciary later said that I was not aware of what was happening there”, she claimed. She blamed her arrest on racial prejudices for being Latin American.
Villaverde has said that she was wrongly accused and called for the opposition to leave the situation in the past. “All the false accusations against me that were used to question me were thoroughly investigated, and I was acquitted in all of them, both in Argentina and the United States,” she wrote in a recent X post.
She also shared a document online showing she has a clean criminal record in Argentina, as well as footage of a drug test she undertook to prove that she has never done drugs.
No me interesa entrar en el barro ni responder agravios.
Prefiero demostrar con hechos que se puede hacer política con transparencia.
Por eso me realicé un narcotest y una rinoscopía: la confianza se gana con gestos, no con discursos.
En el siguiente link podés ver mis… pic.twitter.com/mmudrDz0pF
— Lore Villaverde (@LoreVillaverde1) October 9, 2025 According to the complaint filed by opposition senators, however, Villaverde spent several months in prison and reached a plea bargain that allowed her to reduce her sentence in exchange for collaborating with the case.
She eventually returned to Argentina, but the senators affirm she is no longer allowed to enter the U.S. Villaverde denies having negotiated to obtain her freedom.
U.S. criminal records and documents published by fact-checking site Chequeado verify the arrests but provide no other details.
The complaint also said that Villaverde was investigated for several crimes in Argentina, including money laundering, drug trafficking, tax evasion, and fraud over the irregular sale of land in Río Negro, among others.
During the commission meeting that contested her designation, Peronist senator José Mayans said that it had been “proven” that she engaged in drug trafficking and therefore could “not be a member of the senate.”
Several LLA members publicly backed Villaverde, including former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich — now a senator — Milei biographer Nicolás Márquez, and fellow LLA deputy Lilia Lemoine, among others.