Argentina’s vice presidential candidate’s old X (formerly Twitter) post mocking Korean boyband BTS has recently gone viral, angering the septet’s fans worldwide.
Far-right politician Victoria Villarruel made the post on February 11, 2020, where she said the band’s name sounded like “a sexually transmitted disease”, in response to another X user who said the band’s name sounds like the name of a health insurance company.
The 48-year-old politician’s comments at the time were met with angry tweets from BTS’ loyal fanbase known as ARMY. Noticing this, she tweeted a follow-up post mocking the fans on the same day, “If I knew they were going to jump like that for a pink-haired Korean, I would have started sooner.”
A day prior to her controversial Feb 11 tweet, she had posted “Oh no, I don’t like the pink Korean at all…”
Her old tweets have resurfaced, with Villarruel currently running for her country’s vice president in the 2023 general elections.
A BTS fan and X user @thvologistic mentioned her old comments in a post earlier this month and said “a grown woman into politics having one-sided beef with men who doesn’t know her existence…yeah that’s embarrassing.”
Villarruel, who has apparently received new messages from ARMY protesting her earlier comments, uploaded a new X post on October 25, lamenting an “avalanche of notifications for funny conversations typical of Twitter from a thousand years ago.”
“We repudiate the statements of hatred and xenophobia towards the image of BTS uttered by candidate Victoria Villarruel,” BTS tweeted on their Argentina account.
Villarruel is known for her criticism of human rights organisations and the use of LGBTQ+ and indigenous community flags in classrooms.
Argentina’s run-off or final election to elect the president and vice president is slated to take place on November 19
BTS recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. They have attained 26 Guinness World Records, including for the most Twitter engagements and for the most viewed video/music video on YouTube in 24 hours, achieving the latter every year since 2018 and most recently with “Butter.”
They are also the only K-pop group to win the favorite pop group and favorite social artist awards at the American Music Awards, and in 2021, became the first Asian act in the show’s history to win artist of the year. BTS is the first Korean pop act to receive a Grammy Award nomination, and the first Korean artist to be nominated for a Brit Award.