Her name was Lidia Stella Mercedes Miy Uranga, but no one called her that. Unwittingly, she had achieved what few manage: to be known without needing to speak her name. She was simply Taty, and she was one of the leading figures of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a symbol of the fight for human rights in Argentina. She had been driven to this role by her desperate search for her son, who disappeared during the state terrorism that preceded the last military dictatorship in the country (1976-1983). This Sunday, Taty Almeida died at the age of 95. She never learned what became of her son, never even had the chance to say goodbye to his remains.
“Words fail us, they fall short, we feel a lump in our throats,” stated the press release from Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Founding Line), announcing the death of Taty Almeida, who had been hospitalized in critical condition at the Italian Hospital in Buenos Aires. “So immense that there is no way to describe it. Thank you for teaching us that to love is to resist, that the only fight lost is the one abandoned, and that there is no greater force than love.”
Taty was born in Buenos Aires in 1930. She trained as a schoolteacher and, with Jorge Almeida, her husband, from whom she took her surname, had three children. Her life changed completely on June 17, 1975. On that day, her son Alejandro was kidnapped by the Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), the paramilitary organization that had begun the clandestine repression two years earlier. He has been missing ever since. Alejandro Almeida was 20 years old, a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires, and worked at the state news agency Télam. He was also a member of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP), a left-wing guerrilla group.
The search for her son brought Taty together with so many other women who shared the same anguish. Identified by the white headscarves they wore, since 1977 they defied the military regime by walking silently around the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Government House, to demand answers about their disappeared children. Even today, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo demand “memory, truth, and justice” for them.
In recent times, Taty Almeida used a wheelchair, but that didn’t stop her from continuing her activism. At the march on March 24th, commemorating 50 years since the beginning of the dictatorship, she was present, on the stage, before a massive crowd. “We showed [Javier] Milei and company that they won’t be able to erase the memory. They are a completely denialist government,” she declared at the time. The differences between human rights organizations and Milei’s far-right government are explicit.
The Mothers’ leader had also appeared in public last April, when she was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Buenos Aires. “There are only three of us mothers left, and two grandmothers,” she said to a packed auditorium, warning about the passage of time for her fellow mothers and for the members of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, the organization that searches for the children of the disappeared who were appropriated during the dictatorship. That day, at the university, Taty remembered her son and reaffirmed her political activism.
“We shouldn’t be afraid of the word activism,” she said. “To be an activist is to have commitment, that commitment that the 30,000 disappeared assumed.” She also emphasized then that “the struggle does not end, the struggle continues” and made a request, as a legacy: “Remember what we Mothers have said and do, that the only struggle that is lost is the one that is abandoned.”
