Argentinian activist who spent 50 years looking for ‘disappeared’ son dies | Argentina
The death of human rights defender Lidia “Taty” Almeida, who spent more than half a century searching for her son who was forcibly disappeared by the Argentine military junta, at the age of 95, caused great public sadness.
Almeida, 95, was president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a group of women who have marched in the square outside Argentina’s presidential palace every Thursday since 1977, demanding the return of children lost during the country’s 1976-1983 dictatorship.
Almeida’s son Alejandro was kidnapped by anti-communist paramilitary forces in June 1975, nine months before the coup that saw the military junta seize power. For fifty years Almeida searched for the truth about his destiny.
Alejandro was never found, and Almeida became a moral authority figure and a symbol of the enduring struggle for justice. Even in the last year of his life, he appeared publicly to demand justice for the dictatorship’s atrocities and to campaign on contemporary social justice issues.
His family said he died late Sunday surrounded by loved ones at a hospital in Buenos Aires. Mothers of Plaza de Mayo said she continued her work until she fell ill in recent days.
“Thank you for teaching us that to love is to resist, that the only fight we lose is the fight we give up, and that there is no greater power than love,” the Founding Line of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo wrote in a tribute to Almeida on Sunday night.
Almeida was born Lidia Stella Mercedes Miy Uranga in Buenos Aires on June 28, 1930. She had three children with her husband, Jorge Almeida, and worked as a teacher before devoting herself to supporting her family.
His father was a cavalry officer, and when Alejandro was forcibly disappeared in 1975, his first instinct was to turn to military contacts for help. But as she learned the truth about the dictatorship’s cruelty and met other mothers searching for their forcibly disappeared adult children, her life changed and she became a symbol of the fight against state terrorism.
Alejandro was a medical student at the University of Buenos Aires and a member of the People’s Revolutionary Army, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla group. He was also a poet, and in 2008 Almeida published a collection of poems he found in one of his diaries after he was kidnapped.
In 2024, Almeida became president of the Founding Line of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (the group split in two due to political differences in the 1980s).
Leading figures of Argentine public life paid tribute to him. Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner described him as “a tireless warrior who honors life.”
