Taty Almeida was one of those Argentine women who during the years of the military dictatorship they took to the streets with white handkerchiefs on their heads And the photograph of a missing son in his handschallenging a regime that made people disappear into thin air. Taty Almeida was a mother from Plaza de Mayo who until her death, which occurred today 15 June, at the age of 95, she remained president of the Línea Fundadora, the historical current of the movement and continued to search and not have an answer as to where his son Alejandro had ended up.
Taty Almeida, mother of Plaza de Mayo who never stopped searching
To understand who the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo were we need to understand what was happening in Argentina during the years of General Jorge Rafael Videla in power after the 1976 coup. Videla had chosen a method of repression that did not require trials or convictions: people just disappeared. Night pick-ups, clandestine detention centers, torture, nameless executions. The families were told nothingnor where their loved ones were, nor whether they were still alive.
Alejandro, a desaparecido never forgotten
Thus was born the word desaparecidos, the missing: not officially dead, not alive, but removed from reality without leaving a trace. Estimates count between 10,000 and 30,000 victims. Alejandro, son of Almeida, was a medical student with a political commitment that in those years was enough to make you a targetdisappeared in June 1975, even before the dictatorship formally took power.
Taty Almeida, for over half a century, walked every Thursday around the most famous square in Buenos Aires, with a white handkerchief on her head and a photograph of her missing son in her hands. (Getty Images)
From isolation to meeting Videla
Taty Almeida was born in 1930she had been a teacher, she had lived, as she herself would have said without self-indulgence, inside a “bubble”: an ordinary and protected existence, far from politics and history. Alejandro’s disappearance threw her out of that bubble with no possibility of returning. He looked for answers wherever it seemed possible to find them, he knocked on doors that closed one after another, he even came to a meeting with Videla. But, of course, nothing. The regime was purposely built not to respond.
No answer, but a square to fill
What he found, however, was something unexpected: around her there were dozens of women in her same conditionmothers and wives of disappeared people who understood that isolation was part of the strategy of power and that the only possible response was to make themselves visible together. Plaza de Mayo, the large square in Buenos Aires in front of the government headquarters, it became their place. If, in fact, the dictatorship prohibited public demonstrations, it could not however prevent a group of women from walking. And so they began, in a circle, every Thursday, with the white handkerchief which recalled the children’s diapers and the photographs of those who had disappeared. A seemingly harmless gesture, which became one of the most recognizable symbols of civil resistance of the twentieth century.
The Fundadora Line and the international battle
Over time, differences in vision led to an internal division within the movement: the Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayolong led by Hebe de Bonafini, and the Fundadora line, the current of the founders is more oriented towards the individual recognition of each victim and action in international judicial bodies. It was in this second soul that Taty Almeida found her placeuntil becoming president in 2024 and bearing his testimony before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States, which became one of the forums through which the Argentine disappearances became visible to the world at a time when the regime controlled every internal information channel.
Goodbye to Taty Almeida
Taty Almeida argued that time does not heal the absence of the disappearedif anything it makes it clearer. And he said one specific thing about his son: Alejandro had “given birth” to her politicallyit was his disappearance that tore her from the life she knew and transformed her into something completely different. It wasn’t rhetorical: it was the description of a real metamorphosiswhich occurred in the most painful way possible. He worked until the end because the request “memory, truth and justice”the three words that have become the parameter with which Argentina still today measures its accounts with the past, did not remain confined to its generation but passed on to the following ones. Unfortunately, however, Alejandro never had a grave amamma Taty never knew for sure what happened to him.