Lidia Stella Mercedes Miy Uranga de Almeida, known to Argentina and the world simply as Taty, died on Sunday at the age of 95, severing one of the most recognisable living links to the country’s brutal 1976–1983 dictatorship. As president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora, she was for decades a fixture of the Thursday marches around the Pirámide de Mayo, her white headscarf a silent rebuke to institutional forgetting. Her son Alejandro was abducted by paramilitaries in June 1975, nine months before the military coup, and she never learned his fate. “If the Mothers could do it, why can’t we?” she would tell those who wavered, a phrase that became a generational call to resistance.

The wake, held at the FOETRA telecommunications union hall in the Balvanera neighbourhood, drew hundreds of mourners from across the political and human rights spectrum. The closed casket was flanked by a smiling portrait of Almeida, while a barrier draped in white scarves guided a queue that stretched into the street. The family asked that flowers be replaced by donations. Buenos Aires province governor Axel Kicillof, visibly moved, told reporters that “Taty was always there when she was needed—at every event, every 24 March commemoration, always.” Estela de Carlotto, president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, spoke of a “risueño” bond between the two women, forged through decades of shared grief and activism, and confessed that the news “hurt her soul” because she had not known how fragile Almeida’s health had become.

Yet the farewell was also a political flashpoint. Carlotto delivered a stinging assessment of the Milei government, saying she expected no official recognition because “they hate us” and “must be toasting” her death. The remark crystallised a wider confrontation: since taking office, Milei and his vice-president Victoria Villarruel have promoted a “complete memory” narrative that human rights organisations denounce as an attempt to relativise the crimes of the junta. Almeida herself had spent her final years battling what she called a resurgent negacionismo, making her funeral not only an act of mourning but a defiant restatement of the demand for truth and justice.

Viewed from outside Argentina, Almeida’s passing marks the gradual disappearance of a generation of moral witnesses. The Guardian noted that she had become “a figure of moral authority” whose search for Alejandro spanned more than five decades. Brazilian and Spanish outlets underscored her role as a symbol of peaceful resistance, with UOL highlighting her unwavering support for trade union and student struggles. Analysts in London and Washington observe that the Mothers’ movement, now largely led by the children and grandchildren of the disappeared, faces a political climate in which the very number of victims is publicly contested—a dynamic that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

Almeida’s death leaves the Línea Fundadora without its president at a moment when the battle over historical memory is once again raw. Her example, colleagues insist, will not fade. “Time passes, but the example remains, and the struggle remains,” Kicillof said. For a country still arguing over how to narrate its past, the white scarf she wore every Thursday is likely to remain a potent symbol—and a provocation—for years to come.