Lidia "Taty" Almeida, the Argentine human rights activist who spent five decades searching for her disappeared son and became one of Latin America's most recognised symbols of the fight against state terror, died on Sunday at a hospital in Buenos Aires. She was 95. Her family said she passed away surrounded by loved ones; her daughter Fabiana later told journalists that she and her brother Jorge had sensed their mother was fading that morning. "We told her: 'Old one, go, let go. Go, because Alejandro is waiting for you up there,'" Fabiana said, visibly moved.

Almeida had been president of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line — one of two branches of the organisation, which split in the 1980s over political differences — a group of women who have marched every Thursday around the square outside Argentina's presidential palace in Buenos Aires since 1977. Their white headscarves became a global emblem of peaceful resistance as they demanded to know the fate of children who were forcibly disappeared during the country's military dictatorship, which ruled from 1976 to 1983 and is estimated to have killed or disappeared around 30,000 people. Almeida's journey into activism began before the coup: her son Alejandro, then 20 and a first-year medical student at the University of Buenos Aires, was abducted in June 1975 by the Triple A — the Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, a violent right-wing paramilitary group that operated even under the preceding civilian government. He was also a member of the People's Revolutionary Army, a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla organisation, something Almeida said she only learned much later. Alejandro's remains were never found.

Born Lidia Stella Mercedes Miy Uranga on 28 June 1930 into a military family — her father was a cavalry officer, her siblings married into the armed forces — Almeida's initial instinct upon her son's disappearance was to seek help through military contacts. It was only in 1979 that she joined the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a decision she described as transformative. "I feel that Alejandro gave birth to me," she said in one interview. "He took me out of the bubble in which I had spent my whole life." She went on to publish a collection of his poetry in 2008, drawn from a diary he left behind. In recent years she remained outspoken, taking a position of open confrontation with the current government over its policies on memory, truth, and justice, and appearing prominently at commemorations marking the 50th anniversary of the 1976 coup earlier this year.

The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Founding Line paid tribute to her in a statement on Sunday night: "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 force greater than that of love." Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner described her as an "indefatigable fighter who honoured life." Almeida had continued her work until falling ill in recent weeks, the organisation said, having been hospitalised for three weeks before her death. Her passing marks the loss of one of the last living founders of a movement that fundamentally shaped Argentina's reckoning with its past — and whose weekly marches continue to this day.