‘Hace un año murió mi padre’ by Florencia Salgueiro

On 19 March 2021, Florencia Salgueiro wrote a social-media thread on X (then still known as Twitter) to tell the story of her father, Pablo Salgueiro. The first of 21 posts started: ‘One year ago my father died, at the age of 57, three years after falling ill with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). What he went through, no one deserves’ (translated from the Spanish, as all other quotes). Florencia went on to explain that ALS is a neurodegenerative disease without any known cure, in which one loses the ability to move, speak, eat, and finally breathe – while remaining lucid. Although causes are not well understood, she added that her father’s case was hereditary, as both her grandfather and her uncle had also died from ALS. Her fourth post summarized the helplessness of the diagnosis: ‘Imagine being told one day that you will spend the next 2 to 5 years slowly losing all your abilities until you die, without being able to do anything about it’. Florencia underscored that her father desired to live, so much so that he built a house after becoming ill and continued to work and enjoy life as long as he could. After stages of denial and alternative therapies, came the gradual losses, which Florencia reported as a poem: ‘He could no longer drive / walk without a cane or walker / cook / brush his teeth / dress himself / write / speak clearly / sleep without a ventilator’. In January 2020, her father started receiving palliative care and, in February, expressed he wished to die by stating: ‘This isn’t life. I don’t want to live anymore.’ Thus began what Florencia described as an odyssey to get her father palliative sedation for existential suffering – something she believed was legal, moral, and appropriate, since Pablo could no longer be free from pain, anguish, depression, and anxiety, whether awake or asleep. However, the carers informed that palliative sedation would only be given when symptoms became refractory, which – as Florencia interpreted – meant they ‘had to wait until Pablo choked on his own saliva to ease his suffering’. A few weeks later, after a psychiatrist attested to Pablo’s existential suffering, he received sedation – but Florencia’s 17th post qualifies those weeks as ‘torture’. Pablo died on 19 March 2020, a few days after the first euthanasia bill was proposed in Uruguay.

The political context becomes evident in Florencia’s 19th entry, which quotes one of her previous posts: ‘I can’t put into words how much it would mean to me if such a law passed. I was moved to tears thinking a law like this could soon exist in Uruguay’. Florencia publicly thanked the proponent of the bill, Representative Ope Pasquet, who also joined the thread – which, by that point, had become a public forum. Debuted in 2006, Twitter became popular for its 140-character-max posts (then called ‘tweets’), a constraint that was seen as a driver of innovation (in 2011, the linguist Ben Zimmer compared the impulse to tweet to that of writing a sonnet). In 2017, the platform doubled its character limit to 280 and launched the threads function, so users could create an organized vertical chain of tweets to tell a story. Linear at first, Florencia’s thread was spun over the course of one hour, as she kept adding posts every few minutes. Yet, it also grew like an interactive rhizome as people started leaving comments, which Florencia addressed, multiplying the conversations. For example, she left a compassionate note to a commenter who also had ALS, while she assertively challenged another’s recommendation to read more about living with ALS under palliative care: ‘My father had the best palliative care in the world and he wanted to die anyway. No extra care would have changed that situation.’ Suddenly in the public eye, Florencia continued to share her experience through various platforms, inspiring overwhelmingly positive responses. Encapsulating the impact of Florencia’s words on public opinion, Radiomundo compiled online comments to an interview with her, including the reaction of a doctor who made a point of saying, ‘I understand and empathize’. Florencia’s testimony, first published as the social-media thread, would eventually become part of the parliamentary records, informing the discussions that culminated in the approval of Uruguay’s ‘Ley de Muerte Digna’ (Law of Dignified Death), on 24 October 2025.

Uruguay was the first country in Latin America to carry out a comprehensive euthanasia reform. The bill approved in 2025 (no. 20431) allows mentally capable adult citizens and permanent residents to request medical assistance to die, in case they suffer from an incurable and irreversible illness that causes unbearable pain. Although several Latin-American countries preceded Uruguay in efforts to advance the right-to-die, to date such initiatives have involved one or two but not all branches of government. Both Colombia and Ecuador decriminalized euthanasia (in 1997 and 2024, respectively) and subsequently regulated it through their Ministries of Health, but are yet to pass legislation. Cuba, on the other hand, incorporated the right to a ‘dignified death’ into a 2023 ‘Public Health Law’, but the Ministry of Health has postponed its application – and the courts have not yet decriminalized the procedure. Uruguay’s pioneering reform dates back to 2009, when the right to refuse life-prolonging treatment (sometimes referred to as ‘passive euthanasia’) was recognized. The first law focusing on medical assistance in dying (aka ‘active euthanasia’) was introduced in 2020 by Pasquet and approved by the Chamber of Representatives in 2022; however, it stalled in the Senate and would only pass both chambers of Congress in 2025, following the election of President Orsi. Soon after Pasquet introduced the bill, social mobilization – both for and against euthanasia – ignited. The momentum generated by Florencia Salgueiro’s thread led to her joining Empatía Uruguay (Empathy Uruguay), which advocates for personal autonomy in end-of-life decisions. Speaking for the opposition in the media, the Professor of Philosophy Miguel Pastorino cofounded Prudencia Uruguay (Prudence Uruguay) in 2020 – and since then, both directly and indirectly, debated Empatía Uruguay (the two nonprofits shared their perspectives on the proposed bill before Parliament in 2022). Pastorino argues against what he sees as a hypertrophied liberty offered to patients who are conditioned by emotional pressures, which results in giving doctors too much power in ambiguous situations. His call for a palliative care that would exclude euthanasia has been supported by the Catholic Church of Montevideo, whereas Empatía Uruguay sees the distinction between palliative care and euthanasia as a false opposition, arguing instead for a continuum of possible options grounded in personal autonomy.