Manuel Alfredo Martí

It is with profound sadness that the International Vegetarian Union announces the passing of Manuel Alfredo Martí, our esteemed colleague and dear friend, on Friday, 19 June 2026. A journalist, writer, editor, and tireless activist, Manuel devoted his life to the animals and to building the vegan and vegetarian movement across Argentina, Latin America, and the world. His loss is felt deeply by all of us who had the privilege of working alongside him.

His journey began as a young man of eighteen, while he was working as an artisan at the fair in the Plaza San Martín in Buenos Aires. A book on natural medicine led him to make the connection, for the first time, between the food on his plate and the suffering of sentient beings. From that moment — and for more than four decades that followed — he never turned back, dedicating his whole life to the cause in a country whose identity and economy had been built around the consumption of meat. To stand for the animals in such a place demanded not only conviction but extraordinary resilience, and Manuel carried both with grace and good humour to the very end.

In the year 2000 he transformed a solitary commitment into a collective movement, founding the Unión Vegetariana Argentina — later renamed the Unión Vegana Argentina (UVA) — the first non-governmental organisation in Argentina created exclusively to promote, defend, and spread this way of life. As its founder and director, he built the UVA into a cornerstone of the movement throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He founded and edited its magazine, first as El Vegetariano and later as VEGAN, among the earliest publications in Hispanic America devoted entirely to veganism, and he created and coordinated the UVA's YouTube channel, an archive of hundreds of talks, conferences, workshops, and artistic expressions that carried the message to a vast audience in Spanish.

Manuel's bond with the International Vegetarian Union began in 1999, when the early days of the internet allowed him to discover IVU's website and to reach the Spanish pioneer David Román. That transatlantic friendship gave Manuel the foundations on which to build the UVA — whose very first website was hosted on IVU's own servers — and it opened a lifelong relationship with the global movement. He served for many years on the IVU International Council, and from 2016 as IVU's Regional Representative for Latin America and the Caribbean, acting as a vital bridge between the activists of the continent and the worldwide movement he loved.

Among his many gifts to IVU, Manuel was the driving force behind the 44th IVU World Vegfest, held in Buenos Aires in 2016. Over four full days of activities and outreach, the gathering brought together participants from seventeen countries across the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania — a vivid expression of his belief that the movement grows strongest when it grows together. Three years earlier, in 2013, he had welcomed activists from across the region to the 7th Latin American Vegfest in the Argentine capital. Bringing people together was, perhaps, his truest talent.

His activism reached well beyond the events he organised. Through the UVA he coordinated the Lunes Sin Carne (Meatless Monday) campaign in Argentina, championed landmark public-health and anti-discrimination initiatives in Buenos Aires, and commissioned the first national surveys, carried out by Kantar, that revealed the true size of the country's vegan and vegetarian population — giving the movement the evidence, and the legitimacy, it had long been denied. He was at ease addressing presidents and skeptical farmers alike, always with rigour and warmth. To the agricultural press that fondly named him “the most veteran vegan,” he offered not hostility but an invitation to imagine a kinder future.