Blas Wilfredo Omar Jaime

Blas Wilfredo Omar Jaime, known in Chaná as Agó Acoé Inó (dog without owner) and honored as Tató Oyendén, the custodian of ancestral memory, was the last widely recognized native speaker of Chaná, a Charruan language of the Paraná River basin in Argentina. Born on 2 February 1934 in El Pueblito near Nogoyá, Entre Ríos, he carried a lineage his family had kept quiet for generations. His mother, Ederlinda Miguelina Yelón, and before her his grandmother and great-grandmother, belonged to the women's line of dayendén who safeguarded Chaná speech and custom. Because his sisters died young, that charge passed to him when he was about twelve. Lessons continued into his mid-twenties: vocabulary, stories, and a culture of restraint that prized silence over display.

For decades he obeyed the family rule not to speak Chaná outside the community. Indigenous identity had meant persecution and scorn in the region, and his relatives insisted he learn everything yet say nothing publicly. Only in retirement, near seventy, did he judge that the long-promised signal had arrived. He began searching Entre Ríos for other speakers, even appealing on a friend's radio station. No one came forward. The loneliness of that discovery pushed him to break silence rather than let the language die with him.

His voice reached Conicet linguist José Pedro Viegas Barros, who studied the recordings and traveled to work with him. Together they produced the 2013 book La lengua chaná: patrimonio cultural de Entre Ríos, a historical and linguistic account with a dictionary that provincial authorities treated as cultural heritage under the name Lanték. Jaime also left bilingual sound archives for Argentina's Sonidos y Lenguas platform and appeared in Marina Zeising's documentary Lantéc Chaná. In 2019 he visited Montevideo and the Salsipuedes monument region at the invitation of Charrúa councils, standing publicly for a people long written out of official history.

Neighbors in Paraná's El Morro barrio knew a patient teacher who still measured age by Chaná moons and who said he had never cried, danced, or knelt before anyone but God, keeping childhood teachings into old age. He died in Paraná on 17 September 2026 at 92. His daughter Evangelina Jaime inherits the guardianship of the language he refused to abandon to silence.