Argelia Laya

Argelia Laya was an Afro-Venezuelan schoolteacher, women's rights activist, guerrilla fighter, and politician. A supporter of women's labor, legal, and reproductive rights, as well as various forms of left-wing politics, she was a founding member of the Movement for Socialism, the first woman to serve as its secretary general, and, when she became the party's president in 1990, the first woman to serve as the president of a political party in Venezuela.