Olga Luzardo

Olga Luzardo (29 February 1916 – 19 September 2016) was a Venezuelan journalist, poet, and activist. She was a leader in the Communist Party of Venezuela, serving on as a member of the central committee and political bureau on several occasions throughout her 80 years of involvement in the party.

Early life Olga Luzardo was born in Paraguaipoa in Venezuela's Zulia state in 1916, although some sources have reported her birth year as 1918. Her parents were Aramis Luzardo y Margarita Finol.

At age 12, she became part of the first Marxist circles in Maracaibo's Baralt and Urdaneta plazas. Through the poet and educator Jesús Enrique Lossada, she was introduced to the works of Karl Marx, Maxim Gorky, Friedrich Engels, Nikolai Bukharin, and Vladimir Lenin.

She also joined the fight for women's rights in 1928, protesting mistreatment and workplace discrimination.

Activism Luzardo was a member of the Patriotic Women's Society, an organization of women that protested and fought against the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez.

In 1931, along with Gabriel Bracho, Espartaco González, Isidro Valles, and others, she helped form the first cells of the Communist Party of Venezuela in the state of Zulia.

After Gómez's death in 1935, Luzardo began working to organize political groups among the oil workers. In 1936, she participated in the First Feminist Congress in Caracas, alongside Eumelia Hernández, Itala Reyes, Auxiliadora Soto, Margoth Díaz Urdaneta, Rosa Virginia Martínez, and other female activists fighting for women's suffrage. Later that year, she was one of the main organizers of the First Great Venezuelan Oil Strike.

In 1936, Luzardo founded the Agrupación Cultural Femenina, the Communist Party's first women's organization, which worked for international solidarity and equal political, social, and cultural rights for women. She remained deeply involved in the party, working on its central committee and to disseminate party materials across the country. She was a founder of the Women's International Democratic Federation in the 1940s, serving as Venezuela's first delegate to the organization and traveling to represent the country in the Soviet Union, Chile, Cuba, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries.

She received a degree in economics from the Central University of Venezuela in 1944. The following year, one of her primary fights came to fruition: Venezuelan women won the right to vote. She returned to Caracas after the Jiménez dictatorship's fall in 1958. She sometimes wrote under the pseudonym "Petrovna."

In 2016, Luzardo was given the Order of the Liberators Medal First Class by President Nicolás Maduro. She died later that year in Caracas, at age 100.