Domitila Barrios de Chungara

Domitila Barrios was born in the Siglo XX tin-mining settlement in the Bolivian highlands, the eldest of five daughters. Her mother died when she was ten and she raised her sisters while her father, a miner, worked underground. She married a miner, had seven children, and made a little money selling baked goods. In 1963 she joined the Housewives' Committee of Siglo XX, formed by wives of miners who had been sacked or jailed for union activity, and became its leader.

The work was dangerous. In 1967 the army massacred miners and their families in the camp on the night of San Juan, and she was arrested, interrogated and beaten while pregnant; she lost the baby. She was jailed again in the years that followed. In 1975 she was invited to the United Nations women's conference in Mexico City, where she told delegates that the problems of well-dressed women from rich countries were not the problems of women who watched their children die of hunger. A book of her testimony, Let Me Speak, was translated around the world.

In December 1977 she and four other women from the mines, with several of their children, began a hunger strike in the archbishop's office in La Paz, demanding an amnesty for political prisoners and exiles and the reinstatement of sacked miners. Within three weeks more than a thousand people across the country had joined them. The government of General Banzer gave in, granted the amnesty and called elections.

She was exiled after a later coup, returned in 1982 and ran a school for miners' children. She died in 2012.