Dolores Ibárruri

Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez, known more famously as "La Pasionaria" (passion flower) was a Spanish Republican leader of the Spanish Civil War and communist politician of Basque origin, perhaps best known for her defense of the Second Spanish Republic with the famous slogan ¡No Pasarán! ("They Shall Not Pass"), during the Battle of Madrid.

She grew up in Gallarta, the daughter of a local Basque miner and a Castillian mother. Upon her marriage to the revolutionary socialist miner Julián Ruiz Gabiña, Ibarruri moved to Somorrosto (Biscay). It was here, during the 1920s, that the once Carlist Catholic young woman became a revolutionary militant activist and one of the first members of the Spanish Communist Party (PCE) when it was founded in 1921. In the 1930s, she became a writer for the PCE publication Mundo Obrero, and was elected to the Cortes as a PCE deputy for Asturias in February 1936 during the Second Republic. After the end of the Spanish Civil War and her exile from Spain, she was appointed General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Spain, a position she held from 1942 to 1960, when she was made honorary president of the PCE, a post she held for the rest of her life. Upon her return to Spain in 1977, she was reelected as a deputy to the Cortes for the same region she had once represented during the Second Republic. She is usually regarded as being one of the greatest public speakers of the twentieth century.