Madeiran businesswoman Maria Helena Camacho Correia, known for being the first Portuguese woman to teach at a Venezuelan university, died on Saturday in Caracas, the victim of a long illness, a family source told Lusa.
“He passed away this morning, the victim of complications from cancer, a disease he fought tirelessly for 28 years and never gave up on,” said one of the daughters.
Maria Helena Camacho Correia, born in Ponta do Sol, Madeira, where she was born on August 13, 1944, emigrated to Venezuela in 1965, where she completed her career in business administration at José Maria Vargas University ‘summa cum laude’.
As president of Associação Cultural Abril, she founded with her husband Manuel Correia (deceased in 2019) the company Aeroexpressos Executivos, which modernized passenger transport between Venezuelan cities, and Turismo Executivo.
Maria Helena Camacho Correia, known for her tenacity and pride in being Portuguese, insisted that expatriate women played a “unique and prominent” role in Portuguese and Venezuelan society and that Portuguese and Portuguese descendants should teach their children from an early age about keep Portugal. to bring them to Portugal and to interest them in Portugal, to know its roots.
Maria Helena Camacho Correia was also known for urging her students, especially those of Portuguese descent, on the importance of a university career, and on compatriots so that they “never feel less for being away from their homeland and also when they are there. they will consider themselves first-class citizens”.
She received several awards and was a keynote speaker at several Portuguese-Venezuelan events and in Madeira, where in 2001 she gave a conference on Rotarios in Funchal and another on solidarity, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Ponta do Sol.
The remains of the Madeira woman will be kept in a burning chamber in the New Chapel (8) of the Eastern Cemetery in Caracas between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. local time on Sunday.
Source: DN
