Helena Pato (born 19 April 1939) was a mathematics teacher, a communist opponent of Portugal's Estado Novo regime and a union leader.
Maria Helena Martins dos Santos Pato Noales Rodrigues was born in 1939 in Mamarrosa, in the municipality of Oliveira do Bairro in the Aveiro District of Portugal, the daughter of a primary school teacher and an agronomist.
With left-wing views obtained from her father, and having experienced poverty at first hand while working with the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul on Sundays, her political activity began at the university when she joined the youth wing of the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), a quasi-legal platform of democratic organizations that opposed the Estado Novo.
While at university, she was friendly with Paulo Jorge, a future foreign minister of Angola, with whom she discussed anti-colonialism and played table tennis.
Nolaes, who would die of lymphoma in 1965, had been previously arrested in 1958 by the PIDE, the International and State Defence Police, (Portuguese: Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado), which was an agency nominally in charge of immigration and emigration control and internal and external State security, but which over time came to be known for its secret police activities.
Returning to Portugal after her husband's death, she was part of the early efforts to establish the National Commission for Relief for Political Prisoners (Comissão Nacional de Socorro aos Presos Políticos - CNSPP), together with Maria Eugénia Varela Gomes, Aida Paula and others.
She, herself, was arrested in June 1967 by the PIDE which had intercepted a phone call from another communist party member asking for her help to dispose of a suitcase full of explosives.
Tengarrinha was leader of the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDM), which was founded in 1969 as an electoral coalition to run in the undemocratic parliamentary elections.