Rebeca Delgado

Rebeca Elvira Delgado Burgoa (born 1 June 1966) is a Bolivian academic, lawyer, magistrate, and politician who served as president of the Chamber of Deputies from 2012 to 2013. As a member of the Movement for Socialism, she served as a party-list member of the Chamber of Deputies from Cochabamba from 2010 to 2014. Prior to her election to the lower chamber, Delgado served as a party-list member of the Constituent Assembly from Cochabamba from 2006 to 2007 and was vice minister of government coordination from 2008 to 2009. Delgado's near-decade-long political and legislative tenure was preceded by a fifteen-year career as a public servant, during which time she worked as a public defender and examining magistrate, was a magistrate on the Departmental Electoral Court of Cochabamba, and served as the Ombudsman's Office's delegate for the fight against corruption in Cochabamba.

Born in La Paz and raised in Cochabamba, Delgado graduated as a lawyer at the Higher University of San Simón. She ventured into public activity through the field of human rights, supporting the Departmental Human Rights Assembly during her days as a law student. She worked as coordinator for public defense in Cochabamba and as an examining magistrate before being selected to serve on the department's Departmental Electoral Court, part of the first group of women to hold seats on the bench. Delgado became politically involved during the first government of Evo Morales when she was invited to run for a seat in the Constituent Assembly, tasked with drafting the country's current Constitution. She continued in public administration following the assembly's closure, serving as presidential delegate in Cochabamba, vice minister of government coordination, and head of the Departmental Coordinator of Autonomies.

In 2009, Delgado was elected to represent Cochabamba in the Chamber of Deputies, and was elected to the presidency of the lower chamber in 2012. Delgado's tenure saw a deterioration in relations between herself and the administration due to her willingness to challenge executive interference in legislative matters, briefly upending the subservient role the legislature had begun to take starting from Morales's second term. Delgado was not reelected to the presidency and spent the remainder of her term as ''persona non grata'' within her own party, assuming leadership over a nascent group of "freethinkers" that defected from the ruling party in the latter years of the 1st Plurinational Legislative Assembly. In late 2014, she launched a bid for the Cochabamba mayoralty on behalf of her own party, Freedom of Thought for Bolivia. However, her candidacy was disqualified due to a controversial judicial ruling that barred most outgoing legislators from running for local public office. Delgado took her grievance to the United Nations, which in 2018 ruled that the government had violated her civil and political rights.

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