Ancelma Perlacios

Sworn in at the beginning of 2015, Perlacios became the first-ever member of the Afro-Bolivian community to serve in the Senate and is the most recent individual to do so to date. Together with Celia Bonilla—who took office in the Chamber of Deputies at the same time—Perlacios is one of the first two black women to have served in parliament. They are the second and third Afro-Bolivian individuals to have held seats in the Legislative Assembly, after Jorge Medina, who represented La Paz in the previous legislature. Regarding advances in Afro recognition in the country, Perlacios expressed optimism, stating that "much progress has been made. We Afros are being taken into account and are in places where important decisions are made."

Perlacios's membership within the Bartolina Sisas opened the door to her 2014 nomination to the Senate on behalf of the Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP). Despite her bottom-of-the-list placement on the party's electoral list, she won the seat, reflecting the high level of MAS support in the La Paz Department—a fact that, since 2009, had allowed the party to consistently take home all four of the region's available Senate seats. Perlacios's election also attested to the openness of the MAS towards including women of rural backgrounds on its roster of candidates, especially in 2014, an action that produced the largest caucus of peasant women elected to parliament in Bolivian history, both in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. In a legislature composed of roughly fifty percent women, Perlacios was among the quarter who entered as members of the Bartolina Sisa Confederation.

Perlacios spent much of her senatorial term focused on matters related to coca, its cultivation, regulation, and decriminalization. Her strident promotion of the plant's usage predated even her membership in the Bartolina Sisas. As early as 2010, she had represented the Council of Peasant Federations of the Yungas at meetings in Lima regarding the usage of coca in Peru and Bolivia, and in 2012, she was a delegate to Vienna on behalf of the Departmental Association of Coca Producers (ADEPCOCA), where she promoted the decriminalization of acullico.

Perlacios became active in community organizing relatively late in life, not participating in grassroots movements until the mid-2000s, when she was already in her early forties. Her first functions were in the La Joya Community, where she served as secretary of finance from 2004 to 2006. She later held the same post in the Chicaloma Women's Center from 2006 to 2008. Perlacios's rapid rise through the ranks of women's union leadership culminated in her 2008 election as executive of the Unified Regional Federation of Peasant Women of Irupana. Reelected to a second two-year term in 2010, Perlacios acceded to a national-level position in 2012 when she joined the directorate of the Bartolina Sisa Confederation as the organization's secretary of defense of the coca leaf.

Ancelma Perlacios Peralta (born 26 July 1964) is a Bolivian cocalera activist, politician, and trade unionist who served as senator for La Paz from 2015 to 2020. Born in the rural community of Chicaloma, Perlacios ascended the ranks of women's union leadership throughout the mid-2000s and early 2010s, starting at the local and later municipal levels before reaching the national level as part of the Bartolina Sisa Confederation. Her membership there facilitated her inclusion on the Movement for Socialism's 2014 electoral list, through which she was elected to the Senate. As a legislator, Perlacios occupied a unique position in Bolivian parliamentary history as the first-ever Afro-Bolivian to serve in the Senate. She shares, together with Celia Bonilla, the distinction of being one of the first two Afro-Bolivian women in parliament, and is one of just three overall, after Jorge Medina.

Ancelma Perlacios was born on 26 July 1964 in Chicaloma, a rural community situated in the tropical foothills of La Paz's Sud Yungas Province. She completed portions of her primary schooling in her hometown up to the seventh grade but dropped out before advancing further. Her situation reflected a common fact of life for many women in rural agrarian areas of the country, where high school attendance, much less graduation, was often infrequent, even into the second half of the twentieth century.