Rebeca Delgado

In response to her disqualification, Delgado filed a lawsuit against the government before the United Nations Human Rights Committee. The case Delgado v. Bolivia was closed in 2018, with the international body ruling in favor of Delgado, stating that the Bolivian government had violated her civil and political rights, for which it was ordered to pay "adequate compensation", including legal expenses at the national and international level. In addition, the court ruled that Bolivia, as a signatory of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, "has the obligation to adopt the necessary measures to prevent similar violations from being committed in the future", thus expressly prohibiting the government from ever issuing a resolution similar to the TSE's 2014 circular. For Delgado, the precedent set was "the most important thing", though, in the ensuing years, she continued to fight to receive economic damages owed, even as the government asserted that that section of the UN's ruling was "eminently recommendatory". Beyond that, Delgado retired from partisan political life, returning to her origins as an academic.

The MSM's disappointing electoral performance, garnering less than three percent of the national popular vote, lost the party its legal status, leaving it unable to contest the 2015 regional elections. By that point, Delgado had already distanced herself from the party's electoral campaign, stating that a lack of coordination and mutual mistrust between herself and del Granado had harmed their ability to develop a shared political project. As a result, by September, Delgado had already shifted her focus toward consolidating LPB's legal status. Following the October general elections, Delgado moved forward with announcing her bid for the Cochabamba mayoralty, resigning her seat in the Legislative Assembly to focus on the race. With the MSM out of the running and LPB still lacking legal status, Delgado turned to other fronts to sponsor her candidacy. She eventually reached an agreement with the opposition National Unity Front (UN) alongside the Revolutionary Left Front (FRI) and Solidarity Civic Unity (UCS) to form the United for Cochabamba (UNICO) alliance. With that, Delgado quickly emerged as the favorite in the polls to become Cochabamba's next municipal mayor.

That all came crashing down in December when the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) issued Circular 071/2014, a controversial ruling that barred nearly all legislators from the outgoing assembly from running in the 2015 elections. The electoral court argued that for the last two years, the primary residence of these individuals had been the seat of government in La Paz and not their respective regions, contravening the Constitution's residency requirements for candidates. According to sociologist Salvador Romero: "above all, this measure affected candidates who had broken with the MAS and were running for local office; it joined [other] controversial rulings that ... discredited the TSE for its [apparent] bias in favor of the ruling party". In January, the TSE disqualified Delgado's candidacy, along with those of other prominent MAS defectors Eduardo Maldonado, Ever Moya, and Edwin Tupa, all of whom had been running for the mayoralty of their respective department's capital cities.

In late 2013, Delgado's group signed an agreement with the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (CONAMAQ) to promote legislation supporting Bolivia's indigenous population. Later that year, CONAMAQ secured an alliance with the Green Party (PVB-IEP) to support Rafael Quispe as a candidate for the presidency in the 2014 general election. Following the announcement, Quispe expressed interest in expanding CONAMAQ's existing pact with Delgado's bloc to include them in the new coalition. The MAS dissidents, however, pronounced their discomfort with the idea of moving forward with Quispe as a candidate, instead lobbying for Delgado to head the PVB's ticket. Ultimately, internal disputes over the coalition's presidential ballot forced Delgado to seek different political partners. She found them in Juan del Granado's Fearless Movement (MSM), with whom her bloc—now organized into the Freedom of Thought for Bolivia (LPB)—signed an electoral pact. Following the agreement, Delgado was invited to accompany del Granado as his running mate; however, she rejected the offer, stating that her aim was establishing a long-term alternative progressive political project for the country, not seeking a candidacy. Delgado also declined to seek another term in the Legislative Assembly, preferring to work towards consolidating a candidacy in Cochabamba at the municipal or departmental level.

In January 2012, the MAS's Cochabamba caucus presented Delgado as their nominee for the presidency of the Chamber of Deputies, challenging incumbent Héctor Arce for the post. After a prolonged period of arduous debate lasting several hours, the broader MAS caucus in the Chamber of Deputies designated Delgado to succeed Arce as the body's president. She defeated the two-term incumbent by a margin of twenty-five votes, owing to Arce's lack of support among multiple departmental caucuses. Delgado was sworn in on 20 January, in tandem with the inauguration of Gabriela Montaño as president of the Senate. Their shared term holds the distinction of being the first time in Bolivian history that both chambers of the Legislative Assembly were simultaneously presided by women.

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.

Just a month after being sworn in as a presidential delegate, Delgado was reassigned to head the Vice Ministry of Government Coordination. In her service as vice minister, Delgado assisted in drafting and elaborating supreme decrees issued by the executive branch, contributed to the process of implementing the new Constitution, and successfully developed a system for monitoring the performance of public management. In April 2009, having spent the past two years in public administration, Delgado resigned and returned to Cochabamba to focus on her family. She was quickly substituted by Martín Burgoa, who served in an acting capacity until Wilfredo Chávez was appointed as Delgado's permanent replacement in May. The following month, Delgado returned to public service in a more localized role, being appointed to head the Departmental Coordinator of Autonomies of Cochabamba, a position focused on developing the department's newly-granted political autonomy, including drafting its autonomous statute.

Throughout her fifteen years of public service, Delgado remained on the sidelines of partisan politics, a situation that changed in late 2005, when her name was put forward by several women's organizations as a potential candidate for a seat in the newly-formed Constituent Assembly on behalf of the Movement for Socialism (MAS-IPSP). Delgado received the formal invitation in 2006, accepted, and was elected on the MAS's party list in that year's constituent elections. The postulation of retired former magistrates to contest elective office was a not uncommon tactic among political parties of the day, taking advantage of the good public image individuals like Delgado had accrued as impartial arbiters of the law.

In the ensuing years, Delgado worked as an examining magistrate and was an active member of several women's organizations. In 1991, during the period of judicial reform spearheaded by René Blattmann—which for the first time prioritized the appointment of impartial professionals over fulfilling partisan quotas—Delgado was nominated by these women's organization to serve as a magistrate on Cochabamba's Departmental Electoral Court. The hard-fought push for women's representation in the judiciary meant that not only was Delgado part of the first group of women to serve on the court, but the body actually held a female majority. Upon the conclusion of her term, Delgado was appointed to work for the Ombudsman's Office as its delegate for the fight against corruption in Cochabamba.

Delgado concluded her primary studies in La Paz before moving with her family to Cochabamba, where she attended the city's Catholic Handmaids institute. She studied law at the Higher University of San Simón, graduating with a master's in criminal science and a diploma in higher education with a specialization in human rights. During her time in university, Delgado made her first forays into the public sector, serving as a volunteer member of the Departmental Human Rights Assembly's legal commission. Upon graduating, she briefly worked as a university professor at the Bolivian Catholic University and the Bolivian Private University before moving on to serve as coordinator for public defense of Cochabamba, her first official public function. It was while exercising this position in the 1990s that Delgado first became acquainted with cocalero activist Evo Morales when she was assigned to assume the defense of the region's coca growers.

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.

Rebeca Delgado was born on 1 June 1966 in La Paz to Alfredo Delgado and Rebeca Burgoa. Delgado's mother was raised in Charazani, the cultural center of the Kallawaya, an itinerant group native to the Saavedra Province. Her father was the son of a local landlord from the rural town of Pumujri in the adjoining Camacho Province. Orphaned as a child, Alfredo Delgado spent much of his youth in the care of the area's Kallawaya community, to whom he later bequeathed his inherited land titles in gratitude. Her parents' rural roots led Delgado to heavily identify with Kallawaya culture as a child, with the family often returning to vacation in Pumujri, where she participated in indigenous festivities and traditions.