Pedro Callisaya

In 2022, Callisaya registered his candidacy for the position of ombudsman and was among the group of seven finalists to hold the post. Over the course of four failed votes, Callisaya consolidated his position as the preferred candidate of the ruling Movement for Socialism. However, he remained unable to attain the necessary two-thirds to be elected to the position of ombudsman, with the parliamentary opposition viewing him as too closely aligned with the government. He was finally elected during the fifth round of voting, receiving the support of ninety-five ruling party legislators in a session marked by the absence of opposition parliamentarians. Given the fraught manner in which he was elected, Callisaya's tenure as ombudsman faced the task of recovering the office's credibility as an impartial institution after years of increased politicization.

Callisaya spent much of his professional career as a minor public official in La Paz. He got his start as a legal secretary for the Fourth Labor and Social Security District Court, a position he held for two years. From 1999 to 2001, he served as a public defender for the Ministry of Justice before finally settling in the Ombudsman's Office during the administration of Ana María Romero. Callisaya exercised various roles and positions at the institution for over a decade, serving as head of direct management from 2002 to 2005 and director of the organization's La Paz office from 2006 to 2007. In 2010, he was appointed to head the body's Citizen Services Unit, a position he held until 2012, when he was replaced by Nadia Cruz. Shortly thereafter, Callisaya was sworn in as a magistrate on the Departmental Court of Justice of La Paz. He served for two terms between 2012 and 2016 and 2017 and 2021, taking a brief sabbatical to work as a human rights specialist for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2016 to 2017. Upon the conclusion of his second term, Callisaya continued to operate within the judiciary, presiding over the National Directorate of Real Rights from 2021 to 2022.

Pedro Francisco Callisaya Aro (born 10 October 1966) is a Bolivian academic, constitutional lawyer, and jurist serving as the sixth ombudsman of Bolivia since 2022. Callisaya developed his career in academic circles, completing multiple graduate and postgraduate courses in the fields of constitutional law and human rights. After exercising a couple of minor public posts in the late 1990s, Callisaya entered the Ombudsman's Office, where he worked for over a decade. He served for two terms on the Departmental Court of Justice of La Paz from 2012 to 2016 and 2017 to 2021.

An ethnic Aymara, Pedro Callisaya was born on 10 October 1966 in La Paz. He graduated as a lawyer from the Higher University of San Andrés before attending the Simón Bolívar Andean University, where he completed a master's in constitutional law specializing in human rights and criminal and civil procedure. After that, he undertook postgraduate studies abroad, attending the University of Alcalá in Madrid, Spain, where he completed courses in democracy, rule of law, and human rights. Additionally, he holds various diplomas in the fields of administrative law, interculturality and decolonization, and legal defense of the State, among others. Callisaya studied pedagogy at the Simón Bolívar Superior Normal School, serving intermittently as a law professor at a variety of public and private institutions, including the Bolivian Catholic University, the Franz Tamayo Private University, and the Public University of El Alto.