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After a nearly four-year legal battle, Fabiana Banzer and Scarlett Rocha became the first same-sex couple to be civilly married in the South American country of Bolivia. Despite these women’s recent wedding, the country’s constitution still forbids same-sex marriages. Nevertheless, their legal victory could open the door to other same-sex couples eventually marrying.

The couple applied for a civil marriage certificate on October 12, 2022, with the legal support of the non-governmental LGBTQ+ rights organization IGUAL Bolivia. The organization noted that, on January 9, 2018, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR), which oversees 21 Caribbean, Central, and South American countries issued an advisory opinion stating that countries that had signed onto the 1969 American Convention on Human Rights should grant same-sex couples “accession to all existing domestic legal systems of family registration, including marriage, along with all rights that derive from marriage.”

However, Article 63 of Bolivia’s constitution limits marriage to heterosexual couples. The lengthy subsequent legal battle for Banzer and Rocha resulted in courts issuing two constitutional injunctions, an extraordinary judicial remedy used to protect citizens against actions that violate basic constitutional rights, Merco Press reported.

The couple eventually won their battle, but their court victory applies only to them, and no legislative or constitutional changes have occurred to allow same-sex marriages nationwide. Nevertheless, the victory could open the door to similar challenges that could accelerate the path towards marriage equality.

“Scar and I have been together for more than 4 years,” Banzer wrote in a public August 8 Facebook post. “It makes me very happy to announce to our family and friends that after a legal fight of 3 years and 10 months we have finally been able to access civil marriage as two women.”

Interestingly, Banzer and Rocha are the second same-sex couple to win legal recognition from their home country. In December 2020, David Aruquipa and Guido Montaño won their court battle to become the first same-sex couple to register their partnership as a civil union (a form of legal recognition that bestows many of the same legal privileges as marriage).

In Aruquipa and Montaño’s case, the Second Constitutional Chamber of the La Paz departmental court issued a ruling in the couple’s favor that was upheld by the Plurinational Constitutional Court. But similar to Banzer and Rocha’s case, the men’s legal victory didn’t immediately open the door to legalized same-sex unions across the country until further legal challenges resulted in spring 2023 court rulings requiring Bolivia’s Civil Registry Service to allow same-sex unions.

Aruquipa said on Sunday that he considers the women’s recent marriage to be a significant development in the country’s longer journey towards marriage equality. “Rather than speaking of a beginning, we should speak of a historical continuity: from the first recognized union to the first civil marriage,” he said.

While Bolivia doesn’t criminalize same-sex sexual encounters and has LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections, same-sex couples and partners aren’t legally allowed to adopt children, lesbian couples aren’t guaranteed access to in vitro fertilization (IVF), and conversion therapy remains legal.