Prosecuting attorney. Judge. Educator. Women’s-rights advocate. Real-estate executive. Political exile. Mother to five, grandmother to 13 and great-grandmother to 23.
Graciela Lara de Peñaranda has seen much over nearly a century. And this July, as she turned 97, family and well-wishers turned out in force to celebrate the achievements of the South Arlington resident.
A highly successful professional in her native Bolivia, Lara de Peñaranda overcame personal adversity, including the early death of her husband from prostate cancer, to raise five small children (four of her own plus one foster child) and attain success as a lawyer, prosecutor and judge.
With her life under threat from communist extremists, she came to the U.S. in 1985. And they were not idle threats – a terrorist bomb blew up her prosecutor’s office in La Paz one day, just before she arrived for work.
Given the turmoil, she opted to emigrate to the U.S., as her eldest son previously had settled in Northern Virginia. But that is getting ahead of the story.
Lara de Peñaranda was born July 3, 1927, in the legendary city of Potosi (where one of her ancestors had been the colonial governor) and spent her childhood in the Bolivian altiplano mining town of Oruro. During high school, her oratorical skills were sought for performances on local radio.
In her student days at Higher University of San Andrés in La Paz, she was co-founder of the student theater, headed the Union of Women University Students and was a prominent activist for women’s suffrage. (Bolivian women won the right to vote only in 1952.)
Lara de Peñaranda was one of only two women in her law school’s graduating class, the other being lifelong friend Nelly Sfeir Gonzalez, later an award-winning academic librarian, bibliographer and journal editor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In Bolivia, Lara de Peñaranda was first an award-winning high-school French teacher, later a well-regarded lawyer who served as a family-court judge and as a prosecuting judge advocate of the supreme court of military justice, rising to the rank of captain in the Bolivian Army.
Among her professional accomplishments: Lara de Peñaranda drafted the legislation that allowed women to retain their maiden family name after marriage; she served as president of the National Federation of Women Lawyers of Bolivia (an affiliate of the International Federation of Women Lawyers); and she successfully prosecuted several terrorist guerillas accused of murder and destruction of property. Through most of her adult life, she was a single mother who had to work full-time to support her family.
In 1967, Lara de Peñaranda was part of a delegation of seven National Federation of Women Lawyers invited by the U.S. Department of State to travel to the U.S., visiting the District of Columbia, New York, Colorado and Florida, among other states.
“It was a very interesting trip,” Lara de Peñaranda recalled. “We visited the U.S. Congress and the Supreme Court, where Chief Justice Earl Warren received us very well. We learned a lot about the laws of the U.S. Constitution and really the equality of men and women with respect to legal rights.”
Once in the U.S. permanently, she taught Spanish and French, eventually becoming the department head at the Instituto Internacional Lado in Washington, D.C., today a university. Since 1986, she has worked as a successful real-estate executive, serving as vice president and chief administrator of J.P. Realty, a residential-real-estate firm operating in Virginia and Maryland.
Though her birthday is July 3, the South Columbus Street resident has celebrated it on July 4 ever since becoming a U.S. citizen. All of her children and grandchildren are U.S. citizens, as well.
A big celebration of her birthday was held July 13 at Faith Baptist Church in Fredericksburg, along with festivities in Arlington. Special guests included Tom and Claire Shields from North Carolina – Tom had been a foreign-exchange student at Lara de Peñaranda’s home in La Paz – and the three brothers Gonzalez (Sergio, Fernando and Javier) from Illinois. Also on hand was Paul Ferguson, clerk of the Circuit Court for Arlington and Falls Church, who years back had been tutored in Spanish by Lara de Peñaranda.
Having survived a bout of COVID in 2022, she remains physically active and is writing her memoirs, tentatively titled “It Was Worth It.”
A woman of strong religious faith, Lara de Peñaranda combines it with temporal suggestions in her advice to the generations coming up behind her.
“Understand and accept that progress is made in steps – sometimes giant steps, but usually small steps,” she said. “The important thing is to trust God and keep moving forward.”
