Susel Paredes often finds herself in dangerous situations, donning a bulletproof vest to lead high-profile police operations and breaking up cartels of street vendors in one of the grittier parts of Peruvian capital Lima. Now the short, curly-haired city official is taking on a more personal battle: legalizing gay marriage in the conservative, majority-Catholic country and getting recognition for the Miami wedding to her wife in 2016. Paredes, 55, a lawyer by training, and her wife, Gracia Aljovin, legally challenged a decision by Peru’s national identification registry Reniec, which had rejected their request to validate their marriage for legal purposes. But in a landmark April 4 ruling, a local court said authorities must treat the couple’s marriage as any other, and that failing to do so would be discriminatory and unconstitutional. “What we’ve done with our marriage is launch strategic litigation,” Paredes told Reuters in an interview last week. “We want to trigger a legal process that moves us toward obtaining the equal right to marriage in Peru,” she added.