She was one of the founders of the Asociación de Mujeres ante la Problemática Nacional (Association of Women Concerned about National Crisis, AMPRONAC), which later became the Asociación de Mujeres Nicaragüenes Luisa Amanda Espinoza (Luisa Amanda Espinoza Association of Nicaraguan Women, AMNLAE) and remained on its board for many years.
[8] By 1982, she was working for the state, as the chief legal council for the National Assembly[9] but was still denied party membership, as the examiners believed that she was using her relationship with Nuñez Téllez to acquire power of her own.
[12] In 1986, she joined efforts with poet Gioconda Belli and journalist Sofía Montenegro to found the Partido de la Izquierda Erotica (Party of Erotic Left, PIE).
Their platform wanted to empower not only women but all marginalized people and aimed at political reform to combat the sexism that had become ingrained in Daniel Ortega's campaign.
Vargas led the drive to draft the new constitution and was successful in expanding women's rights and gender equality in the newly framed document.
[13] By 1990, she began advocating for a separation between the FSLN and AMNLAE to enable and empower the women in the movement to make their own decisions and implement their own plans of action, independently from the party line.
Hosting a conference with the theme Unidas en la Diversidad (United in Difference), some women along with Vargas began to explore the means to claim their own autonomy.
[14] In 1992, she and others from the Center for Constitutional Rights began working on the reform of the statutes dealing with rape and sodomy in Nicaragua, as part of the Commission on Women, Youth, Children and the Family established across party lines by the administration of President Violeta Chamorro.
[21] Heated debate followed, and though many of the reforms were adopted as Vargas had proposed them, decriminalization of abortion for rape victims and consensual sodomy did not become part of the revised penal code.
[22] Instead, the changes to the portion of the code that dealt with sodomy were amended to provide vague language and penalties that could apply to activists working on behalf of LGBT communities.