When a Constitution Names the Earth as a Rights-Holder

Pachamama's move into modern law is a genuinely unusual development in comparative legal history. Ecuador's 2008 constitution, adopted after a constituent assembly process that drew explicitly on Andean indigenous concepts, became the first national constitution in the world to grant enforceable legal rights directly to nature itself, using the term Pachamama in its text and establishing that nature has the right to have its existence respected and its cycles, structures and functions restored, rights that citizens and the state are empowered to invoke in court on nature's own behalf rather than only through claims of harm to human interests.

Bolivia followed in 2010 and 2012 with its own Law of the Rights of Mother Earth and a longer companion framework law, again drawing directly on the concept of Pachamama as understood in Aymara and Quechua tradition and asserting a comparable set of legal rights and protections for the natural world, developed with substantial input from indigenous social movements and coca-growers' organizations that had long organized around defence of the land in explicitly Pachamama-centred terms. These laws have had a mixed and debated record in practical enforcement, legal scholars and environmental advocates differ over how much concrete protective effect the rights-of-nature provisions have actually achieved against continued mining, drilling and agricultural expansion in both countries, but their existence marks a genuine and closely studied instance of an indigenous Andean religious and cosmological concept being translated directly into the formal language of national constitutional and statutory law, cited internationally as an influential precedent by rights-of-nature movements advocating similar legal changes elsewhere.