Review. Zaffaroni, Eugenio Raul, La Pachamama y el humano. Buenos Aires, Ediciones Colihue / Ediciones Madres de Plaza de Mayo, 2011.

Abstract

The author of the work under review, Eugenio Raúl Zaffaroni, is one of Latin America’s leading criminal law scholars and criminologists, an academic, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Justice of Argentina, and a judge on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights from 2016 to 2021.

La Pachamama y el Humano brings together three texts: the central essay by Zaffaroni himself, a foreword by historian and journalist Osvaldo Bayer, and an afterword by legal scholar Matías Bailone, accompanied by illustrations by artist Miguel Rep.
The work has academic origins: it emerged from two keynote lectures that Zaffaroni delivered upon receiving honorary doctorates from the National University of Tucumán (2009) and the Simón Bolívar Andean University in Quito (2010).

In this context, the author systematically developed a reflection on the place of human beings in nature, animal rights, animal abuse in criminal law, and the emergence of Latin American neoconstitutionalism as a legal response to the global ecological crisis.