Life or lithium in Argentina
Salt flats in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina. June 2023. Photo © Susi Maresca.
Reportage • Susi Maresca • July 24, 2025 • Leer en castellano
The Andean salt flats are known to hold the clues to the origins of life on our planet. They also contain an increasingly coveted, silver coloured alkaline metal: lithium.
Indigenous communities have built a life around salt in Argentina’s Jujuy province for at least 40,000 years. They’ve been steadfast in their resistance against the advances of mining interests that threaten all that surrounds them.
Salinas Grandes is a high-altitude basin spanning the Argentine provinces of Jujuy and Salta. Renowned for its beauty, it is one of the largest salt fields in Latin America
It belongs to what corporations and governments call “the lithium triangle,” which spans Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile and holds over half of the world’s lithium reserves.
A photo of a freshwater spring from above in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina. December 2024. Photo © Susi Maresca.
“Salt is valuable, it’s a natural resource and we conserve and protect it,” said Julia Cañari, the head of the Pozo Colorado Aboriginal Community, one of the communities near Salinas Grandes, while she makes soup in her kitchen. “It’s our community’s source of work.”
While companies present lithium extraction as a technical process, communities experience it as a tangible loss and, in Salinas Grandes, an existential threat.
Salinas Grandes is an endorheic basin where salt fields and freshwater reserves are interconnected, as the water doesn’t drain to the sea. Lithium mining threatens the freshwater deposits, which are crucial to survival in the otherwise arid climate.
“We don’t talk about lithium, we talk about water,” Cañari said.
A history in salt
For the communities around Salinas Grandes, resisting the encroachment of lithium mining is a fight for their own survival and in defense of their territory.
“From our perspective, salt is not an economic resource, but a ‘living being’: it has a life cycle, just like crops,” reads the Kachi Yupi (“Salt Footprints” in Quechua), a document put out in 2015 by the 33 Indigenous Kolla and Atacameño communities of Salinas Grandes and Guayatayoc Lake.
Rodrigo Nespolo, an Indigenous artisan and one of the tour guides at the “La Curva” tourist stop in Salinas Grandes, explains how three traditional methods of salt extraction that each take several months are employed in tune with the region's rainy and dry seasons.
Harvesting salt blocks in Salinas Grandes, Jujuy, Argentina. October 2024. Photo © Susi Maresca
“The first method is to cut blocks of salt directly for construction and livestock,” says Nespolo. “Another method is to harvest in crystallization pools. The pools are dug in October and November and they fill with rainwater. Then we wait several months, and the gradual deposit of salt from the brine forms crystals. Harvesting usually takes place between March and May, depending on how the rains have been.”
When the pool is ready for harvesting, the first 10 centimeters of salt are removed, and high-quality salt is extracted, which is used for human consumption.
The third method involves scraping the wild growing salt at the end of the summer, once the the rainy season is over. This salt is considered to be of lesser quality and is primarily used for industrial purposes.
Florencia Barbarich, a biologist at the University of Buenos Aires, explained in an interview with Ojalá that this cycle follows the same pattern as the agricultural phases, which are also linked to the cycles of the Pachamama and ceremonies including as making offerings in August and carnival in February and March.
Two llamas in Pozo Colorado. The llama is part of the camel family and is a fundamental part of the cultural identity and historical legacy of the province of Jujuy, Argentina. February 2025 Photo © Susi Maresca.
There is also a fourth extraction method, which is not traditional: it is that employed by lithium companies during the lithium exploration process. According to data from the National Mining Secretariat, there are two companies operating in Jujuy: Arcadium Lithium, a US-Australian company located in the Salar de Olaroz, and Minera Exar, a company with capital from China, Canada, and Switzerland that’s based in the town of Cauchari Olaroz.
“Since 2010, in response to the first attempts at lithium mining by companies, we, as Indigenous peoples living near the salt flats, have been defending our water and saying ‘Yes to water, no to lithium,’” Nespolo told Ojalá. “Lithium extraction involves a chemical process that pollutes our source of life and work.”
The arrival of Lition Energy, part of the Pan American Energy group—owned by the Bulgheroni family, the British giant BP, and China's CNOOC—two years ago marked a turning point in Salinas Grandes.
The company obtained the endorsement of part of Jujuy’s Lipán community to begin exploration. But this approval has deepened tensions within the Lipán community and among the 33 communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc.
In Lipán, there is talk of a kind progress that can be summed up as “bread today, hunger tomorrow,” in the words of Nelson Castillo, who is from the Lipán community.
The division is stark: there’s those who want to continue living from salt, and those who see lithium mining as salvation.
Scarred earth
While Lition Energy continues apace with the backing of an extraordinary communal assembly, neighboring communities maintain that mining in one part of the salt flat will affect the rest because the water basins are interconnected.
“With the mining that has already been carried out, people say the animals are dying due to a lack of water, or the wildlife is being displaced,” said Barbarich. “In particular, the llamas are affected by the building of large installations, the movement of trucks and machinery, and the noise and visual pollution caused by industrial processes.”
Lithium extraction pools in the Salar de Cauchari-Olaroz, Jujuy, Argentina. June 2023. Photo © Susi Maresca.
When drills arrive at the salt flats, they tear up paths in the compacted salt, and fragment the lives of those who live there. Heavy machinery and evaporation pools transform the landscape into a desert of industrial activity, leaving scars on the earth.
“Before, the salt flat was full of flamingos in the summer, and the water moved according to the cycles of the rain,” said Castillo, who says this has already begun to change. “The salt flat is a living body: there is water underneath, but now that water is going to be drained for mining.”
Protecting the land, protecting the future
Law 26,160, passed at the end of 2006, established an Indigenous territorial emergency and suspended evictions of communities until a technical, legal, and cadastral survey of ancestral lands was completed.
Javier Milei repealed this law in December 2024 through Emergency Decree 1083/2024. This gave companies carte blanche to proceed with evictions and start mining and tourism ventures in the area.
Néstor Alberto at sunset in Pozo Colorado, Jujuy, Argentina. February 2025. Photo © Susi Maresca.
“We rely on the National Constitution [...] as well as on ILO Convention 169 to defend our territory,” says Néstor Alberto, a member of the Pozo Colorado community. “Our mandate doesn’t come from the constitution, but from our grandparents: to defend Las Salinas, to prevent multinational companies from coming and stripping our land, in this case, for lithium.”
Since 2010, communities have filed appeals with the local courts. They took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2013.
In 2023, Argentina’s Supreme Court ordered the provinces of Salta and Jujuy and the national government to provide detailed information on the economic and environmental impacts of mining activities.
“Our dream as a community is to keep fighting, defending, and protecting our territories, because this is our life,” said Cañari, the Pozo Colorado leader. “To care for and provide a good future for our children, for our grandchildren, so that tomorrow they can value what we have done today.”
