by SUSI MARESCA
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.
“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.
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