More than 10 years ago, indigenous communities to the Puna region — a plateau second only to Tibet in height — agreed that two lithium mining companies, Minera Exar and Sales de Jujuy, could operate in Susques department. They hoped the mines would bring jobs and development along with the careful environmental stewardship they were promised. Some local people do work for the mines, but the demand for lithium batteries has left them without enough water to live comfortably, or even just maintain their farms. While the lithium helps power electric cars, computers and other high-end technology, basic survival is jeopardized in one of the driest places in Argentina. 

People are so desperate that they drink from the Pastos Chicos River, which contains arsenic from volcanic activity. Arsenic levels in the river reach 1,400 parts per million — far beyond the threshold that the World Health Organization states can cause cancer.

Global Press Journal reached out to Minera Exar and Sales de Jujuy via email, social media requests, physical letters and more than 20 phone calls, but there was no response. Meanwhile, the government of Jujuy province denies that the mining operations dry up water supplies.

“It is totally false to say that the exploration and/or production of lithium carbonate consumes the water available to the communities, since the water for [local] consumption comes from other sources, which are not affected by the projects,” reads an August 2023 report from the Jujuy government. But independent studies show that the mines are in fact to blame for depletion of the area’s water. 

Walter Díaz Paz, an environmental engineer at CONICET, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, who has written numerous reports on lithium mining in the Puna region, says the mining companies obscure the facts.

The mining companies’ bulk extraction of water is “completely linked” to the drying up of various residents’ watering holes, Díaz Paz says.

Lithium mining is poised to grow exponentially in Argentina. The country has the third largest lithium reserve in the world and is the fourth largest producer, but its president, Javier Milei, believes mining is “significantly underdeveloped.” In April, he made it cheaper and quicker for companies to import mining equipment and materials.

President Milei secured congressional approval in June for another law granting mining companies significant benefits, including tax reductions and 0% tariffs on imports for 30 years, among other incentives. He has met twice with Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla, the battery and electric car giant and one of the largest lithium consumers in the world.

This economic plan leaves people in Susques department worried. The mines employ about 30% of the workers in the department, but that matters little when water is disappearing.

Three years ago, Reinaldo Luzco, 75, collected water from a natural well near his house for his family and goats. Today, that well is dry. He now depends on others to bring water from town. When that is not enough, he drinks water from the arsenic river.

“What are we going to do? Without [water] reserves, we’ll die,” he says.

For thousands of years, rainwater has trickled down these mountain peaks in the Andes, slowly eroding the salts and lithium in the rocks to form a brine that seeps down into the Puna region’s lakes, salt flats and aquifers.

Argentina holds an estimated 20 million tons of lithium in this brine, or 10% of the world’s known lithium reserves. Extracting it requires drilling into salt flats — the white, cracked surfaces of former lakes, now fully evaporated — to pump the underground brine into nearby evaporation ponds. Once in the artificial ponds, the brine is left for up to two years to evaporate. The result is lithium carbonate, a white salt, which is then refined before it is used in battery production.

During 2023, Minera Exar and Sales de Jujuy extracted about 12.2 billion liters of brine, according to the production levels declared in their environmental impact reports, and the brine consumption per ton calculated by experts at CONICET, Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council.

In the same period, both companies extracted over 3.7 billion liters of “industrial water” — technically, fresh water — to produce what is broadly known as the “white gold of the 21st century.” That amounts to more than 31 times the annual water consumption of the people of Susques department. Just two years before, the lithium mines had used five times the fresh water consumed by department residents. In 2023, after Sales de Jujuy expanded operations and Minera Exar began production, fresh water extraction in Susques department soared by 535%. And the industry plans to expand further.

Four mines now produce lithium in Argentina: Sales de Jujuy and Minera Exar’s mines in Jujuy province, the Fénix mine in Catamarca province and the Centenario Ratones mine in Salta province. Two more mines are expected to begin operating this year, and more will follow. According to a November 2023 report from Argentina’s mining secretariat, about 40 additional lithium mining projects are in progress.

Crucially though, for people who live in the Puna region, this massive extraction of water from under the salt flats affects the distribution of the region’s underground water reservoirs, which are classified as either fresh, brackish, saline or briny — and all connected via mixing zones.

This isn’t a surprise. A 2018 study by Argentina’s Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN) modeled the predicted impacts of lithium mining in the Puna region’s Olaroz-Cauchari watershed. According to the study, the massive pumping of brine from Susques department — which began in 2015 — is likely to pull the nearby fresh water toward the salt flats, where it would become irreversibly salinized. The study also found that the levels of the Olaroz-Cauchari watershed will almost certainly drop, causing springs, lakes, lagoons and wells to dry up.

And that’s exactly what people here know to be true.

An army of buckets, tanks and basins sit on María Norma Vasquez’s patio. It’s her last line of defense against frequent interruptions to her village’s water service — a network of hoses that draws water from a nearby spring. Potable water comes from a tank in the village’s main square, which is supplied by water from a small, precarious stream nearby.

“Sometimes we don’t even have any to clean with or wash our clothes, for personal hygiene or anything,” she says.

Places where animals once found water are dry, says Eva, who asked that her last name not be used because she fears retaliation.

“I feel they are sucking from all the veins of all the hills,” she says. 

The mining companies have made some effort to ease the competition for water. In 2022, Minera Exar spent 87 million Argentine pesos (nearly 500,000 United States dollars at the time) to truck in bottled water for their employees, to avoid consuming local drinking water. In the same year, the company also spent 640,000 pesos (then about 3,400 dollars) to supply water to 104 houses in rural Salar de Olaroz, according to its 2022 sustainability report.

Those efforts haven’t eased concerns. Many people no longer want the mining companies here. They’re joining a chorus that began in 2012 in Salinas Grandes-Guayatayoc basin, which neighbors the basin in Salar de Olaroz. There, 33 indigenous communities created a document in 2015, called Kachi Yupi, which demands that companies that want to operate in the area follow a consultation protocol that respects indigenous culture.

But the provincial government of Jujuy didn´t endorse the protocol and it came to nothing. 

Last year, the indigenous communities were dealt another severe blow.

In June 2023, the Jujuy government approved an express constitutional reform, a process that took just over 30 days to complete and involved no opportunity for public comment. The reform established that public lands, such as those where these community members live, can be expropriated and used for productive development like lithium mining. It also prohibited protests and demonstrations that involve roadblocks — one of the few methods protesters could use to make themselves heard. 

There are small signs of change: This March, in the province of Catamarca, after people reported negative effects on the Los Patos River from nearby lithium mining, a court issued a ban on all new mining permits in the area and ordered the provincial government to conduct a new environmental impact study.

Even so, there are cracks in some communities’ resolve. This year, Lipán, one of the 33 communities that signed the Kachi Yupi, broke from the others and allowed exploration to begin for lithium mining on their land.

Reports from the government and the mining companies “intentionally ignore” what the mining work is doing to underground reservoirs, says Díaz Paz, the environmental engineer who has studied the impact of lithium mining in the region. They say that just one area is exploited, but that exploitation leads to decreased surface flows and water volume that reaches the meadows, he says.

Another issue, Díaz Paz says, is that the mining companies use the term “industrial water” — a term coined by the industry itself and not used in any scientific classification — to refer to fresh water that does not meet drinking standards.

By classifying this untreated fresh water used by locals for their animals and crops as “industrial water,” mining companies can extract it while denying they are competing with the community.

José Gómez, secretary of Mining and Hydrocarbons of Jujuy province, says there are more than 70 monitoring points around the basin to ensure the mining does not lead to an underground mixing of salt water and fresh water.

But he does acknowledge that industrial water is what people now drink and use to raise their cattle.

“The water is the same, yes, of course,” he says.

Before the mining companies came, people used both fresh and brackish water from local sources to drink themselves and for their animals.

Today, many of the local streams are dry or have been covered by the evaporation ponds. But the mines have brought job opportunities, investment and cellphone service, says one Susques resident who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing the work that, as a supplier, the mining companies give him.

Like other people in the area, he says the local communities accepted the mining companies out of necessity, with hope that they would generate employment and development in an area with a subsistence economy.

“The communities wanted to contribute to the country. They wanted to generate work, connect to the world,” he says. “Maybe we didn’t do it right. We don’t know.”

The answer to that question is simple, says Pablo Bergese, mining sustainability coordinator of the Mining and Hydrocarbons Secretariat of Jujuy. Other efforts to ease poverty in the area have failed, he says. The only way to develop the area is to take advantage of the mineral wealth, he adds.

“People have developed in terms of homes, they have better fixtures, they have better bathrooms, they have better buildings, they have community centers,” Bergese says. “Unfortunately, development has an impact on the environment, and that’s what we are complaining about. Human beings impact the environment in all their activities. Mining is one of them.”

Still, many local people feel left behind.

José Sajama, a leader of the Abra Pampa community, north of Salar de Olaroz, is the son and grandson of miners. But he has a vastly different vision of the mining here in the Puna region.

“They’ve done mineral development in the better part of the Puna. So, why are the people still poor? What is the development? Or who is the development for?” he asks.

María Arce, GPJ, contributed to this story.