these three companies differ widely from one another. In Jujuy, Salar de Olaroz interacts with Andean community organizations, made up mostly of young people who participate in the company’s activities by performing both the hardest and the simplest tasks. It is also worth noting that there are communities that have refused to participate in the company’s undertakings. In other cases, communities have been dominated and divided by relations of distrust across the local social spectrum.
In Vaca Muerta, at the highest level of the stratified workforce, there is a sort of “worker aristocracy” that is highly technologically skilled and well paid. These workers shore up a culture of oil-drilling that has a long history and has been privileged in the region and in Argentina. They have their own trade unions that take practical measures to advocate for their interests. On the other hand, there is also a set of part-time and temporary workers who sustain the extractive system in a different way. Another key factor in the company’s success is the outsourcing of various activities both to other national companies and to international corporations.
Mapuche communities are key actors and significant territorial presences in this context, as are the labor organizing networks and non-governmental organizations to which Mapuche people belong. These networks are international in their reach, connecting them with Chilean Mapuches, for instance, and Sioux tribes in the United States. These communities’ critique of Salar de Olaroz is primarily ecological in nature; it points to the possible contamination of groundwater on their territory. Other labor and business organizations in the region interact and participate in oil-drilling ventures. In this context, research units from the Universidad del Camagüey stand out, making significant contributions.
Environmental impacts, including water pollution and various other alterations to the ecosystem, are just some of the many frequent consequences of these corporate projects. Lithium mining requires considerable amounts of water, which tends to be scarce in fragile ecosystems like the salt flats (salares) for which Salar de Olaroz is named. Even a slight alteration to the conditions of these ecosystems can cause major disturbances in their equilibrium. For this reason, lithium mining worries local and surrounding communities, which see the mining company’s use of nearby water sources as a threat, given that water is a scarce community resource, indispensable for both life and the maintenance of ancestral traditions including llama raising and mountain farming. In fact, in several interviews with local actors, we heard lithium mining called “water mining”; conflicts here are not over the extraction of lithium, but over the extraction of water.
The intensity of water use in lithium mining depends both on the method of extraction and on the concentration of lithium in the brine involved in this process. In keeping with the concentration of lithium in Salar de Olaroz, according to a detailed feasibility study, every ton of lithium extracted requires around two million liters of water; in other words, the extraction of every gram of lithium takes two liters of water.2
In Vaca Muerta, we find differing expectations about the ecological or environmental consequences of fracking. Corporate leaders, the provincial government, civil society groups, trade unions, and Mapuche communities all have different worldviews, different understandings of the cosmos. The Mapuche question the logic of extraction as such; companies see it as the road to development; local citizens’ views are somewhere in between, but suspicious. “Risk” is often argued over, as are the questions of whether risks are calculable and what the real costs of extraction are. People worry above all about the depletion of groundwater in the region. If the environmental effects of extraction could be mitigated and/or communities could ensure that these effects were no greater than those generated by traditional activities – that is, by the demands for energy, water, and materials for construction (steel, cement, and gravel, among others), within the limits determined by these activities – this would still entail territorial transformations at an unforeseen scale (Giuliani et al., 2016).
Pollution from farming is increasingly intense throughout the region. “Today, in Argentina there are 12 million people living in areas where more than 300 million liters of agrotoxins per year are disposed of” (Svampa and Viale, 2014: 150). High concentrations of genetically modified foods and agrochemicals, spread across so many hectares used for farming, have turned the country into a kind of open-air laboratory (Gras and Hernández, 2013).
According to Wahren’s baseline study, no major critical voices have emerged in Carlos Casares to question Los Grobo Agropecuaria in particular or the extractive economy of mining more generally. Nevertheless, in the region more broadly, the last few years have witnessed the emergence of ever more forceful assemblies and local associations that have begun organizing to put an end to the spraying of chemicals near towns and rural schools, a practice that has led to increases in respiratory illnesses, skin diseases, and cancer. These groups associate such increases with the indiscriminate use of agrotoxins, including glyphosate the most widely used herbicide in the region. Rural communities, located in areas that are at the center of agribusiness in Argentina, have joined the struggles of peasants and indigenous people who have been denouncing corporate practices of despoliation and subjugation, as well as the corporate pollution of land and water, since the mid-1990s.
Until now, none of these collective actions seems to have reached Carlos Casares or to have directly affected Los Grobo, a corporation that takes pride in its own manual of agricultural “best practices,” which has even been adopted by some local governments in the region, including that of Carlos Casares, of course.
As for conflicts in Salar de Olaroz, “broadly speaking, groups with opposing interests have been forming. In certain social sectors, we see the consolidation of an identity related to the universe of mining, with characteristics that follow from modernization, whereas in other social sectors people reject this model and seek to return to traditional activities or search for alternative approaches to local development” (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming: 45).
“Even more complexity is introduced [into this situation] when we note that neither of these groups is homogenous in its meanings. Instead we can identify subtle differences, expressed in the juxtaposition of identities present in the territory” (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming: 45). Within these communities, a first confrontation occurs between those who are in favor of and those who oppose the corporation’s presence; at the most fundamental level, this entails arguments about the ways of life that each group advocates, and the latent conflict that emerges when these ways of life turn out to be incompatible. Here a clear generational division emerges, a division between young people in these communities (many of whom study in San Salvador de Jujuy, the provincial capital) and the older inhabitants of the region, for whom cattle farming and traditional agriculture remain primary economic and cultural commitments. These indigenous young people have gone to school, and they know how to articulate their demands elsewhere, but in most cases they no longer depend on the pastoral economy. Social divisions are characteristic of the region’s society and of residents’ relationships to Sales de Jujuy (Pragier and Deluca, forthcoming).
Meanwhile in Vaca Muerta, “increasing social differentiation in urban areas compounds the territorial, social, and environmental conflicts that lead to frustrated expectations for the future of oil mining. In this context, the Mapuche are key agents of resistance, questioning the model of informational extraction but disconnected from other agents engaged in the same sort of questioning” (Cretini, 2018: 83).3
Disputes over the meaning of land development ensue. The use of unconventional hydrocarbons has created various visions of such development, producing a range of opinions. There are those who question and oppose the logic of extraction (indigenous people and the union Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, CTA) and those who consider this logic indispensable for long-term development (the state at various levels, business interests, and bureaucrats). There is of course a broad middle range of opinions as well. Public debates persistently center on the risk of extraction, the question of whether such a risk is calculable, and thus also the question of what the real costs of extraction are. But often accurate information is lacking or ambiguous when it comes to environmental impacts.4
