ATACAMA DESERT, Chile — At the top of a craggy path in Socaire, a hilltop village deep in Chile’s Atacama Desert, a black flag whips in the wind above Jeanette Cruz’s house. The desert sun has bleached it to a dark gray blur, but the defiance it represents remains strong.
Above each house in the village, shimmering in the evening sun, these black flags represent the Indigenous Lickanantay people’s resistance to the lithium mining that many say is tearing their communities apart. The lithium in the brine beneath the brilliant white Atacama salt flat, which stretches out across the valley floor, has become a global resource.
It holds the key to the global green energy transition, but the Lickanantay communities that have inhabited the area for millennia are wondering what they themselves stand to gain.”Our life is contained in that water,” says Cruz, gesturing forlornly out toward the salt as she stands in the low doorway to her home. “The day it dries up, we’re dead as a culture, and we will have to leave.”
For the rest of this article: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/23/nx-s1-5266009/chile-lithium-mineral-atacama-desert