At one point, six of them were crammed into two rented rooms each week, a package would arrive containing quinoa, bread and dried meat from relatives in Rio Grande, where staples were cheaper. The seven siblings all went to university in Sucre, a nearby city. Unlike Rio Grande, it had a secondary school. She dropped out of school aged seven and made a living selling street food, but convinced Alí’s father, a railway porter, to move the entire family to Uyuni, a bigger town on the other side of the salt flat. Chuvica, a village that borders the salt flatĪlí and his seven siblings were among the first residents of Rio Grande to go to university. Bags of potassium chloride wait to be collected. Locals hoped the factory would bring jobs to the area.
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Extracted from a mixture of salts, lithium is used to make batteries for smartphones and electric cars. Green dreams ( from top to bottom) There are 160 evaporation pools filled with blue-white brine. Thanks to the protests, the contract was eventually revoked. Once again, it looked as though local communities would lose out. In the 1990s members of his family protested against the government’s decision to grant exclusive mining rights for the whole salt flat to a Canadian company, LitCo. Rapacious foreign companies, enabled by the Bolivian government, kept his town poor for centuries. As a child, he was taught by his parents to “distrust any foreigner who talks about our natural resources”. Alí is slight of stature and speaks with a soft intensity. We want development but we don’t want to repeat history,” says Donny Alí, 34, a lawyer and hotel owner from Rio Grande, a town of around 2,000 people on the southern edge of the salt flat. But can it avoid being exploited, as it has been so many times before? If Potosí is to find its way out of poverty, its best bet is its fledgling lithium industry. Locals are worried that lithium production, which relies on large quantities of water, will worsen water shortages.Ĭan Bolivia avoid being exploited, as it has been so many times before? It doesn’t rain as much as it used to, however, so the fresh layer of crystals that forms each year is no longer as thick as it used to be. Some locals make a meagre living by harvesting salt: a laborious process involving a dumper truck, a tractor and several men with shovels and long sleeves to protect them from the fierce glare of the sun. Climate change has led to harsh droughts, with the result that traditional industries such as quinoa-farming and llama-herding have become unsustainable. Tourism, a source of income to many, dried up during the pandemic. The communities nearby, already some of the least well-off in Potosí, have yet to see the material benefits.
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The complex is so big workers drive around in trucks Refining lithium carbonate is challenging work. The factory also produces potassium chloride, a byproduct that is used for fertiliser. From top to bottom: In 2013 the government opened a lithium factory on the edge of the salt flat. Modern alchemy Opening image: The Uyuni salt flat holds the world’s biggest deposits of lithium. Its residents lack adequate health care and schools: a quarter of women still give birth at home nearly 40% of adults only ever attended primary school and nearly 20% have never been to school. In the rainy season, when red clay turns to mud, the area’s unpaved roads become impassable. More than two-thirds of Potosinos live in houses made from mud bricks or earth. Potosí is the poorest part of Bolivia, which is South America’s second-poorest country. Yet little of the wealth generated in the soil of Potosí over the centuries has stayed in Bolivia.
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Potosí, home to a rail junction that connects La Paz, Bolivia’s administrative capital, with Chile and Argentina, remains an important transport hub. In the 19th century a British company built a railway line to carry minerals from landlocked Bolivia to the Chilean coast, from where they were shipped to Europe. Potosí’s barren landscape has yielded plenty of other riches since then, including aluminium, lead and zinc. In the 16th and 17th centuries more than half the world’s silver came from one mountain in the region.
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The mountainous region of Potosí in southern Bolivia was one of the richest places in the Spanish Empire.