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Résumé

This article examines the socioecological ‘fractures’ emerging from lithium extraction in the Atacama Salt Flat, a massive, high-altitude saline formation on the Chilean Andean Mountain Range, and one of the world’s richest lithium reserves. Conceptualized as an ‘oasis of contradictions,’ the Atacama’s territory—defined by its hydrological basin—is simultaneously, a site for the global ‘green’ transition and a space of deepening dispossession—where transnational demands for lithium collide with Indigenous territorialities. Grounded in political ecology and based on extensive fieldwork with Lickanantay communities, our study imagines ‘fractures’ as multidimensional disruptions—ecological, cultural, and political—driven by extractivist dynamics. By unpacking the socioecological fallout of ‘green’ mining—foregrounded by Indigenous resistance and territorial claims in the Andean Highlands—our research challenges dominant development logics and calls for governance frameworks grounded in socioenvironmental justice and community resilience.

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We thank the faculty of UniTrento’s SUSTEEMs PhD programme for their helpful comments and support. We also thank UofT’s Department of Geography and Planning, and the School of Graduate Studies through their respective research travel grants, for their generous contributions towards the logistics behind fieldwork. We also kindly thank Javiera Barandarián, Nushy Golriz, Sally Babidge, and Julio Postigo for their kind comments and contributions during LASA 2025 Lithium Pre-Conference “Lithium Extraction: Research Directions and Needs in Latin America.” Special gratitude to Fundación Tantí for their kind logistical and intellectual contributions to this work, and for their warm and welcoming friendship while on the field.

Introduction

1This article examines the socioecological fractures produced by extractive activities in the Atacama Salt Flat (hereafter referred to as the ‘Atacama’) basin in Chile. We analyze the effects of lithium mining on the environment, local relations, power dynamics, and resistance strategies of Lickanantay Indigenous communities. Framed within a political ecology perspective, our study critically explores the historical legacies and contemporary dynamics of colonial and capitalist exploitation—due to the rapid expansion of lithium extraction—driven by a global energy transition. Our research aims to further operationalize the concept of fracture to analyze an extractivist context through empirical data collection carried out between 2024 and 2025 in the Atacama Basin, Chile.

2In its broader context, extraction hinterlands are becoming more strategic as functional nodes in transnational supply chains. Mountainous territories across the world are increasingly being involved in—and transformed by—mining extraction sites; since these landscapes have become crucial in providing critical raw materials for the energy transition (Riofrancos, 2025). The analysis of the case study in the Atacama Basin reveals fractures (Ferdinand, 2022; Foster, 1999) and conflicts, providing insights in both a local and global perspective.

3Employing a mainly qualitative methodology, our study is based on over six months of fieldwork, conducted across the Atacama Desert in Chile—mostly within the ‘San Pedro de Atacama’ municipality. Our methodology aims to offer a nuanced exploration of the socioecological impacts of extractivism, and the interplay between local knowledge systems and broader structural forces.

4 Based on a political ecology framework, our research critically examines how extractivist activities generate ‘fractures’ defined—following Malcom Ferdinand—as complex disruptions that intertwine environmental, cultural, and socioeconomic dimensions (2022). We contextualize these fractures within debates of sustainable development and energy transitions (Ciplet & Harrison, 2020), which often rely on resource extraction to support the expansion of renewable energy—i.e., green extractivism. While such strategies aim to address global climate crises, they frequently replicate historical patterns of inequality and environmental exploitation—often in remote mountain regions (Morena et al., 2020). Drawing on literature exploring resource extraction and socioenvironmental inequalities (Pellow, 2018; Svampa, 2013), this paper highlights the contradictions between global sustainability goals and localized socioecological resilience.

5A key contribution of our study lies in its nuanced exploration of fractures as an image to understand the socioecological dynamics of extractivism. Ultimately, this research highlights the complex socioecological fallout of extractivist processes in the Andean highlands, illuminating the far-reaching impacts on territorial relations, community dynamics, and ecological sustainability. By situating these dynamics within the broader context of green extractivism and global energy transitions, our study offers critical insights into the challenges of achieving a just and sustainable development in mountain regions. Through an engagement with the lived experiences of Lickanantay Indigenous communities and an exploration of fractures, our article makes a contribution to ongoing discourses on resource governance and socioecological justice in an extractivist context.

Literature Review: Extractivist Fractures as Analytical Lens

6This paper draws on the concept of ‘fracture as a lens to analyze the extractivist context of the Atacama. Extractivism—understood as the large-scale appropriation of natural resources for global markets—generates socioecological disruptions that extend far beyond the mine itself (Chagnon et al., 2022). Extractivism has been described as a historical regime of accumulation rooted in colonial processes and based on the large-scale appropriation of natural resources and labor (Svampa, 2013). Beyond mining and oil, it functions as a systemic logic of territorial transformation, producing sacrifice zones and reinforcing dependency through state-corporate alliances (Gago & Mezzadra, 2017). More recently, the concept of “green extractivism” has emerged to highlight how energy transitions replicate these logics under the banner of sustainability (Dunlap et al., 2024; Riofrancos, 2020). Situating fractures within this extractivist paradigm allows us to conceptualize them not merely as ecological or social disruptions, but as multidimensional effects of a broader historical and systemic logic of appropriation.

7Building on Ferdinand (2022), fractures are understood as interruptions within a system, caused by forces that disrupt its pre-existing structure. Karl Marx’s notion of “metabolic rift”—later developed by John Bellamy Foster (1999)—describes the rupture between humans and nature produced by capitalism; such as the exhaustion of soils through intensive agriculture (Khorchani et al., 2022). Jason W. Moore (2011; 2017) expands this perspective by underlining capitalism’s ecological regime and framing capitalism as a “world-ecology,” in which nature is continuously transformed into a means of production. Malcom Ferdinand (2022) adds a crucial dimension by highlighting a dual fracture—environmental and colonial. The environmental fracture derives from modernity’s “great divide,” separating nature from culture and prioritizing “Man” above the non-human (Descola, 2013).

8The colonial fracture meanwhile, stems from the hierarchies of colonizer and colonized—white vs. non-white or North vs. South—and is epitomized by the plantation system, which simultaneously exhausted ecosystems and human labor as ruptures in the ecological system caused by deforestation and desertification (Ferdinand, 2022). This perspective resonates with the notion of “coloniality of power,” which highlights how modernity is structurally entangled with colonial domination, producing lasting forms of racialized, geopolitical, and epistemic hierarchies (Quijano, 2007). From this viewpoint, colonial fractures are not historical residues but ongoing configurations of power that shape labor relations, territorial control, and global inequalities. Similarly, contributions arguing on the “coloniality of knowledge and of being” emphasize how colonial projects have imposed Eurocentric epistemologies while silencing and marginalizing other ways of knowing and being (Mignolo, 2010). This epistemic rupture underscores that fractures are not only material and political, but also ontological, affecting how worlds are imagined, narrated, and legitimized.

9We therefore propose the notion of extractivist fractures to describe points of discontinuity where territories undergo profound transformations driven by extractivist processes. These fractures emerge through market acceleration, technological innovation, or critical resource demand, and manifest not only in ecological cycles but also in cultural, political, and social realms. By prioritizing economic and industrial interests over ecological sustainability and community rights, extractivism produces radical territorial reconfigurations—extractivist landscapes—while also generating resistance, conflict, and alternative imaginaries. By framing fractures as interconnected disruptions spanning environmental, social, and cultural dimensions, we aim to provide a perspective on the impacts of resource extraction in the Andean region; we analyze these through three proposed dimensions of extractivist fractures: ‘ecological-material,’ ‘power-colonial,’ and ‘narrative-knowledge’ fractures. Furthermore, our work supports the understanding of how mountain areas are seen as mining districts by global processes of sustainable development and the global energy transition.

10This framework underscores the inseparability of ecological crises and colonialism, showing how both processes shape geographies, narratives, and histories, as visible today in the Atacama under the global demand for lithium and the politics of critical minerals.

Context & Methodology

11Northern Chile has about seventy salt flats and saline lakes across the Atacama Desert, a superarid biome stretching across the southwestern Andean Mountain Range. The Atacama Salt Flat is located at the core of its homonymous Desert at roughly 2,300 meters of altitude, featuring scarce precipitation and an extreme thermal oscillation. The Lickanantay have become ancestrally and tightly interrelated to this geography by mastering agriculture, infrastructure, habitation, and developing interregional trade long before the modern republic, Spanish colonization, and before the Inca Empire incorporated them into their political systems.

12 Historically, the Atacama Desert has been shaped by extractive economies that prioritize external markets over local wellbeing (see e.g., Azócar Duarte, 2021; Prieto, 2022), perpetuating patterns of ecological degradation and cultural dispossession (Khorchani et al., 2022). These dynamics mirror broader trends in mountain regions, where external economic interests often dictate land-use changes at the expense of local needs (Dax et al., 2021; Zuo et al., 2022). Currently, the mountainous area of the Atacama contains Chile’s only two operational lithium mines—operated by the Chilean SQM and US-based Albemarle—originating as an historic byproduct of nitrate and boron salts extraction.

Figure 1: Map showing the Atacama and its geographical context. Andean salt flats are represented in light blue, conservation areas in green, urban areas in red, main roads in orange, and surface lakes and lithium evaporation ponds in dark blue.

Figure 1: Map showing the Atacama and its geographical context. Andean salt flats are represented in light blue, conservation areas in green, urban areas in red, main roads in orange, and surface lakes and lithium evaporation ponds in dark blue.

©Hernán Bianchi B.

13Our analysis is based on over six months of field research, between May and August 2024, and January through March 2025, conducted in Northern Chile’s Andean highlands—mostly within the Atacama and Alto El Loa hydrological basins—including the San Pedro de Atacama, Calama, Antofagasta, Tocopilla, and Ollagüe municipalities.

14Semi-structured, in-depth interviews, and numerous formal and informal conversations were held with a wide range of interlocutors (Swain & King, 2022), including mining company workers and former employees, Lickanantay and Quechua people from various Indigenous communities in the Atacama Basin and Alto El Loa, non-native San Pedro residents or ‘outsiders,’ academics, and individuals currently or formerly holding public and private positions in State offices and mining companies. The respondents ranged in age from 20 to 80 years; nearly half were young adults (46% aged 20–34), a third were aged 35–49 (36%), 9% were 50–64-year-olds, and another 9% of elders aged 65 and up. More than half of the respondents are Lickanantay (52%)—with a few other respondents belonging to other Indigenous Peoples such as Quechua and Mapuche—and 46% non-Indigenous. Women corresponded to nearly a third of respondents. All interviews were conducted in protected and safe spaces, where both the respondents and the researchers felt secure and at ease. Additionally, discourse analysis and policy documents review was also developed. Some key terms used for searches—mostly in Spanish—were: Atacama, Lickanantay, Atacameño, lithium, critical mineral(s), water, ecosystem, salt flat, desert, highlands, Andes, mining, extraction, extractivism, and ‘green’ transition. In short, interviews and document analysis covered a range of topics related to socioecological challenges, the influence of extractive industries, and the experiences and perspectives of those directly affected.

15To protect the interviewees’ privacy—especially given the sensitive nature of the lithium industry and socioecological debates in Chile and worldwide—their anonymity is kept, which is crucial due to the potential political and economic implications for those participating in these discussions. Many Indigenous and local groups were understandably cautious and required significant trust-building before they consented to engage in meaningful conversations about the impacts of mining and energy projects on their land (Sault, 2018; Tuck & Yang, 2014), mainly because of the complex context related to the ongoing negotiation with mining companies.

16Overall, our interviews revealed a much more complex web of opinions and experiences that referred to the idea of fractures and consequent conflicts developing in this territory.

Analysis: Extractivist Fractures in the Atacama Oases

17Our research in the Atacama and its surrounding oases builds on the idea of fractures that identifies them as transformative moments linked to the capitalist socioeconomic structure. We propose an empirical analysis of this concept through our study in this Andean region. The image of a fracture, when considered in relation to extractivist territories, merges social and ecological aspects. On the one hand, fractures often manifest as physical ruptures—in the rocks, aquifers, and salt flats. On the other hand, the process of extracting resources produces irreparable socioecological and political ruptures, restructuring territorial governance, economic systems, and livelihoods.

18The image of fractures—as ruptures in both the soil and the socioecological system—emerged from our interviews and field observations. As we continued our fieldwork, this image was frequently linked not only to environmental burdens caused by mining, but also to broader notions of tensions, contradictions, conflicts, and gaps.

19In the following sections, we organize and examine three types of fractures. First, the ‘ecological-material fracture’—in terms of water extraction, land degradation, and exploitation. Secondly, the ‘power-colonial fracture’—historical and ongoing extractivism as a form of neocolonial control. And thirdly, a ‘narrative-knowledge fracture’—centered mainly in the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge and cosmovision from scientific and policy-making processes.

Ecological-Material Fracture: Water, Land, and Ecosystems

20Decades of lithium extraction in the Atacama have contributed to the disruption of hydrological cycles, biodiversity alterations, and intensified territorial conflicts. Mining operations by SQM and Albemarle have led to water overuse, ecosystemic degradation, and ground fissures as part of what we define as ecological fracture. These fractures manifest in three key dimensions: hydrological depletion, biodiversity and ecosystem degradation, and landscape transformation and destruction.

21Lithium mining directly affects groundwater reserves in the Atacama Basin, creating an irreversible deficit in the region’s hydrosocial system (Liu et al. 2019). This overexploitation is particularly critical in a desert where water availability is already at the threshold of ecological collapse.

22In this context, lithium mining involves pumping brine from depths up to 60 meters under the Atacama, exposing aquifers to crossed infiltration with freshwater sources (Babidge et al., 2019; Bustos-Gallardo et al., 2021). The result is a structural transformation of the basin, where brine and freshwater lose their natural volumetric and biochemical composition thresholds, compromising existing ecosystemic relations (Liu et al., 2019; Vera et al., 2023). The fragile equilibrium between groundwater, surface water, and evaporation rates has become dangerously imbalanced:

The physicochemical composition of the water changes; for example, in salt concentration. This leads to a succession of other organisms that start living there, while some are never observed again.
—Dr. Cristina Dorador, microbiologist (February 5, 2025, in-person interview)

23The pressure on freshwater and brine deposits in the Atacama is now exceeding the biophysical limits of recovery, turning the region into a hydrological sacrifice zone (Azócar Duarte, 2022; Weinberg, 2023). The ecological-material fracture in the Atacama extends beyond water depletion—it radically alters biodiversity by affecting ecosystems at both their micro and macro levels of interaction.

24Studies show that many key bird populations—including three flamingo species—have significantly declined in areas where lithium extraction is most intensive. Flamingoes are abandoning traditional nesting sites, as food availability declines due to shifts in salinity levels and water composition (Vera et al., 2023). The transformation of the Atacama Basin’s biodiversity is not just a short-term disruption, but a long-term ecological fracture, whose effects may become irreversible over time.

25A local person from the community of Peine and former Albemarle laborer, drove us through the internal roads of the Atacama. As we walked around on the salt crust, he explained how some fractures we observed—literal cracks along the Atacama’s crust—have grown over time, while entire sections have sunk at least between one to two meters from their original level:

The mines extract water, lithium is in the water, so that the level of the water under the crust decreases and the crust itself—there since millennia—cracks, fractures, and falls.
—Lickanantay farmer (June 29, 2024, day trip conversation)

26These onsite observations have been corroborated by recent studies using satellite imagery (Delgado et al., 2024). The ecological fracture in the Atacama is multidimensional, extending across hydrological, ecosystemic, and territorial destruction. Water depletion, biodiversity loss, and land material fracture affect existing interconnected processes, reinforcing the structural impact of extractivism on landscapes and communities.

Figure 2: A saline pond in the southern surface of the Atacama with a fracture behind it—shown across the picture frame and under the horizon—due to the ‘sinking’ of the Salt Flat, as explained by a Lickanantay farmer during a field trip, corroborated by satellite imagery analysis (Delgado et al., 2024).

Figure 2: A saline pond in the southern surface of the Atacama with a fracture behind it—shown across the picture frame and under the horizon—due to the ‘sinking’ of the Salt Flat, as explained by a Lickanantay farmer during a field trip, corroborated by satellite imagery analysis (Delgado et al., 2024).

©Hernán Bianchi B. (June 29, 2024)

  • 1 On its 19th Article, Section 24, the Chilean Constitution (Supreme Decree #1,150 of 1980) establish (...)

27This fracture is not static; it deepens over time and space, creating lasting changes in how ecosystems function and how communities relate to their land. While mining companies and the Chilean state frame lithium extraction as a ‘green’ transition, local communities and environmental scientists increasingly highlight its unsustainable and irreversible costs. This environmental crisis is closely related to a deeply political issue, as water rights in Chile remain privatized, disproportionately favoring extractive industries.1

Power-Colonial Fracture: Extractivism and Neocolonialism

28The colonial fracture draws inequalities along racial, geographic, and historical lines. It was supported by Western ideologies and knowledge that justify imperialism, slavery, and the exclusion of colonized peoples from power and decision-making for centuries​ (Ferdinand, 2022; Moore, 2011). While colonial processes started centuries ago, nowadays, the lithium industry follows the same logic. The colonial fracture manifests in three key dimensions: appropriation of ancestral territories, neocolonial processes, and land use transformation.

29The progressive appropriation of Indigenous lands began with European colonization, which included the occupation of the Andean region. This historical moment marks the beginning of the transformation of the ancestral territory into a resource to be exploited, redefining the economic, social, and spatial organization within an extractivist logic (Moore, 2011). A Lickanantay community member from Toconao explains:

We have never stopped fighting to protect our ancestral land. First, during the Spanish colonization period, then the Chilean state, and now the mining industry. So, the struggle continues.
—Lickanantay community member and sociologist (June 30, 2024, in-person interview)

30For centuries, the Atacama Desert was seen as a barren frontier to be exploited for external interests. Colonial occupation transformed sacred and communal Indigenous lands into mining frontiers, stripping local communities of territorial control. This extractive logic did not end with the Declaration of Independence of 1810; it evolved under the Chilean state, where land, water, and mineral resources continue to be exploited.

31Extractivism remains a structural force, shaping economic, social, and territorial landscapes—mirroring the logics of colonial dispossession. Thus, the socioecological order of the Atacama basin changes, producing an irreparable fracture of power. In past decades, other extractivist processes have also transformed ancestral land use and practices:

There are two major global resources here: the salt flat, and astronomical observation. ALMA [Atacama Large Millimeter Array] and the observatories do not have a proper relational policy towards Indigenous communities here. There are superpowers installed right here, and that huge concessioned area imposed over Lickanantay territory functions as some sort of embassy. ALMA does not allow local people to access their own sacred sites and herding commons.
—Lickanantay community member and sociologist (June 30, 2024, in-person interview)

32In a broader context, the rising demand for electric vehicle batteries has turned lithium into a strategic resource, reconfiguring global power relations and their local impacts. These designations have framed lithium extraction as a global necessity, justifying accelerated mining projects in Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina.

33Today, the Chilean government—in alliance with mining companies—continues to extract lithium from Indigenous territories, reinforcing colonial fractures. Recent agreements between SQM, Codelco, and the Chilean state signed in mid-2024, will extend lithium extraction until 2060 (Valverde-Carbonell, 2024). While global stakeholders emphasize the benefits of lithium extraction, local communities—particularly land defenders and Indigenous leaders—see a different reality:

The resistance to extractivism is due to the fact that it involves a natural resource essential for survival—water—considering that mining activity is planned to continue until 2060, by the time the children of my children will still be here. This is why our eyes must remain focused on the territory.
—Lickanantay community leader (July 3, 2024, text message exchange)

Figure 3: Traditional celebration of Saint Roque, Patron of Peine, with the Atacama Salt Flat in the background.

Figure 3: Traditional celebration of Saint Roque, Patron of Peine, with the Atacama Salt Flat in the background.

©Hernán Bianchi B. (August 16, 2024)

34Despite the evolving forms of governance and technological modernization, the power-colonial fracture remains a persistent structure, rooted in historical dispossession and continuously reactivated through global economic imperatives.

Narrative-Knowledge Fracture: Science, Cosmovision, & Epistemology

35To define the extractivist fracture of knowledge and narratives—shaping what is ‘valid and true’ while excluding Indigenous, Black, and non-Western epistemologies—is essential​ to complete the perspectives upon our argument. This epistemic rupture is part of what decolonial thinkers call the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ (Mignolo, 2010; Quijano, 2007), which refers to the ways in which colonialism has shaped the dominant systems of knowledge, and excluded other ways of thinking and knowing—such as, and rather primarily, Indigenous epistemologies.

36The narrative and knowledge fracture in the Atacama reflects on a deep asymmetry in scientific and legal authority; where State, corporate, and global actors dominate environmental governance, while excluding Indigenous knowledge systems and local participation. This fracture manifests in two key ways: hegemonic knowledge and ancestral challenges.

37Since 2009, the Chilean Copper Commission (Cochilco) has played a key role in shaping the country’s lithium policy, issuing reports that define legal and scientific guidelines for extraction. By 2023, Chile’s government had further solidified its extractivist trajectory by launching the National Lithium Development Strategy, aiming to expand mining across dozens of salt flats in the Atacama Desert. However, its ambiguously defined protection model has been widely criticized by Indigenous land defenders and scientific communities, as it does not prevent extractive projects from advancing.

38Despite official green energy narratives, these public-private partnerships reproduce extractive dependencies, where local communities bear the environmental and social costs while foreign markets reap the benefits. This has aligned with views from scientists that have worked intensively in studying these desert ecosystems, and how Indigenous communities relate to salt flats and water:

There may be best intentions, absolutely, but sustainable development does not exist; the sustainable extraction of the elites does not exist—it is completely false, because these are terminal systems.
—Dr. Cristina Dorador, microbiologist (February 5, 2025, in-person interview)

39This reveals a fundamental disjunction between the dominant representations of lithium as a national asset for global sustainability, and the lived experiences and epistemologies of Indigenous communities whose territories and futures are directly affected. Global and State narratives—reinforced through expert commissions and policy frameworks—construct a storyline of progress, innovation, and ‘green’ transition, obscuring the violent continuities of dispossession and environmental degradation. A leader of the water protection movement argues:

The mining industry speaks to Indigenous people of development, of economy. This has influenced some minds or led them to want to be part of that—let’s say—system, using their own origins.
—San Pedro de Atacama community member and Lickanantay land defender (June 9, 2024, in-person interview)

Figure 4: A llama corral in the community of Talabre, between Toconao and Peine.

Figure 4: A llama corral in the community of Talabre, between Toconao and Peine.

©Hernán Bianchi B. (July 13, 2024)

40A local activist argues that the legal and scientific frameworks governing lithium extraction are not neutral—they serve specific stakeholders consolidating a hierarchical control over knowledge production. By abstracting the issue into technical and policy-driven discussions, these frameworks exclude local communities from decision-making and reinforce a colonial logic of governance. Lickanantay land defenders frequently argue that decisions about their territories are made according to global capital demands rather than local perspectives. In a conversation at the Toconao community headquarters, a local community member describes this dynamic:

The global market determines territorial decisions. Our struggle is not just about resources, but about how political and economic power prevent us from developing our own knowledge and politics over our land.
—Lickanantay community member and land defender (June 19, 2024, in-person interview)

  • 2 Translates to Atacameño (i.e. Lickanantay) Indigenous Peoples’ Council. The Council or ‘CPA’ was fo (...)

41Knowledge fractures are particularly visible in scientific debates over lithium extraction, where corporate-backed environmental assessments often dismiss Indigenous ecological concerns. During the “Salares Lab” workshop in Toconao during late August 2024, Dr. Cristina Dorador opened the session—aimed at recollecting the local communities’ vision for protecting Andean salt flats—by asking the audience: “How do we build knowledge? Who builds that knowledge?” Her team and the audience discussed how science has been controlled and appropriated by mining companies, and how the ‘Consejo de Pueblos Atacameños’ (CPA)2 is working to reclaim scientific agency. This aligns with a broader movement to decolonize scientific practice, moving away from what Dorador terms extractive “helicopter science” that “lands, extracts, and takes off” from Indigenous territories:

The issue of microbial life has been crucial in this struggle. We had to prove that these extreme environments are alive; because before—they said—there was no life here. So, it didn’t matter if the ecosystem was destroyed.
—Dr. Cristina Dorador, microbiologist (August 30, 2024, “Salares Lab” seminar presentation, Toconao)

42Despite these exclusions, Indigenous communities and local scientists are actively challenging the knowledge monopoly. The CPA’s Environmental Unit has begun producing research, including water analysis and academic collaborations for publishing peer-reviewed papers:

Reclaiming science means reclaiming our right to define the future of our land. We have been excluded for too long, and we are building knowledge that reflects our reality—not just what the State and corporations want to see.
—Lickanantay community member, educator, and researcher (August 30, 2024, “Salares Lab” seminar presentation, Toconao)

43The narrative-knowledge fracture reveals how extractivism operates not only through material extraction and territorial appropriation, but also through the control of meaning, legitimacy, and truth. In the Atacama, science, law, and policy are deployed to naturalize extraction, marginalize Indigenous epistemologies, and co-opt cultural expressions; shaping which stories are told, which knowledge is heard, and which futures are imaginable. Recognizing and challenging this fracture seems essential for building truly plural, situated, and just environmental futures. It is not only a matter of redistributing resources, but of reclaiming the power to define what knowledge matters, and for whom.

Conclusions

44Our study contributes to highlighting how lithium extraction in the Atacama exemplifies a contemporary extractivist paradigm producing multidimensional fractures in Indigenous territories. Through a political ecology framework and grounded in over six months of fieldwork, our research documents the lived experiences of local communities, as they confront the expansion of green extractivism driven by global energy transitions.

45The image of fractures was suggested from the interviews in the field, and from them, a focus on three main forms of extractivist fractures—ecological-material, power-colonial, and narrative-knowledge—emerged. These are not isolated effects, but interwoven processes that disrupt hydroecological systems, appropriate ancestral lands, and marginalize Indigenous knowledge systems. Each fracture reveals the persistence of neocolonial structures embedded in the logics of governance and sustainability.

46The material and ecological dimensions of extractivist fractures are not only measurable in environmental indicators, but also in the shifting relational fabric between land and life. It restructures ecosystems and territorial meanings, altering how communities inhabit, understand, and protect their environments. In this sense, ecological degradation is inseparable from sociocultural disruption, and the ‘green’ transition becomes a process of ecological dislocation and epistemic violence. Understanding the ecological fracture requires looking beyond technical environmental assessments to consider the sociopolitical dimensions of extractivism, for which we examine the historical and political structures that underpin such fracture—particularly the colonial roots of extractive expansion of territorial and epistemological dispossession. In doing so, we recognize that the ecological crisis in the Atacama is not just about resources—it is about power, history, and the future of Indigenous land and water rights.

47Ecological exploitation becomes a terrain of political domination, as the scarcity and degradation of resources are managed asymmetrically by governments and corporations. These power imbalances, in turn, select and impose which forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate, marginalizing Indigenous cosmologies and understandings. The fracture of knowledge thus contributes to normalizing environmental and social damage, obscuring their scope behind the rhetoric of the ‘green’ transition. Together, these fractures constitute systemic devices that sustain the persistence of extractivism, revealing how its wounds are at once material, political, and symbolic.

48Despite these challenges, some local communities have mobilized to resist and adapt to the impacts of extractivist fractures. Their strategies include renewing cultural practices, and strengthening traditional knowledge and rituals to reinforce community identity—while also building solidarity networks and alliances with other environmental and local movements across the Andean highlands to amplify their voices. Moreover, they have developed alternative and sustainable models to challenge extractive economies, demonstrating localized agency in facing socioecological challenges. While these trends aim to produce and envision future perspectives for mountain landscapes beyond the Andean region, they focus on creating a more just and sustainable future—in contrast to the inevitable outcomes presented by mining-dominant narratives.

49Our study thus advances debates on spatial and environmental justice in mountain areas, by emphasizing the need for governance frameworks that prioritize local requirements and integrate community knowledge. In short, addressing the socioecological fractures in Atacama requires a paradigm shift in development practices, moving away from extractivist models, and toward more equitable and just approaches.

50Furthermore, it proposes the concept of extractivist fracture as an evocative and critical lens to understand the socioecological consequences of mining in the Atacama. This concept situates extractivism not only as an economic or environmental issue, but as a political and epistemic project that reshapes landscapes, cultures, and forms of governance.

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Notes

1 On its 19th Article, Section 24, the Chilean Constitution (Supreme Decree #1,150 of 1980) establishes that the State has absolute, exclusive, inalienable, and imprescriptible domain over every mine (including slat flats); and in addition, private rights over water—recognized and constituted through law—gives its holders ownership over them. See https://bcn.cl/2eph2 for a copy of the Chilean Constitution and https://bcn.cl/2zhx2 for the Water Law in their latest reformed versions (in 2005 and 2022, respectively).

2 Translates to Atacameño (i.e. Lickanantay) Indigenous Peoples’ Council. The Council or ‘CPA’ was founded on September 25th, 1994—at the time under the recently approved Indigenous Law #19,253—gathering nearly two dozen Indigenous groups within the Atacama Salt Flat basin. For a copy of this legislation see https://bcn.cl/2eu0o.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Map showing the Atacama and its geographical context. Andean salt flats are represented in light blue, conservation areas in green, urban areas in red, main roads in orange, and surface lakes and lithium evaporation ponds in dark blue.
Crédits ©Hernán Bianchi B.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rga/docannexe/image/15648/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 1,4M
Titre Figure 2: A saline pond in the southern surface of the Atacama with a fracture behind it—shown across the picture frame and under the horizon—due to the ‘sinking’ of the Salt Flat, as explained by a Lickanantay farmer during a field trip, corroborated by satellite imagery analysis (Delgado et al., 2024).
Crédits ©Hernán Bianchi B. (June 29, 2024)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rga/docannexe/image/15648/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 1,1M
Titre Figure 3: Traditional celebration of Saint Roque, Patron of Peine, with the Atacama Salt Flat in the background.
Crédits ©Hernán Bianchi B. (August 16, 2024)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rga/docannexe/image/15648/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 1,1M
Titre Figure 4: A llama corral in the community of Talabre, between Toconao and Peine.
Crédits ©Hernán Bianchi B. (July 13, 2024)
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rga/docannexe/image/15648/img-4.png
Fichier image/png, 1,6M
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Référence électronique

Chiara Braucher et Hernán Bianchi Benguria, « Extractivist Fractures in the Atacama Desert: An Oasis of Contradictions »Journal of Alpine Research | Revue de géographie alpine [En ligne], 113-2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 décembre 2025, consulté le 18 janvier 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/rga/15648 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/15d2n

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Auteurs

Chiara Braucher

Università di Trento

Hernán Bianchi Benguria

University of Toronto

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