The Lican Antai of the Atacama

The Lican Antai people of the Atacama Desert have persisted for 12,000 years in the oases, valleys and gorges of the Andes. Dominated by the Inca in the 15th Century, their language, Kunza was believed extinct after the arrival of the Spanish. Today they are reviving the language in the small towns and settlements where the Lican Antai or Atacameños hold on to their ways of life, using the scarce water and sparse terrain by keeping their livestock - llama and alpaca - both as pack animals and for their meat, hide and wool.
Stewards of water in one of the driest and harshest environments on earth, the Lican Antai are a model for the rest of the earth as global climate change and the rest of humanity bring heartbreaking tragedy and perplexing challenges to the Atacama.

A place of unrivaled clear skies, international observatories have long mapped the skies here. San Pedro de Atacama, the main town of the Atacama is an ancient settlement where pre Inca fortifications, and the nearby oldest archaeological site in Chile, Tulor, bear witness to time and change.

50 km away from town is the largest salt flat in Chile, surrounded by mountains with no drainage outlets. The Salar of Atacama, contains 27% of the world's lithium reserve base, the world's largest and purest active source of lithium. The lightest of all metals, lithium is the key ingredient in rechargeable batteries. In high demand as the world undergoes technological evolutions, the battery industry has tripled its consumption of lithium over the last few years. Called white gold, Chile is sometimes referred to as the Saudi Arabia of Lithium. The explosive growth of the industry that pumps underground brine into evaporation ponds has affected local water tables, severely affecting agriculture and surrounding communities.

Water rights in Chile were privatized during the 17 year military dictatorship of General Agusto Pinochet. The effects of his neo -liberal free market policies are felt keenly today as climate change exacts its toll and those who have lived in the Atacama for centuries are left without water for basic needs even as international corporations legally deplete water to create products for foreign markets.

Agri-business is another industry that has moved into inhospitable areas of the Northern Chilean desert and further into the central region of Chile. Using water rights bought at top dollar, the industry feed the worlds apparent insatiable appetite for avocado toast, ( a long- time Chilean staple) with widespread avocado plantations terraced for maximum growth and density. As the river Loa in the Atacama runs dry, further south, the rivers of Petorca and Ligua have long ago also gone dry. There, people have no running water in their houses, but across town, thousands of hectares of avocado grow in an oasis. Along with climate change, people blame agricultural production companies, especially of avocado, to have generated water problems.

Chile, a country with little reserves of petroleum continues to expand its alternative energy sources through solar and hydro electric power, actions that continue to call for both Lithium extraction and water contamination as climate change and human folly come together to create an invasion that dwarfs both the Inca and the Spanish empires.

#climatechange  #LicanAntai  #Atacama #secos