Luciana Almada
The Southern Cone emerges as a critical fault line in the energy transition and the strategic reordering of the multipolar world.
Buenos Aires, July 2025 — In the blistering salt flats of Jujuy, northern Argentina, where ancestral Quechua traditions still whisper through the wind, a military convoy discreetly guards the entrance to a newly privatized lithium operation. No war has been declared, yet the landscape bears the unmistakable signs of occupation. Lithium, free markets, and military forces: this new strategic triangle is no longer an abstract theory. It is the operational grammar of a region under pressure.
Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia form the so-called Lithium Triangle, home to over 50% of the world’s known lithium reserves—a mineral now central to electric vehicles, energy storage, and digital infrastructure. But framing lithium solely as an “economic opportunity” is a dangerous oversimplification. In today’s world, lithium is a geopolitical asset. Whoever controls its supply chains, controls leverage in the next energy era.
What was once debated in university halls is now decided in libertarian cabinet rooms, intelligence briefings, and corporate boardrooms. In Argentina, the radical free-market reforms pushed by President Javier Milei have turbocharged foreign access to lithium extraction. Under the banners of modernization and deregulation, environmental protections have been dismantled, Indigenous consultation protocols erased, and provincial oversight reduced to bureaucratic symbolism.
But the most alarming development is not economic—it’s military. Since late 2024, joint operations between national security forces and private contractors have begun to patrol key lithium corridors and extraction zones, previously governed by civilian authorities. Simultaneously, Argentina’s Navy has revived plans to expand maritime patrols across the South Atlantic, citing “emerging hybrid threats.” In practice, this means that resource access is now fused with security doctrine and territorial control.
Chile, although institutionally more robust, is moving along a similar path. Its recent policy shift to allow deeper foreign participation in lithium projects has sparked social tensions, even as it signs new defense cooperation agreements with the United States to “secure critical infrastructure.” Bolivia, after a dramatic halt to its nationalization model, has pivoted toward renewed alliances with Russia and China, further fragmenting the regional bloc and exposing the South to the wider battlefield of the global tech war.
What we’re witnessing is a new geometry of power: a triangle where lithium is the material engine, market fundamentalism the ideological driver, and military presence the enforcement mechanism. This is not dystopian fiction—it’s the lived reality of signed contracts, reinforced bases, and digitalized extraction regimes financed by opaque financial vehicles and crypto-capital flows.
So, who arbitrates this new order? Multilateral institutions like the IDB and IMF frame it as “green cooperation” and “sustainable development.” Western think tanks praise libertarian reforms as agile and innovation-friendly. Meanwhile, local Indigenous communities—Quechua, Aymara, Guaraní—watch their lands reclassified, militarized, and monetized without consent. Overhead, drones—funded by international security programs—monitor them in the name of energy security.
This is the silent frontier of the green transition: a post-colonial conquest disguised as climate progress. It no longer requires gunboats—just deregulation, surveillance platforms, and securitized trade pacts. The new wars over lithium are not declared in public; they are executed through contracts and enforced with boots and algorithms.
Argentina now stands at a geopolitical crossroads. It can choose to be a raw material supplier subordinated to the demands of transnational capital and global debt cycles, or it can forge a sovereign development pathway—one that integrates high-tech innovation with environmental justice and democratic accountability. But that requires what is in shortest supply: political will without ideological captivity.
Because when algorithms speculate on lithium prices, drones patrol Indigenous lands, and markets celebrate deregulation as destiny, who defends the right of a people to govern their future?
As a journalist from the Global South, my role is not to soothe readers with tidy answers, but to surface the questions no one dares to ask. And today, the most urgent one is this:
Who really benefits from the energy transition?
Luciana Almada, Argentinian Senior Opinion Columnist & Southern Cone Analyst at Phoenix24.
An investigative journalist and geopolitical analyst, Almada explores the shifting architecture of the Southern Cone through the lens of strategic innovation, climate diplomacy, and post-crisis governance across Latin America.