I vividly remember the moment I first met Juan Carlos Montenegro. It was July 26, 2018. He received me in his office on the 18th floor of an office building located right in the city center of la Paz. I was nervous about meeting him. My research on lithium had only just begun and I was in Bolivia to conduct preliminary fieldwork. I had filed a formal request with the state lithium company YLB to visit their facilities in the Uyuni salt flat without getting any response. I had already given up on the visit but a friend who was more familiar with Bolivian bureaucracy told me to just go to their offices and request a meeting with the director. I responded with an incredulous smile but then followed his advice, on my last day in La Paz and without knowing what or who to expect, nor how to prepare myself.
My nervousness vanished the moment I stepped into the director’s office. Sitting at a large, heavy wooden table behind which he almost disappeared, Juan Carlos received me with a smile. He complimented me on my Spanish and I in turn complimented him on his German. He had read my request, including the description of my research endeavor which I was struggling to define at that time. Yet, he seemed happy with it, and that was all that mattered: “No hay problema.” To arrange my visit, he called the head of operations into his office. And while we sat there waiting for more than an hour he told me about himself and Bolivia’s lithium project.
So, this is how I knew Juan Carlos. Through lithium. Whenever we met again over the years that followed, this was the context. Each time, it was this common element which brought us together. Juan Carlos had to leave his post as YLB director at the end of 2019 after the violent change of government. Still, he remained very much invested in the lithium question and our paths kept crossing. Over the years, I ended up learning quite a bit about him and his life before and besides lithium. Nonetheless, our relationship was always about lithium. That never bothered me and I think neither did he mind talking to yet another person about this subject. He seemed present in these encounters, with mind and heart and soul. He truly cared about lithium.
Caring about lithium
Now, I might have to explain what it means to “care about lithium”, at least for those who do not know the context. Since around 1980, the salt flats in the border zone between Argentina, Bolivia and Chile have been known to contain large quantities of lithium. From the outset, the context in which this knowledge was produced was mostly, if not entirely, about energy transition. In these days, the term referred to Peak Oil rather than Climate Change, but for people in places with a lot of lithium there was never much of a difference. It meant that there was a boom coming.
As you may know, Latin America has a long and violent, but also heroic, history with resource booms that has left its traces across the region. This means that today resource extraction is a matter of extraordinary social and political significance – a question of identity we might say. From the moment it was known to exist in the salt flats, lithium was also read through that history and therefore became a thoroughly political affair. As people kept waiting for the boom to materialize, lithium existed mostly in the future and was thus defined in contrast to that past. It was the promise that this time things would be different.
Proposed by social movements and developed by a revolutionary government, the Bolivian lithium project epitomized that promise more than any other. It sought to build a sovereign, properly Bolivian, industry to benefit people rather than corporations. For Juan Carlos, it was an opportunity to use his technical expertise (in metallurgy and material science) and position as university professor for the (pluri)national cause. He was excited about being part of an effort to overcome extractivism, that is the economic and political arrangements and ideologies compelling places like Bolivia to export their natural riches as cheap raw materials. He was a technically-minded person for sure, but someone with a political conviction.
Juan Carlos Montenegro proudly driving an electric vehicle (see also “Evo’s Electric Joy Ride“) built to test the batteries made in YLB’s research center in La Palca, Potosí. Overcoming extractivism by making batteries and even cars in Bolivia has been the ultimate objective of the lithium industrialization project. Picture taken in September 2019 by the author, who had been generously invited by the director to join a tour to the YLB facilities.
Juan Carlos was not the only one invested in lithium because of its potential for social change. I remember yet another conversation, in which he told me why it had been so difficult to find enough qualified personnel for the state lithium company: “They need both technical skill and ideological commitment, and that combination is hard to come by.” The company, he explained, could not match the working conditions of private industry in terms of pay, security or comfort. This meant that working for the Bolivian lithium project implied a certain sacrifice that only people who cared were willing to make.
A strange community
Beyond Bolivia, lithium has gathered a whole range of people from across the world who have come to care about it and its promise to be different. For a while now, I have been wondering about that strange community, of which I am myself part. Among us you will find scientists writing about global entanglements and local consequences, or assembling the materials and infrastructures of national industries. There is no unified nor uniform space or time in which we meet, and still the conversations keep happening. Our relations have formed in projects and events, among many other forms of encounter. People have very different opinions on “what to do with lithium,” yet no one remains indifferent when something related to it happens. In fact, we have arguably very little in common except for lithium, but that common element seems to count for something.
And so I was not alone with my bewilderment and grief when I heard of Juan Carlos’ death. In any case, his passing away would have meant something to those (many) of us who had had the chance to meet him in person. Yet, it ended up acquiring an even wider significance, for on the day of his death Juan Carlos wrote an open letter. It was a reaction to the legal charges (broadly, for corruption) that the government had leveled against him and others. In technical parlance he explained that these charges served in fact to cover up that the government had utterly failed in advancing the lithium project. Rather than admitting the failure, they were now looking for culprits outside of their ranks, sacrificing those who had built the project’s foundations. He could not accept being humiliated in public by a corrupt justice system.
His letter ended: “I apologize to my loved ones for the pain that my decision will surely cause them, but I do it also for them.”
We all realized: Juan Carlos had given his life for lithium.
The ultimate sacrifice?
There has been debate, in both private and public, about the circumstances of Juan Carlos’ death. Did he commit suicide or die of a heart attack? What did his letter really mean, and was it even authentic? I do not think that such questions – of truth – are really what matter. Either way, this is also a story about sacrifice.
In its original sense the term ‘sacrifice’ refers to ritualized offerings to the gods. In one form or another this practice can be found in all societies, including secular ones. Studied the phenomenon, anthropologists have developed rather different ways of understanding it. For my purpose here, I find it most helpful to read it in the line of Marcel Mauss’ work on gift exchange. Mauss understood that gifts not only create a bond between the giver (people) and the receiver (gods) but also enforce a cycle of obligations that sustain social ties and reinforce the collective conscience of a community.
It is in this relational sense that I would like to read Juan Carlos’ death. One possibility would be to highlight the nation as the ‘modern god’ for which so many people have made the ultimate sacrifice. Undoubtedly, for Juan Carlos and the many others working with him, lithium was a national project in which they believed and for which they were willing to give. Yet, looking up for too long – fixing our gaze on the gods – can be a dangerous affair. Too much can be justified in the name of the greater cause. And so I want to offer a second possibility, which is to look down – to the ground on which we all stand and the communities in which we all live. Before he died, Juan Carlos gave so much to that strange community, gathered by lithium as a common element. Maybe we can remember him by reviving some of the stories about his generosity?
I remember the puzzlement I felt after my first meeting with Juan Carlos that day in La Paz. Why had he received me with open arms? Why would he allocate scarce company resources to have his employees show me around and spend their time at work talking to me? He was a nice person, for sure. But was that reason enough for offering me such a gift? Only later did I understand what must have been some of his reasoning. For Juan Carlos, lithium was an inherently political matter and as such it rested on alliances. Their project was ambitious and many people doubted that it would ever be more than a dream. I believe that showing what they had built in the salt flat to someone like me was part of his efforts to make this dream a little more real.
In Puerto Chuvica, people have built a road into Salar de Uyuni, whose fringes can be muddy and dangerous when the rains come. Standing on its firm ground, you may grasp these crosses from afar, remembering some of those who have lost their lives in the salt flat. Juan Carlos and his colleagues used to drive along this road to build their lithium dream. I wonder what went through their minds when they saw them. Video taken by the author. Footage taken by the author.
If you you, too, have a story to share about Juan Carlos’ generosity, please do so in the comments below!
Anthropologist fascinated by lithium and its connections around the world. What happens once we venture into the different places and issues it can take us?