Native people are left poor as tech world takes lithium from under their feet

You'd think that after thousands of years these "great thinkers" would learn that nothing good will come from taking private property and making it a "common resource" (read: property of the state)

That's a clear false dichotomy: either people have no self-interest, or else they must be the bad guys. But almost everyone in any market operates primarily from self-interest. If a company that was losing money offered you your current job at twice the salary, would you say no, because you placed their interests above your own? Of course not. If you didn't take it, it would most likely be because you worried the company would go broke and lay you off, a clearly self-interested motivation. And the communities here - if someone offered them far more than the lithium was worth, would they turn that down? I really don't think they would. So either being mainly motivated by self-interest doesn't make someone bad, or else almost anyone who buys or sells anything is bad.

"Yolanda Cruz, one of the leaders of the village of Catua, said she signed the contract with Minera Exar but now regrets it. At the time, she valued the opportunity to create jobs for her village. But she now worries “we are going to be left with nothing,” she said."

They do this everywhere in the country. Most parts of Argentina are dry because the Andes block most of the humidity. Large mines use a lot of water. Indigenous people and farmers (lots of wines grow in deserts, but also olives etc.) no longer get the water they need.

This is why we have the IMF. To make financial crack junkies out of countries that are controlling the resources. Thank god there's a republican government now and the ban on lending money has been lifted now they've paid off the vulture funds.

What could go wrong?

It takes a certain sort of person to screw the indigenous out of not only their traditions and culture by destroying their source of food and other supplies, and then turn around and say they don't deserve to profit off that destruction because they're simple and provincial.

Yet most people question why a natural resource extraction should result in a windfall for 300-1000 people at most, and leave the rest of the nation without any immediate benefit.

We can question why X people get more and Y people get less, but that's really getting into the scope of the politics of a foreign nation which I bet none of us are really capable of discussing.

   There is a large difference in power and knowledge
   between these two sides, which is the heart of the
   ethics argument.

Had the Lithium extraction here turned out to be really really hard and the payment to the communities was nearly all of the profit the mining companies were making after extraction, the natives would not complain. But when it is a small fraction of the profit, it is "unfair".

So what is the right answer? Well in one view of the world the correct answer is to build a mining company with the indigenous population so that they can start providing a commodity that the rest of the world wants to buy. That creates a local boost to the economy and employs as many native people as want to be employed.

That seems great until the lithium runs out. Then you end up with a derelict mining town.