“…Such interpretation has been historically supported by mining companies and the Chilean State-although with some nuances across different State institutions. Others, including indigenous groups and part of the scientific community, argue that brine is a type of water and therefore point out that lithium mining in salt flats is nothing more than water mining (Babidge et al, 2019;Garcés and Álvarez, 2020;Ejeian et al, 2021;Jerez et al, 2021). The brine-water nexus has been analyzed from a diversity of perspectives among others molecular analysis (Ejeian et al, 2021), critical resource geography (Bustos-Gallardo et al, 2021), political ecology (Jerez et al, 2021) and hydrogeology and geochemistry (Marazuela et al, 2019;Munk et al, 2021).…”