The Mountain’s Price: Argentina Opens the Andes to the Biggest Mining Rush in Latin American History

Key Points

• Argentina’s mining exports hit a record $6 billion in 2025, up 29%, as Milei’s government offers 30-year tax guarantees to attract global miners eyeing copper, lithium, and gold worth tens of billions of dollars.
• Eight major copper projects totaling $26 billion in planned investment could make Argentina a top-five global producer by 2035, but many require weakening the country’s glacier-protection law, which safeguards freshwater for 70% of the population.
• Past mining disasters — million-liter cyanide spills, rivers contaminated thousands of times above legal limits, zero convictions after a decade — fuel fierce opposition from communities and environmentalists who say the profits leave while the damage stays.

Javier Milei’s libertarian government is steering Argentina toward what could become Latin America’s most aggressive mining expansion in a generation.

Exports reached a record $6.037 billion in 2025, driven by gold prices nearing $5,000 an ounce and lithium production that tripled in three years as operational mines jumped from two to seven. The sector grew 7% even as manufacturing shrank under Milei’s trade liberalization.

The real prize is copper. Argentina currently exports none, yet eight projects — led by Glencore, BHP, Lundin Mining, Rio Tinto, and McEwen Copper — aim to produce over one million tonnes annually by the mid-2030s.

The RIGI incentive regime, passed in 2024, offers investors 30-year regulatory stability, a corporate tax cut from 35% to 25%, duty-free imports, and access to international arbitration.

Rio Tinto committed $2.5 billion to a lithium plant in Salta; BHP and Lundin applied for the largest foreign mining investment in Argentine history.

Supporters call this a generational opportunity. Mining salaries are the country’s highest, and the world faces a projected 10-million-tonne copper deficit by 2040, driven by electric vehicles, AI data centers, and grid expansion. S&P Global warns supply cannot keep pace with demand.

Critics counter with history. Bajo La Alumbrera, Argentina’s only large copper mine, operated from 1997 to 2018, leaving waterways with arsenic at 20,000 times legal limits.

Barrick Gold’s Veladero mine spilled over a million liters of cyanide into rivers in 2015 — locals learned via WhatsApp — followed by four more incidents. No one was convicted.

The flashpoint is now the Glacier Law. Milei sent Congress a bill to narrow protections for 16,968 Andean ice formations, transferring oversight to provinces with direct mining interests.

In Mendoza, where 50,000 people marched in 2019 to block mining, the legislature approved its first copper project in two decades.

Environmental groups filed injunctions; all were rejected. An activist was arrested under a penal code provision associated with political repression.

More than 25 organizations and the UN, which declared 2025 the International Year of Glacier Conservation, have raised alarms.

Foreign direct investment outside mining and energy turned negative for the first time since 2003, suggesting the boom is narrow rather than broad.

Argentina’s minerals are needed for a global energy transition occurring primarily in wealthy nations. Whether the communities living above those minerals share in the benefits, or simply inherit the costs, remains the unanswered question.

Related coverage: Brazil’s Morning Call | The Small Country Between Brazil and Argentina That Just Bec This is part of The Rio Times’ daily coverage of Argentina affairs and Latin American financial news.

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