It is a city of Opata origin, sparsely populated – less than a thousand inhabitants – in the high western range of the mountains, founded in 1645 by the Jesuit Cristóbal García as a Jesuit mission called Mission San Luis Gonzága de Bacadéhuachi.
It is 277 km east of the state capital Hermosillo, 295 km south of the border town of Agua Prieta and 409 km northwest of the port city of Heroica Guaymas.
Surely if novelist B. Traven had known the lithium that would lift him out of poverty and not the gold from the mountains he boasted about when writing his famous novel The Schartz of the Sierra Madre, and Dobbs ( Humphrey Bogart) was buried there and not in Durango.
The point is that the real mineral treasure of the Sierra Madre is lithium, not gold, although what is most precious in comparison to both is the extreme beauty of the mountain range and its indigenous peoples, many of whom were wiped out by Spanish and American marauders.
It is very certain that if the existence of lithium had been known in 1848 and what it represents for modern industry already at the gates, the theft of the two million square kilometers from Mexico after the United States invasion of this country would have gone like this Sierra Madre and the film’s wildness would be nothing compared to what would have happened.
In addition, if the governments from Carlos Salinas de Gortari to Enrique Peña Nieto had known the potential of this mineral, it would have been the central axis of supply of energy resources to the United States and Spain in the reform of the latter.
They were now fighting the privatization of lithium, as they still are, with oil in the hands of Pemex and electricity managed by the State Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), and the corruption would have been ten times worse than that found in was shown The trial of Genaro García Luna in New York.
That is no longer possible today, and hopefully never, because President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has just announced the nationalization of lithium and ratified the oil dictated by General Lázaro Cárdenas in 1938, precisely in a ceremony held in this municipality this weekend was in the Alta la Sierra Madre.
López Obrador signed an agreement specifying that 234,800 hectares will be considered lithium reserves and instructed the Department of Energy to carry out follow-up work for the extraction of this mineral, essential for electric cars, since it is the basis for the elaboration of the batteries used.
What we’re doing now, by keeping the stake, and at another point in time, is nationalizing lithium so foreign companies can’t exploit it. Oil and lithium belong to the nation, we’re signing this deal, there’s already a law that’s passed in Congress, he assured the world.
The decision has already been made. The law passed and lithium belongs to the nation. Now comes the technological challenge, because in Sonora lithium is not in the rock like in Bolivia, Argentina or Chile, but in the clay. Because of this, Mexican engineers are already looking for a way to separate lithium from clay.
He stressed that in the Free Trade Agreement (T-MEC), the United States, Canada and Mexico are committed to advancing the transition to clean energy in vehicle construction, with a completely different content from the previous one and very balanced benefits and respect for sovereignty.
Exactly on Saturday, Mexico inaugurated the largest solar power plant in Latin America, as part of the energy transition policy for the use of clean energy, related to lithium.
Anticipating the course of lithium development, your government had already promulgated the Decree of April 20, 2022, which amended the Mining Law to state that lithium is the heritage of the nation, and as of today, February 19, 2013, the technical begin the process of exploration and extraction of this raw material for the automotive industry.
“Lithium nationalization will be remembered by future generations as the turning of a screw that gave way to this century’s new industrial policies and import substitution, industrial policies committed to clean energy,” predicted the President.
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