Argentina: Salta, Jujuy and Catamarca sign Interprovincial Treaty creating the 'Región Minera del Litio'

Mechanism

Three governors — Gustavo Sáenz (Salta), Gerardo Morales (Jujuy) and Raúl Jalil (Catamarca) — signed the treaty at a meeting in El Rodeo, Catamarca, creating a formal cross-provincial territorial unit over the shared lithium salars of Argentina's northwest (the Puna/Altiplano basin that includes Salar de Olaroz, Hombre Muerto and Cauchari). The treaty establishes the Comité Regional del Litio as coordinator of the three provinces' regulatory and fiscal requirements "among themselves and before the Nation," aiming to give investors a single, predictable set of rules across jurisdictions rather than three independently negotiated regimes.

Ratification followed a standard provincial-legislature path in each signatory: Salta approved via Ley N° 8.289 (Decreto N° 905/21, Boletín Oficial 22 December 2021), Jujuy via Ley N° 6.278, and Catamarca via Ley N° 5.756.

This is the foundational instrument behind Argentina's subsequent provincial lithium-royalty coordination and precedes — by roughly two years — the national deregulation push of DNU 70/2023 and the RIGI large-investment regime that individual lithium projects in these same provinces (e.g. Galán Litio's Hombre Muerto Oeste) later used.

Downstream implications

• Establishes a durable institutional channel (Comité Regional del Litio)

through which the three provinces can jointly set royalty, permitting and environmental terms for lithium projects — raising the cost of regulatory arbitrage between provinces for miners operating across the shared basin.

• Predates and structurally underlies later national-level lithium/mining

liberalisation instruments (DNU 70/2023, RIGI) filed separately in the register; those instruments operate within, not instead of, this provincial framework.

• Closes a period gap: prior to this filing, the register's earliest

Argentina action was 2023-12-20 (DNU 70/2023), leaving the 2021-24 provincial groundwork for Argentina's lithium chokepoint policy unrepresented.

Open questions

• No independent primary text for the Jujuy (Ley 6.278) or Catamarca (Ley

5.756) ratifications was located during this filing; only the Salta Senate record and secondary press coverage were confirmed. A follow-up pass should pull the Jujuy and Catamarca boletín oficial texts directly.

• Whether the Comité Regional del Litio has issued any binding joint

regulations since 2021, as opposed to functioning purely as a coordination forum, is not established here.