Ram贸n Balc谩zar Morales
Ram贸n Balc谩zar Morales, Executive Director, Fundaci贸n Tant铆 and PhD Student, Universidad Aut贸noma Metropolitana
Ram贸n Balc谩zar Morales, Chilean socio-environmental activist and researcher. Since 2016 he is the founder and director of Fundaci贸n Tant铆, an independent non-profit organization created in San Pedro de Atacama to promote agroecology and raise awareness regarding the value of Andean wetlands and a just, fair, and post-extractivist socioecological transition. Ram贸n is a member of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (OPSAL), a cross-border collective that brings together indigenous leaders, activists and researchers from Chile, Argentina and Bolivia in the defense of Andean salt flats and wetlands threatened by lithium mining. Ram贸n was a CONACYT fellow and is a doctoral researcher in the Postgraduate Program in Rural Development at the Metropolitan Autonomous University of Mexico, where through collaborative and territorially situated research in the Salar de Atacama he seeks to account for the implications of green extractivism in the Andean rurality in a context of multiple crises. He's led several projects and publications such as the book Salares Andinos (2021) and the documentary Water is Worth More than Lithium (2021).