The first time I saw Vicente Alancay he was knee-deep in brackish water in the middle of a vast salt flat in northern Argentina. The photograph I took of him digging salt made the cover of our 2003 Journal. At the time, I was visiting a Foundation-funded project called WARMI, an organization of indigenous Coya founded by Rosario Quispe, the wife of an unemployed miner.
Vicente Alancay digging salt. Rosario had an ambitious dream for the puna–the high, arid plateau where Argentina and Bolivia meet in the shadow of the Andes–that the Coya people would live in dignity on the fruits of their work.

In 2003, that dream looked distant for Vicente Alancay. He labored up to six hours a day in the thin air of the Puna, almost 12,000 feet above sea level. Around him, the blindingly white salt flats stretched to the mountains on the horizon. The day’s work produced a ton of raw salt, for which he earned about $3. Rosario said it was the hardest work she knew of.

Salt, however, was the only resource Vicente and his neighbors in Cerro Negro had and Rosario was convinced it could be made to pay if they could process and package as well as dig the salt.

When I next saw Vicente, in December 2005, he and five partners were packing processed, iodized and purified salt in one kilo bags, labeled with their own brand–Sal Puna. They sell them by the truckload in Tucuman for about $40 a ton, a huge increase in value added.
Vicente packing processed salt.What made the difference was a $9,000 loan from WARMI which, in addition to its widespread microcredit program that reaches into 78 communities with tiny loans, also offers a program complete with larger loans and entrepreneurial training to encourage the creation of businesses across the Puna.

Vicente and 11 partners used the loan to buy a salt processing machine and other equipment to outfit their small factory in Cerro Negro. There’s still the tough work out on the flats, where the men take turns spending a week at a time, living in dirty grey igloos made of heavy blocks of salt. The work is still backbreaking. The fierce sunlight still ricochets off the white flats and stabs the eyes like crystalline knives and the salt dust coats the skin and lips. But the difference now is that the men know their labor will be rewarded with a decent income.

Patrick Breslin is IAF’s vice president for external affairs.