In September 2023, the then deputy and presidential candidate Javier Milei uttered a phrase that today reappears strongly on social networks and the media: “A company can pollute the river as much as it wants.” The statement came during a speech at the Argentine Economic Congress, in La Rural, where Milei said: “Where is the damage? Where is the problem there? That, in reality, speaks of a society that has plenty of water, and the price of water is zero.”
And he added: “The problem actually lies in the fact that there are no property rights over water. When there is a lack of water, someone is going to see a business there and is going to claim property rights. They are going to see how the pollution ends there.”
Although the comment was made in 2023, today it gains new media momentum: this Monday, December 9, 2025, a massive march was held in the province of Mendoza under the slogan of defending water. The mobilization, named “Liberating Gesta for Water”, started from the town of Uspallata and traveled more than 100 km to the provincial capital. The protesters claim that their rivers and fields “may be contaminated by mining waste,” while demanding that the provincial Senate reject the Environmental Impact Statement (DIA) of the copper and gold mining project called Proyecto San Jorge (renamed PSJ Cobre Mendocino).
Milei’s phrase—“a company can pollute the river as much as it wants” and that “there is a society that has plenty of water” and “the price of water is zero” resonates again today with particular relevance in Mendoza, where the question about water is mixed with the debate on mega-mining, natural resources and property.
The Mendoza march, by demanding that “Mendoza’s water is not negotiated” is part of a tradition of struggle to defend the commons against extractive interests. In this context, Milei’s phrase—which proposed a lack of property rights over water as a cause of pollution—takes on a new nuance: if “there are no property rights,” according to him, “when water is missing, someone will claim property rights” and “pollution will end.”
But for the participants of the march, the tension does not reside in the private ownership of water but in the collective use, care of the environment, and the questioning of large undertakings that could affect basins and ecosystems, opening the debate on water, pollution, property and development model in Argentina.
