Story and photos by Katie Surma

AÑELO, Argentina—Ana Guircaleo was deep in slumber when a thunderous crash jolted her awake. Guircaleo, 72, barely had time to register that her television was shattered into pieces on the floor when she felt the convulsing of the Earth beneath her bed. She bolted, half naked and terrified, across the threshold of her red brick ranch-style home and into the open desert beneath a dark sky. 

That 2019 earthquake, Guircaleo recounted in a recent interview, was not the first nor the most intense seismic event to hit her small Wirkaleo Mapuche community since hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for hard-to-reach oil and natural gas began in the early 2010s in Vaca Muerta, a shale and limestone deposit roughly the size of Maryland that is located in Argentina’s northern Patagonia region. 

Since 2018, Wirkaleo and the adjacent small town of Sauzal Bonito have at times endured 48-hour periods of more than a dozen earthquakes ranging from mild tremors to violent shaking that have left many homes with veined cracks in walls, broken windows and crumbled chimneys. Guiracelo said the persistent tremors have aggravated her high blood pressure, caused pervasive mental stress and put her into debt—as a retiree on a small budget, she had to take out a loan to pay for repairs to her home.