Latin America mining risks and the $54B hit: key lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
Above-ground risks have imposed or frozen more than $54 billion in Latin American mining since 2018, including a $31.7‑billion settlement for the 2015 Mariana tailings dam failure in Brazil and roughly $7 billion in stalled Peruvian copper projects plus $4 billion tied up in Mexico’s El Arco, San Nicolás and Cordero developments. AMI also cites Panama’s $6.8‑billion Cobre Panamá copper mine closure and over 700 days of transport-corridor blockades at Peru’s Las Bambas as emblematic of execution and social risk. Consultants report investors now heavily discount projects with uncertain permitting timelines, weak institutional legitimacy or high exposure to illegal mining.
Technical Brief
- AMI attributes about $38 billion to realised write-offs, legal settlements, fines and other documented losses.
- A further $16 billion is capital immobilised in delayed or halted projects rather than written off.
- The Mining Conflicts Observatory records 284 conflicts affecting 301 extractive projects across Latin America.
- Chile’s Second Environmental Court annulled a key permit for Collahuasi’s $3.2‑billion expansion over community-observation handling.
- At Cobre Panamá, Supreme Court invalidation of the concession law shut a $6.8‑billion mine supplying 5% of national GDP.
- AngloGold Ashanti has written off $98 million at Quebradona, now targeting 2027 for a revised EIA submission.
- Zijin’s Buriticá mine reportedly lost operational control of 60% of underground tunnels to Gulf Clan‑backed illegal miners.
Our Take
With copper and critical minerals central to this Latin America risk tally, it is notable that the only directly related piece in our database is a US‑backed uranium‑from‑seawater R&D project, underscoring how comparatively little of the roughly $1 billion in US critical‑minerals investment into the region is tied to large, high‑risk greenfield mines like El Arco or Vicuña.
The concentration of stalled capital in Peruvian and Mexican copper projects in this article aligns with our broader Mining coverage, where copper repeatedly appears as the commodity most exposed to permitting and social‑licence delays rather than purely geological or price risk.
Incidents like the Mariana tailings failure and prolonged blockades at Las Bambas sit within a subset of safety‑ and failure‑tagged stories in our database that increasingly drive higher ESG and political‑risk premiums for operators such as BHP, Vale and First Quantum Minerals when they advance multi‑billion‑dollar expansions like Collahuasi or greenfield builds in Chile and Panama.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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