On Thursday, a group of Peruvian indigenous communities agreed to temporarily lift the protest against the Las bambas copper mine of MMG Ltd. the protest forced the company to stop operating for more than 50 days, the longest forced outage in the history of the mine.
According to the minutes of the meeting signed on Thursday afternoon, the mediation between the two sides will last for 30 days, during which the community and the mine will negotiate.
Las bambas will immediately seek to restart copper production, although executives warned that it would take several days to resume full production after a long shutdown.
Peru is the second largest copper producer in the world, and Chinese funded Las bambas is one of the largest red metal producers in the world. The protests and lockouts have brought a major problem to the government of President Pedro Castillo. Facing the pressure of economic growth, he has been trying to promote the resumption of transactions for several weeks. Las bambas alone accounts for 1% of Peru's GDP.
The protest was launched in mid April by the fuerabamba and huancuire communities, who believed that Las bambas had not fulfilled all its commitments to them. Both communities sold their land to the company to make way for the mine. The mine opened in 2016, but experienced several outages due to social conflicts.
According to the agreement, fuerabamba will no longer protest in the mining area. During the mediation, Las bambas will also stop the construction of its new chalcobamba open pit mine, which will be located on the land previously owned by huncuire.
At the meeting, community leaders also asked to provide jobs for community members and to reorganize mine executives. At present, Las bambas has agreed to "evaluate and restructure senior executives involved in negotiations with local communities".
Post time: Jun-13-2022