By Sarah Sax
In late December 2023, when communities in the southeastern Peruvian province of Cotabambas received a copy of proposed modifications to the Las Bambas copper mine, they were at first surprised, and then frustrated. The document, which arrived between Christmas and New Year’s, contained a proposal to almost double the mining operation but lacked detailed studies on its environmental impact on aquifers, wetlands and rivers, which are crucial to the communities. Yet, they were given mere weeks to send in comments. In response, around a dozen organizations sent a letter to the agency of environmental certification for sustainable investment (SENACE), requesting they annul the amendment.
“They didn’t consult with us at all, they only sent notifications,” said Walter Contreras, a local leader of the Cotabambas Defense Front, one of several organizations that signed the letter. It was impossible to infer from the document what exactly the impacts were going to be for communities like his, which are directly in the mine’s impact zone.
The open-pit mine of Las Bambas sits at 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) above sea level. It is one of the largest copper mines in the world, producing up to 2% of the world’s copper, a critical mineral for the clean energy transition. In theory, Las Bambas can produce 320,000 metric tons of copper concentrate a year, but widespread protests over the social and environmental impacts of the mine and the transport of minerals have never allowed the mine to fulfill that potential.
Piece of copper. Image by Marta Vidal.
Now, the company that owns the mine, Chinese MMG Ltd., is attempting to add an amendment to its Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for the fourth time. The environmental impact assessment is a document that identifies possible environmental and social impacts of alternative project designs and develops plans to mitigate those impacts. Critically, the amendment includes the expansion of the company’s Ferrobamba pit by 285.3 hectares (705 acres), which would generate more than 2 million tons of waste and would require the potential irreversible loss of 12.36 hectares (30.5) of wetlands, as well as significant reduction in the flows of the Ferrobamba and Challhuahuacho rivers. In addition, local water bodies, such as the Charcascocha lagoon and the Chuspiri water reservoir, are reported to be at considerable risk of contamination.
Communities and organizations on the ground have pushed back, arguing that the document does not include enough studies and technical details to evaluate the environmental impacts and is also written in such a way that makes it inaccessible and unreadable to the communities that under Peruvian law have a right to be consulted.
“The only thing they wanted to do is check off the requirements; they weren’t interested in having a real participation,” said Elizabeth Zamalloa, an environmental engineer at CooperAcción, a nonprofit Peruvian civil association that promotes the rights of rural and Indigenous peoples. “They did it under pandemic norms, it was deficient in terms of timing, and on top of that, it was not accessible but highly technical.”
While seemingly a highly technical matter, moments like these are important, Maiah Jaskoski, a political scientist at Northern Arizona University who has written extensively about extractive conflicts and participatory measures in Peru, Colombia and Bolivia, told Mongabay over the phone. “These are moments where big decisions are made generally. It’s a formally built-in space where the state and institutions like SENACE have to decide what they stand for. It’s a decision point, and it creates a moment for activists to insert themselves and halt development,” said Jaskoski. “A lot of the success in blocking projects has happened by making them politically infeasible, especially the Peruvian case, because of massive protests. The modification can make this a political moment.”
The right to know
At the beginning of this year, representatives of various social organizations from the district of Challhuahuacho in southern Peru signed a statement giving the government 72 hours to “restart the dialogue regarding the fourth modification of the environmental impact study” of the Las Bambas project. Ten days later, on Jan. 20, after receiving no response, the organization wrote a formal letter to the Ministry of the Environment, asking it to annul the fourth amendment of the EIA.
The activists argue that the EIA doesn’t give enough information about the Ferrobamba pit expansion or how the increase in tailings waste will be safely managed. It also lacks details on the impacts of discharging waters with higher acidic content into rivers used by several communities and how that wastewater would be pretreated, or any water management plans needed as a result of destroying wetlands for the expansion. One of the biggest complaints relates to the company’s failure to help communities understand the impacts of the new project.
In La Oroya, a Peruvian city which from 1922 to 2009 supported the copper and zinc mining industry, the nearby mine and in-town factory turned this high Andes community into one of the most polluted cities on earth. In the case of Las Bambas, communities fear the mine’s expansion and don’t have clarity on the potential environmental impacts. Image by Jason Houston.
According to a report by CooperAcción, the document submitted by Las Bambas does not comply with the standards established by the National Environmental Certification Service for Sustainable Investments (SENACE).The report fails to accurately delineate the areas of direct and indirect environmental and social impact. According to Peruvian law, communities that will be affected by the environmental impacts of a new mine or amendments to a mining project have the right to be consulted about those impacts in a way that is accessible by nonspecialists and nontechnical people. Zamalloa said they failed on those accounts.
“This is a rural area where many people don’t speak Spanish fluently or speak it as a second language. It wasn’t translated into any of the local languages, it didn’t have a guide or translation of English technical terms,” said Zamalloa. “I should be able to understand what is going to happen with my water, with my crops, where am I going to get potable water from, and where are the impacts of the modifications for me,” she said. Zamalloa is a technical expert who has been working on mining projects for decades, and still, she had to read the EIA several times to understand it because of how ambiguous and unstructured it was, she said.
“The people in this zone are not anti-mine. Why don’t you try to not rush through these consultations but rather actually have a good working relationship with the communities? There is a lack of trust, which makes sense because there isn’t any information,” she added.
Part of the problem is that community involvement in EIAs generally is already limited, said Jaskoski. Before any formal revisions are made to an EIA, the state is required to hold public hearings in the area of direct influence of a project. They are open to the public, and people can speak at these hearings. But the companies are not required to actually address the feedback, and communities don’t have any veto power, she said.
On top of this background, the rigor of the environmental oversight system has been reduced or chipped away, said Jaskoski. Starting in 2013, for more minor modifications, companies in Peru were able to complete a more streamlined application and did not require public participation. “There were always critiques of the system, and it’s just gotten worse for communities concerned with environmental oversight.”
A history of conflict
Concerns over changes to the Las Bambas EIA go back at least a decade.In 2004, the Swiss company Xstrata (then Glencore Xstrata) acquired the exploration rights for the Las Bambas mine and had the initial EIA approved in 2011. In 2014, it sold the mine to the Chinese Minerals and Metals Group (MMG). Originally, the material from Las Bambas was to be moved from Cotabambas 206 kilometers (128 miles) south via a pipeline to the Peruvian city of Espinar closer to another facility owned by the Swiss company where the materials could be processed. But when MGM took over management, it submitted a modification to the original environmental impact assessment to use road transport instead, in order for the copper concentrate to reach the Port of Matarani. On the coast it needed to travel along the southern road corridor, a 320-km (201-mile) road passing through the territories of some 37 communities between Cotabambas province in the department of Apurímac and Caylloma province in the department of Arequipa.
In September, 2015, four protestors were killed during demonstrations at Las Bambas mine in Apurimac, Peru. Image courtesy of Mining Conflict Observatory.
Not only did this exclude many communities that had been expecting compensation from the mine for the planned pipeline development, it also created additional environmental impacts from increased truck traffic, dust and related impacts. The authorities approved the EIA modification in November 2014, and the Peruvian government reclassified a series of local and regional roads as a national route in order to accommodate the influx of heavy transport from trucks. This was criticized because of alleged irregularities in the process, sparking distrust in a population that had high expectations of the promised benefits. Since then, the company has been continuously brought into the spotlight due to widespread protests around the mine and along the proposed transport route.
“Since 2015 until now, nothing has improved at all. We want them to annul the fourth [amendment] and do another proper analysis with proper details,” said Contreras from the Cotabambas Defence Front. “We want the project to be an alliance. But we haven’t seen any support until this point.”
Since 2015, the mine has faced frequent protests, which at times turned deadly, in some cases pushing the government to declare a state of emergency in the region in 2015, 2018 and 2022. Regular protests along the road used to transport the heavy metals have erupted since 2016 over environmental impacts and lack of compensation. At the end of 2021, a blockade in Chumbivilcas, 200 km (124 mi) from the mine, stopped operations in Las Bambas for several weeks, causing losses of $9.5 million each day. In 2022, communities blocked the ore transport road, demanding improved living conditions, and members of the Fuerabamba and Huancuire community in the Challhuahuacho district protested on the mining property itself, alleging noncompliance with social investment commitments. In 2022, the company reported that it had lost 400 days of transportation since 2016, when it began operations.
Contreras said the organizations want to escalate the matter above local politics, going as far as the Chinese government or international organizations. “Now, we are trying to vary our strategies to get to people who really can decide, who can be an alliance with us.”
Mongabay reached out to MMG and SENACE for comments but received no reply.
Banner image: Work on the Las Bambas mine in Peru. (Photo via Wikimedia)
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This article was originally published on Mongabay
