Southern Peru "temporarily" suspends Tía María mining project

The long-running social conflict over the $1.2 billion copper mining project Tía María reached a temporary conclusion on Friday when the Peruvian Prime Minister Pedro Cateriano told the Peruvian Congress, “Southern [Copper] accepts a pause of Tía María.” Now that the country has had a few days to digest the news of a temporary suspension, the future of the embattled mining project is even more uncertain than before.

The project’s opponents have taken President Ollanta Humala’s stance as confirmation that the project is dead, that the government does not want to risk additional violent protests. Opposition leader Héctor Becerril told El Comercio, “Now there is no chance that Tía María continues. Ollanta Humala took out the corpse. This stand by will last a year and then they’ll try to resolve it. He knows this is inevitable and it’s clear that the capitulation on Tía María now is a done deal for the government. Just like Conga, they won’t start it back up. Worse, they won’t even speak of it again.”

The general belief of the outside experts interviewed by El Comercio is that the Tía María project will not be revisited by the Humala administration. Southern Copper will need to wait for a new presidential administration before restarting its copper mining project in Arequipa.

For its part, Southern Copper issued a press release stressing that throughout the protests, the company always acted in accordance with international norms and Peruvian laws. Southern Copper clearly does not want to suffer from ongoing negative repercussions of the failed project, as the company has other active mining interests in Peru.

In other unrelated mining news, approximately 20,000 unionized mine workers in Peru, members of the National Mining Federation, organized a national strike on Monday. The country’s silver, tin, and iron production was affected by the strike, while copper and gold production was largely unharmed. The workers went on strike to try to pressure the government to greater restrict firings and the use of contract workers by mining companies.