The Road to Copper

In Peru, a mining corridor slices through communities

Dec 01, 2022

Climate technologies require enormous amounts of metal. I’m Ian Morse, and this is Green Rocks, a newsletter that doesn’t want dirty mining to ruin clean energy. News and Reads at the bottom.

In southern Peru, more than two miles above sea level into the Andes Mountains, a dirt road begins its journey to the coast. It stretches through dozens of communities – hamlets, peasant settlements, Indigenous groups – and passes three copper mines that have helped make Peru the second largest producer of the metal. After stopping at processing plants, the full path from mine to port extends hundreds of miles. Most refined and raw ore goes to China, the dominant player in this industry for a crucial metal in electrification.

At the road’s inception lies Las Bambas, a large open-pit copper and molybdenum mine owned by Chinese company MMG. Moving downhill, the road quickly becomes busy. From MMG alone, 250 trucks make roundtrips every day. It’s unpaved, and potholes spread. Dust hovers around the road and blows to nearby settlements and farmland. Locals complain of respiratory infections and smothered vegetable and fish farms.

“Next to this road live people. They have animals and crops. The transportation of the minerals is disturbing the way of life of these Indigenous peoples. They need natural resources to live. They need their water, their soil, their air, their cattle,” says Leonidas Wiener Ramos, a consultant with CooperAcción, an NGO that works with communities confronting mining companies to boost awareness about peoples’ rights and protections.

Trucks along the mining corridor. via teleSUR

Since 2016, communities have blocked the road dozens of times, demanding that mining companies address the air pollution and distribute more benefits to locals. Two protesters were shot dead before the mine started up. Another died in 2016. Different communities block different parts of the road at different times, creating chaos for mining operations. Police are often sent in, Ramos says, and clashes have flared up almost every year since opening. In April, the national government declared a state of emergency after indigenous communities had camped out within company territory for a week.

In September, an MMG executive says since the mine opened, these protests have interrupted 528 days of operation. The same month, the company announced it would invest $2 billion to quadruple output by 2030. Las Bambas produces 2% of global supply of copper, and up to a fifth of Peru’s contribution. On Monday, MMG said it had resumed production but transportation of ore was still impeded by a conflict further down the road.

MMG and other mining companies along the route have denied to Reuters that their operations have increased air and water pollution, attributing any harmful mineral content to normal background levels.

The mine’s previous owner had previously planned to build a pipeline that would transport concentrate 200 kilometers to refineries further south. However, around the time that ownership transferred, the plan was scraped in favor of using a road that hadn’t yet existed. Peru’s government reclassified that road to fit the definition for industry, an act beset with irregularities, Ramos said. The country’s rise to copper titan has coincided with a roughly decade-long political crisis that has left government institutions unstable.

“We have four people dead from social conflicts related to Las Bambas. We have a lot of people prosecuted as a consequence of these protests,” says Ramos, who has also worked for the mining ministry.

“It’s about how we as a nation create good governance between mining companies and the people. It’s important to create a good balance between the welfare of the people and the wealth of the company, and the taxes we can get from these companies. We haven’t reached that balance yet.”

The Las Bambas area. via China Dialogue.

With the expansion of the mine, additional problems are cropping up. MMG is seeking to purchase land for another mine pit, and Ramos says it is using its weight to set communities against each other. The company may offer higher prices to some communities for their land, or bypass the traditional councils that would establish consent. Local officials often help negotiate or approve these agreements, but MMG’s leverage in the area has disrupted a balance of power. That can mean, for example, that agreements are made in Spanish, a language some groups say members do not know.

One Indigenous community, Huancuire, has become one of the most vocal to demand changes from MMG. Last Green Rocks, I included a story that they proposed to become shareholders in the mine, a benefit-sharing tool that has been used and proposed in other areas. Here, Huancuire said it would be based on their concept of “waqui”, whereby all parties benefit. New far-left officials elected last month in districts surrounding the mine could pose more hope, with at least one saying they hope work more closely with communities to end conflicts.

In Ramos’ experience, many solutions have been proposed, but they often stray into wishful idealism. Most directly, he said, there could be another way to transport the minerals, such as a train or pipeline.

“There are a lot of things we need to change – not only in regulatory terms, but also in the way we respect these people and communities and their way of life,” says Ramos. His reports on Las Bambas, based on his master’s thesis and subsequent work, are available here and here. China Dialogue’s recent piece on Las Bambas has more detail.