Peru's Las Bambas copper mine restarts after 51-day outage

On June 9, 2022, a group of Peruvian indigenous communities agreed to temporarily lift a protest against MMG Ltd's Las Bambas copper mine, which forced the company to cease operations for more than 50 days, the longest forced outage in the mine's history. 

The mediation will last for 30 days, during which time the community and mine will negotiate, according to minutes of the meeting signed Thursday afternoon. 

Las Bambas will immediately seek to restart copper production, although executives have warned that it will take days to return to full production after a prolonged shutdown. 

Peru is the world's second-largest copper producer, and Chinese-owned Las Bambas is one of the world's largest producers of the red metal. The protests and shutdown pose a major problem for President Pedro Castillo's government, which has been struggling for weeks to broker a reopening deal under pressure from economic growth. Las Bambas alone account for 1% of Peru's GDP. 

The protests were launched in mid-April by the Fuerabamba and Huancuire communities, who felt that Las Bambas had not delivered on all the promises made to them. Both communities sold land to the company to make way for the mine, which opened in 2016 but has experienced several outages due to social conflict. 

Under the agreement, Fuerabamba will no longer protest in the mining area. During the mediation, Las Bambas will also halt construction of its new Chalcobamba open-pit mine, which will be located on land previously owned by Huncuire. 

At the meeting, community leaders also demanded jobs for community members and a reshuffle of mine executives. For now, Las Bambas has agreed to "evaluate and restructure executives involved in negotiations with the local community".