In May, BHP staked 2,713 new claims across Alaska's Kenai Peninsula and Matanuska-Susitna Borough — every single claim filed in that county that month. It was a striking single-company push in Stake & Paper's staking data, a bet on ground nobody else was bidding for. The rock, evidently, wasn't the obstacle.
Farther south, the rock was never the obstacle either. A new tally from risk consultancy Americas Market Intelligence puts a hard number on what mining executives in Latin America have spent years describing only in the abstract: above-ground risk — permitting fights, community conflict, security breakdowns — has cost or stalled more than $54 billion across the region's mining sector since 2018, according to AMI figures reported by MINING.COM. That is capital that never became a mine, a smelter or a paycheck, lost not to bad geology but to bad politics.
AMI splits the total two ways. About $38 billion comes from write-offs, legal settlements and fines — money already spent and gone. Another $16 billion sits frozen in projects delayed or halted outright, per MINING.COM. Peruvian copper projects account for roughly $7 billion of that frozen pile; three stalled Mexican projects — El Arco in Baja California, San Nicolás in Zacatecas and Cordero in Chihuahua — make up another $4 billion, each snarled in permitting. The Mining Conflicts Observatory currently tracks 284 conflicts touching 301 projects across the region, AMI notes.
The single largest line item traces back to a mountain of waste that broke loose over a decade ago. AMI values the long-term reckoning from the 2015 Fundão tailings dam collapse near Mariana, Brazil — operated by Samarco, a Vale-BHP joint venture — at $31.7 billion, the largest figure in the dataset. The dam released 50 million cubic meters of toxic iron-ore residue and killed 19 people on 5 November 2015, according to Business & Human Rights Resource Centre. The wound hasn't closed: in March 2025, 31 of 49 eligible municipalities, including Mariana itself, rejected a proposed settlement. On 3 September 2026, a Brazilian federal court convicted Samarco and three former managers over the collapse, overturning a 2024 acquittal — the first criminal conviction of a mining company and its officers tied to the disaster.
Panama shows how fast that arithmetic can turn. Cobre Panama once supplied about 5% of the country's GDP and 75% of its mineral exports, and supported roughly 54,000 jobs, according to AMI figures cited by MINING.COM. Panama's Supreme Court then unanimously declared the law behind First Quantum's mining contract unconstitutional; President Laurentino Cortizo said "the orderly and safe closure of the mine" would follow. First Quantum suspended production and put the mine into care and maintenance, writing off a project it had spent about C$10 billion building — one that had produced 112,734 tonnes of copper in the third quarter of 2023, accounting for 46% of First Quantum's overall third-quarter revenue of $2.02 billion, Yahoo Finance reported.
Peru's version plays out on a single road. MMG's Las Bambas mine has to move its concentrate along the Corredor Vial Sur, a 325-kilometre route cutting through 37 communities across four provinces, to reach the coast, per Dialogue Earth. Peru's mining union puts the cost of each blockade day at US$9.5 million; MMG says the mine has lost more than 400 days of transport to blockades since it opened in 2016. Former congressman Richard Arce estimates the surrounding region loses 3.5 million soles — about US$900,000 — for every blockaded day, in a province where Las Bambas accounts for 78% of the economy. "If you do not take the time to really engage with the community, and if you do not fulfil the promises that you make, it will come back to bite you." AMI's John Price said of the pattern.
In Colombia, the threat isn't paperwork — it's armed men underground. Zijin Mining took control of Continental Gold's Buriticá project, sitting atop more than 300 metric tons of gold, the largest known deposit in South America, when it bought 69.28% of the company's shares in 2019. Nearly 100 illegal tunnels now honeycomb the mountain. By June 2024, Zijin said it had lost control of more than 60% of the operation to informal miners who had seized or collapsed its workings, killing two employees. The company logged "2,260 explosions using improvised artifacts" and "a total of 2,450 shots fired" during confrontations in 2023 alone, Mongabay reported, and in 2024 sued Bogotá for $500 million in damages under a trade treaty. Nearby, AngloGold Ashanti has written off $98 million on its Quebradona project, stalled since 2021, with a new environmental review not due until 2027.
Chile shows the risk can catch even the biggest producers. Collahuasi — owned by Anglo American, Glencore and a Mitsui-led consortium, and the world's sixth largest copper mine, producing more than 404,000 tonnes last year — finished a seawater pipeline running nearly 200 kilometres inland to a site 4,600 metres above sea level in April, built by contractor Techint. A month later, Chile's Second Environmental Court overturned the expansion's authorization over concerns for Indigenous communities and marine life, forcing regulators to reassess the very system just completed. Manuel Viera, head of the Chilean Mining Chamber, has been pushing to overhaul the permitting rules companies blame for the delay.
Not everyone signs off on AMI's arithmetic. Juan Carlos Guajardo of Plusmining Consulting said the $54-billion figure "is broadly consistent with the scale of disruption we see across Latin America, although we have not independently verified AMI's calculation." Geopolitical specialists Eduardo Zamanillo and Marta Rivera offered a sunnier read, telling MINING.COM: "We see a region entering a potentially important new mining cycle rather than one becoming uniformly less attractive." Argentina is their exhibit: the country keeps folding projects into its Large Investment Incentive Regime, approving the Vicuña copper-gold-silver project for the scheme this year.
Investors haven't waited for the argument to settle. COPX declined 1.69% to $85.26 at Monday's close, though the copper-miner ETF remains well above where it traded across 2025, per market data — a sign that demand for the metal hasn't blinked even as its Latin American supply keeps getting tangled in court.
BHP's Alaska claims will sit through the winter untouched by lawsuits or blockades. Its counterparts across Latin America don't get that luxury. For them, the ore was always the easy part.
