Glencore-Antapaccay mine in Peru seeks to displace communities without consultation, faces challenges in court and fines for contamination
Blog by Thomas Niederberger, CooperAccion.
Spanish version, here
Once considered as worst-company-of-the-sector, Glencore has done considerable investments on improving its image. The company claims it adheres to a long list of sustainability and human rights standards. However, at its Antapaccay mine in the Peruvian province of Espinar, it keeps denying a long-proven contamination problem and uses highly problematic procedures for land acquisition. Two ongoing court cases and a million-dollar fine are testimony to serious problems that could become much worse with the planned mine expansion.
“It’s a really simple project”, said Jon Evans, Glencore’s head of industrial copper, during an investor call on the 3rd of December last year. “We're looking at as quick as possible to shovel – shovel, shovel, shovel”. The Antapaccay expansion project, with two new pits in the Coroccohuayco area, is the centre piece of an ambitious growth strategy to take advantage of the high copper demand and record prizes, with the first mined copper promised for 2029. Together with the acquisition of another copper deposit close-by, the Quechuas project, which can be connected to the existing installations, Glencore plans to almost double output and keep mining in Espinar for another 40 years.
What Evans forgot to mention, is the people who are living there, except for this: “we're in the process of land acquisitions - that's moving along really well”. Then, the presentation focussed on geology and engineering. Interestingly, in the whole presentation the name of the Espinar province was not mentioned. Instead, in an apparent rebranding attempt, Glencore executives spoke of the “Antapaccay district”, which does not exist as an administrative entity in Peru.
The Espinar province is ancestral home to the indigenous, Quechua-speaking K’ana people. Their communities have strongly protected collective ownership rights and a proud history of struggle against foreign oppressors, including repeated uprisings against the mine. Today, they are also highly fragmented and intimidated due to many years of the socially corrosive “divide-and-rule” applied by Antapaccay’s community relations department. There are evident inequalities in the distribution of benefits: whilst some people profit financially, others remain in extreme poverty, without running water or electricity, and their livestock dies from contaminated pastures.
And, while the state is carrying out a consultation process with some communities, the two communities who are most directly affected – Pacopata and Huini Coroccohuayco – are excluded from it (some of the background is explained in this Oxfam report). A perfect recipe for socio-political chaos with endless cycles of social discontent.
It’s hard to tell how well the negotiations are really going with these two communities, who are the collective owners of the area destined for the new mining pits. Rumours proliferate about the amounts offered as compensation. The company treats the process as a simple contract negotiation of private character, while the communities apparently feel intimidated to not seek support from NGO advisors. There are no independent observers or government agencies involved. The negotiations thus happen under very asymmetric power relations, whereby the communities lack basic understanding of the extension project and its impacts.
In Glencore’s response to a report by Oxfam and CooperAccion, we find some exceedingly weak language about the land acquisition process: it says that communities have been "informed" about the project, and that it was agreed with them to enter into a "dialogue process that respects traditional organizational structures". There is no admission of the fact that two entire communities have to be displaced, accounting for roughly 300 families or 1200 individuals.
According to the Internacional Finance Corporation’s (IFC) Performance Standards on indigenous peoples and resettlements, which Glencore claims to follow, community members of Pacopata and Huini Coroccohuayco cannot be treated as simple landowners who may sell their land at whatever price they accept in secret negotiations. They are holders of collective, indigenous rights, which means that their livelihoods, including cultural and spiritual values, need to be compensated and restored integrally, in equal or better conditions, elsewhere. It is worth emphasizing that the IFC's standards were created precisely to curb bad practices in the displacement of communities, similar to those we see in this case.
Pacopata and Huini Coroccohuayco have launched a constitutional protection request (demanda de amparo) already in 2019 to demand a proper prior informed consultation process. In the hearings before the second instance, the Cusco high court, Glencore’s lawyers argued that Peruvian legislation does not require to hold consultations based on the Environmental Impact Assessments. They even refused to give clear answers about the number of people who have to be displaced. Sadly, a majority of the judges went with the company’s argument, and the claimants have appealed to the Supreme Court, which could take years to take up the case again.
Meanwhile, another group of communities located a few kilometres downstream has been excluded from the ongoing prior consultation. Among them is the municipal capital of Pallpata, with a population of about 5000, just outside of what was defined as the “direct influence area” of the Coroccohuayco project. In January, these communities issued a statement demanding the suspension of the pending approval of the Modification of the Environmental Impact Assessment, and their full inclusion in the consultation process as directly affected communities. Ignoring their well-founded position will be impossible, and rushing things through is not going to help.
Following international standards and Glencore’s own corporate policies, the Peruvian government’s requirements for a prior consultation process are not the only guidance here. Ultimately, the company must ensure that all right- and stakeholders who will be affected by the project are duly consulted. If national regulations are weaker than international ones – as is the case here – the company must adhere to the latter.
A million-dollar fine and court case for contamination
A second legal case against Glencore concerns the communities affected by contamination from the over 40-years of copper mining in Espinar. The constitutional protection request (demanda de amparo) is brought forward by the civil association “Plataforma de Afectados por Metales Toxicos de Espinar, Cusco” (PAMETEC) and the indigenous community of Huisa against Glencore-Antapaccay and several government agencies in charge for securing a healthy environment. Since May of 2025, the hearing at the Espinar province court has been postponed already 5 times, and finally began on the 8th of April. The entire hearing was dominated by Antapaccay’s lawyer opposing the participation of independent experts on the side of the claimants, and a new date was programmed for the 23rd of April.
There is strong proof that the mine is responsible for the serious contamination problem in Espinar. In October 2025, Glencore was fined over 1.6 million USD (5.5 million soles) by the Peruvian government’s environmental monitoring and enforcement agency OEFA, for the failure to prevent and mitigate air pollution from dust at the southern pit of its Antapaccay mine – among the highest environmental fines issued by Peruvian authorities ever. The fine is based on the findings of an extensive causality study that the agency undertook in 2022, which is detailed again in a 290-page substantiation document (see here).
However, the air pollution is just one component analysed in the six extensive OEFA studies, next to water (underground and surface), soil, flora and fauna, all of which combined reach the same conclusion: the long-known heavy metals contamination problem in Espinar has its origin in the copper mine (see CooperAccion’s analysis of OEFA’s findings here, and here).
The OEFA studies’ findings could have been an opportunity for Glencore to practice some state-of-the-art crisis communication, admit to some problems and promise to look into it. Instead, the company chose to double down with its long-dismissed fairy tale of blaming “natural mineralisation”. To make things worse, company representatives are smearing the reputation of the OEFA agency by alleging methodological errors in its studies.
At the last AGM in May 2025, Glencore’s president of the board Kalidas Madhavpeddi, himself peddled the “natural mineralisation” excuse. And we find it again in Glencore’s response to the FairFinance report “Financing critical minerals but failing critical safeguards”. The report features Antapaccay as an example of bad practice with regard to mining for transition minerals (see page 43). Glencore hides behind phrasings like “in accordance with applicable regulations”, its own environmental monitoring (which is not publicly available), and reviews of the OEFA studies commissioned by the company from anonymous researchers of two Peruvian universities, which supposedly point to methodological deficiencies of the studies; however, Glencore refuses to share these reports, making it impossible to evaluate the validity of their arguments.
Contrary to the doubts peddled by Glencore, OEFA’s work was called “one of the most comprehensive and thorough environmental assessments this reviewer has encountered” in an independent review by Prof. Bernhard Wehrli. With over 40 years of experience studying water quality on four continents, Wehrli is professor emeritus of aquatic chemistry at the Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollution Dynamics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich – an eminent institution which consistently scores among the top-10 universities in the world.
With regard to the two OEFA studies on water contamination (Informe 00095 and 00144), Prof. Wehrli finds that “documentation of the study sites, sampling procedures, analytical methods and data analysis shows high professional and scientific standards,” and “allow drawing cause-effect relations between mining activities in the area and mining-related water pollution”. On the key question in OEFA's analysis, whether there is a causal relationship between mining activities and water pollution, Prof. Wehrli states that: “The detailed information available in Informe 00095 and 00144 forces this review to answer with a clear yes.”
“A really simple project”, seriously?
The start of extraction at Coroccohuayco by end of 2029, as announced during Glencore’s investor call in December, seems highly unlikely to happen. Leaving investors in the dark about the real challenges is certainly a high-risk strategy itself. The company may find itself soon in a situation where delays have to be justified, while building enormous internal pressures to speed up processes can lead to bad decisions.
A realisation may have settled in at Glencore’s Zug HQ that a change in attitude is needed. Recent moves show that the company suddenly is willing to enter into a re-negotiation of the Convenio Marco framework agreement with the province of Espinar, giving in to a longstanding popular demand. However, after years of bad-faith negotiations in Espinar, it is hard to trust their intention. Some further steps should be taken by the company:
- Follow your own commitments and make sure everyone, from top to field staff, understands what they are and how to implement them.
- Recognize damages. Offer serious compensation packages, medical and psychological support to people who can no longer live safely and practice agriculture on their contaminated lands, so that they can move elsewhere if they choose to do so.
- Show monitoring data. Take the OEFA findings serious and make the necessary investments to curtail the sources of contamination in accordance with the best available technological and engineering solutions. Be fully transparent and provide public access to environmental monitoring data in real time via a dedicated website, like Glencore is doing in Canada.
- Respect rightsholders. Enter into a public consultation process with all the affected communities, and foremost, with Pacopata and Huini Coroccohuayco who are to give up their entire ancestral territory for the expansion. Offer them compensation agreements with a resettlement plan that guarantees their long-term survival as collectivities.
- Tolerate civic space and critical voices. Issue clear internal directives and public statements to make sure that civil society organizations, independent observers and legal advisors have access to all relevant information and negotiations, with zero tolerance for harassments and defamations against human rights defenders.
Some of these steps have their cost and may not be easy, but they are necessary conditions to improve the relationship with the people of Espinar, after years of mismanagement. It remains largely true that the Espinar population is not fundamentally opposed to the mine, so there is actually a good base to find agreements - if approached in good faith and the willingness to offer a fair share of the expected record profits from the copper boom. Not “really simple”, and the shovel may have to wait a bit longer, but if you want to invest for another 40 years, that’s what it takes.
Thomas Niederberger, CooperAccion
