And what the press is not telling the world

Updated  June 5  2025

Carlos Zorrilla (originally published January 2023)

Four mining companies have tried and failed to develop the Llurimagua mining concession.

The mining concession of nearly 5,000 hectares known as Llurimagua is located in the Toisán mountain range in northwestern Ecuador, encompassing primary and secondary forests and hundreds of endangered species..  In addition, it is within the buffer zone of one of the most important protected areas on the planet, the Cotacachi Cayapas National Park.

Before Codelco acquired the concession, without a public auction, as required by law, and without the Ecuadorian state consulting with the communities, an obligation clearly set out in the Ecuadorian Constitution, the mining concession was in the hands of, first, a subsidiary of the giant Mitsubishi Corporation in the 1990s, and in the 2000s of a Canadian company. Both had to abandon the project due to strong resistance from the communities and organizations of the Intag area and the rest of the country (see  the documentary Under Rich Earth). 

This resistance is still very much alive, and it was what forced the government of President Rafael Correa, in May 2014, to use hundreds of elite police and military personnel to violently enter the mining concession. There was no other way. It is, in short, a mining project that was born illegitimate and is plagued with problems.

A must to keep in mind is that, since 1995 the people of Intag have stopped six mining companies from opening a mine in its territory (Bishimetals, Copper Mesa, Cornerstone, BHP, ENAMI EP and Codelco). The mining camps of three of them have been burned to the ground. Not an easy place to set up a mining project

International Arbitration(s) Related to The Project

In 2021 Codelco took Ecuador to the International Chamber of Commerce, based in France, to try to  force it to abide by an international treaty which brought Codelco to Ecuador. Then, in 2022 Codelco went to the much more powerful  International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, the World Bank-established mechanism to resolve international investment disputes. The issue of international arbitration is not new for this copper mining project.  In 2011, the Canadian-owned Copper Mesa Corporation sued Ecuador for breach of the bi-national investment protection agreement. This is the only mining project in Ecuador that has been taken to international tribunals on three different occasions.  To date (June 2025) neither the 2021 or 2022 arbitration have been resolved.

The Gemelas Waterfalls in the middle of the mining concession and

community reserve used for tourism- just two of many waterfalls.

Credit: Carlos Zorrilla

No Mining Since 2018

The mining project has been on standby since October of 2018 when Codelco withdrew its drilling rigs and abandoned the area pending approval of the second phase of exploration. And, six years and some months later, it is still waiting.  The reasons, apart from civil society opposition, are due to several other factors, most important is having lost a major court case in March of 2024 in which Ecuador’s Constitutional Court agreed with a lower court decision that declared the project violated the Constitutional rights to environmental consultation and the Rights of Nature 

 Weighing in on Codelco’s headache, a report by the State Comptroller General’s Office and the Ombudsman’s Office in 2019 detected dozens of irregularities and illegalities. One of the irregularities was enough to call for the suspension of the mining concession. . But that is not all…

Biodiversity Issues

The site where Codelco is exploring is rich in primary cloud forests; considered a fragile ecosystem in Ecuador’s Constitution. The forests are also part of the world’s most important and threated Biodiversity Hotspot: the Tropical Andes. Ecuador’s montane forests, where the concession is located,  are home to many more endangered species per square kilometers than their better known lower Amazonian cousins. This holds true no less true than in the 4,929 hectare Llurimagua mining concession with its great altitudinal range.

Thanks to support from the grass-roots NGO DECOIN, the list of endangered species found in the mining area has grown every year- it now stands at 101. Several of the species are critically endangered, including one of the world’s most endangered primates, the brown-headed spider monkey. Two frog species are on the brink, including the Longnose Harlequin, and a new species to science (Ectopoglossus sp.). They have only been reported within the mining concession and nowhere else in the world.  Until they were rediscovered, the Harlequin was considered extinct. Experts believe that several other “extinct” species will eventually be found in the area.

The threat to the likely extinction of two species of frogs has been gathering support from all kinds of actors, including the activist-movie actor Leonoardo DiCaprio, who has tweeted and Instagrammed four times to support the fight to save these, and the dozens of other species in danger of extinction. Report on the struggle against Codelco has also been reported in The Guardian newspaper, Mongabay, and The Ecologist.

Jaguars

In 2024 and again in 2025 jaguars were filmed by trail cameras within Codelco’s mining concession. They had not been seen in the area in more than 15 years.  Jaguars on this side of the Andes (Western) are considered endangered. Besides Jaguars, another endangered species in the IUCN list is the Spectacled Bear. But there are also anteaters, sloths, toucans, a critically endangered fish species, as well as orchids on the brink of extinction. To name a few of the 101 species on the IUCN and Ecuadorian Red lists in dan dander of extinction.

Other problems in sight

Another “inconvenient issue” for the company and, especially for the company’s investors, is that the Cotacachi county government, where the mining concession is located, has passed several environmental ordinances to protect its enviable biodiversity and abundant water resources.  The 

Cotacachi government was the first subnational government Latin America to pass such a law. The Ordinance that declared the entire County as Ecological, in force since 2000, imposes restrictions on land use, which would prevent mining.  In 2018, another county government legislation was approved, the Intag-Toisan Municipal Conservation and Sustainable Use Area (Acusmit).  The law, which is also currently in force, zoned the entire territory of Intag, and excludes mining. 

                                 Cloud forests within the Llurimagua mining concession. Credit: Carlos Zorrilla

Community Watershed Reserves

A bigger problem for CODELCO or any other mining company for that matter,  might be that Intag has 38 community and local government owned watershed reserves protecting 12,000 hectares of forests and wildlife spread out throughout Intag. These sites not only protect the area’s precious cloud forests and endangered species, but also provide safe drinking water to thousands of inhabitants. Water for human consumption as well as agriculture and tourism have priority of use over mining, according to the Constitution. There are also several legally protected forests (Bosques Protectores), and some known as Socio Bosques, which cannot be degraded. 

It is remarkable how much Codelco has kept from investors and its majority owners, the people of Chile. In most instances, the company would be tossed out of the stock exchanges it trades under for withholding material information from its investors. And, as sleazy mining companies are wont to do, they are wildly inflating their ore deposit after 4 years of exploration. Unless the ore body is independently verified, their estimation is pure fantasy.

The Environmental Impact Assessment

To begin to understand the opposition to what would be one of the world’s most destructive mines, it is necessary to understand the environmental and social impacts identified for a small open-pit copper mine by Japanese experts working for Japan Mining and Minerals in the 1990s. Despite being based on a copper deposit 2% the size of what Codelco’s unproven claims the Llurimagua deposit could contain, the Japanese scientists predicted that four communities would have to be relocated and that crime would increase. The mine and facilities, the study goes on, would cause massive deforestation, which would cause the area’s climate to dry up, and rivers would be contaminated with lead, arsenic, cadmium and other heavy metals. The scientist also predicted that mining would impact the habitat of endangered species, as well as the Cotacachi Cayapas National Park. 

Then there are the popular referendums

One of the things that some of the reporting got right is the fear companies have of the effect of the growing popularity of referendums to decide the future of mining projects. Both local governments and even civil society are making use of referendums to ask the local populations to decide on whether they would like to allow mining in their jurisdictions. If the results from Cuenca, Ecuador’s third largest city, is a sign of where this initiative is heading, mining is in deep trouble in the country. In that referendum, held in February of 2021, 80% of the population voted against mining. The following referendum took place in the Quito Municipal District in early 2023, which includes a large swathe of the forested region of Northwest Ecuador, and which lies close to the Intag area. Mining was resoundingly defeated in the referendum.

Llurimagua’s Deadly Copper

Chile’s copper is getting more and more expensive to mine. There are several reasons for this, but it’s mainly due to lower metal content of the copper in the ore bodies, and the ore is getting deeper to get at, which means it is getting more expensive to access. The arsenic content of most of Codelco’s mines is also rising. Water is also a huge problem where Codelco gets most of its copper; the Atacama desert, the driest in the world. They will face similar issues with the arsenic and water in the Llurimagua project. Ironically, whereas water scarcity is a huge problem for the company in Chile, in Llurimagua it´s the opposite. In Llurimagua the issue with the water is that it rains too much; between 3000 and 5000 millimeters annually. So much rain combined with very steep valleys makes mining not only more expensive, but much more dangerous and more subject to natural disasters. On the other hand, Ecuador’s ore deposits are as rich, or richer, in arsenic than Codelco’s ore deposits. One proposed gold mine in the south of the country (Loma Larga), for example, predicts its gold-copper concentrate will have 10% arsenic. This not only lowers the price per ton of the concentrate, but more importantly, very few smelters are willing to process copper with an arsenic content above 0,5%(.

Llurimagua was Codelcos’ first real attempt at what they see at internationalization of its operation. Win or lose ,the arbitration gambit has turned that dream into a resounding failure.  And, hopefully, it should also serve as a lesson for other transnationals that think that they can mine wherever they like with only with the support of the national government. Especially in such a megadiverse country in terms of species and cultures, and with such a long history of resistance to extractive projects (in 2025, DECOIN celebrated 30 years of resistance to mining in Intag). And, no one is giving up.

I could highlight many other difficulties Codelco or any other mining company will encounter if it decides to impose a mining project in Intag. One worth mentioning is the plan of presenting the copper dug from this biodiverse site as environmentally and socially friendly. For more, I recommend you check out  Twenty-four reasons why  Codelco shouldn’t mess with Llurimagua’s Intag mining project

For more information see:  www.decoin.org

www.codelcoecuador.com

Mongabay article  In Ecuador, communities protecting a ‘terrestrial coral reef’ face a mining giant