Panama: The Mining Moratorium and the Pending Decision on Cobre Panamá

Panama is the region's clearest case that regulatory risk is not a discount in the rate: it is binary. In 2023 the country shut a mine contributing more than 5% of its output and prohibited metallic mining by law. Three years on, the decision about what to do with that mine is still pending.

What the law says today

Law 407 of 2023 established an indefinite moratorium on granting concessions for metallic mining exploration and extraction across the national territory. It is not a reversible administrative suspension: it is legislation, and it has survived constitutional review. The Supreme Court rejected a challenge to five of its articles — a decision published in April 2025, with an eight-justice majority — after rejecting an earlier challenge in March 2024.

Separately, the Minera Panamá concession contract approved by Law 406 of 2023 was declared unconstitutional by the same Court in November 2023. That ruling is what stopped the operation.

Cobre Panamá: where the decision sits

The mine has been stopped since 28 November 2023. The government commissioned a comprehensive audit, carried out by SGS Panama Control Services, whose final report was delivered to the Ministry of Environment on 19 June 2026. The audit assessed 370 commitments from the Category III environmental impact study across four components — legal and fiscal, environmental performance, technical and operational, and risks and liabilities — and reported overall compliance of 87.73%, with the technical-operational component at 90.20% and risks and liabilities at 81.70%. Findings include reforestation delays, deforestation beyond the authorised area, reduced sedimentation-pond capacity and monitoring gaps, all classified as remediable.

The decision rests with a ministerial commission made up of the ministers of Economy and Finance, Commerce and Industry, and Environment, which is to present a recommendation to the President. At the time of this review the commission had indicated it aimed to do so before the end of 2026, without a committed date. The President has publicly stated that the mine belongs to Panama and that, if it continues, it would be operated by the State with a technical partner — an arrangement that does not yet have legal form.

What was authorised

In April 2026 the government authorised processing of ore extracted before the shutdown, on environmental grounds: there are on the order of 38 million tonnes of exposed material in the pit whose acid drainage has to be prevented. This is not a reopening: extraction — drilling, blasting, waste movement — remains suspended. Under that authorisation the operation processed stockpiled ore, brought employment back to roughly three thousand workers and prepared concentrate shipments during 2026. The company's international arbitrations against the State are suspended, not withdrawn.

Where there is a market

Metallic mining being closed does not mean the country is. For a natural-resources and infrastructure investor the active fronts are elsewhere:

• Energy. The National Energy Secretariat ran two tenders in 2026 — one for renewable capacity and a long-term contracting auction that drew more than seventy bids, including conversion of liquid-fuel thermal plants to natural gas — and announced two more for 2027, with battery storage participating significantly for the first time. Capacity and technology requirements were expected to be published toward the end of 2026.
• Logistics and water. Water security in the Canal watershed is, in practice, the country's most important natural-resources policy, and it carries associated infrastructure with it.
• Public-private partnerships. The PPP framework is the usual route for large-scale infrastructure, and it is administered — that is, won or lost on the quality of the institutional relationship, not on the tender document.

What Panama teaches the rest of the region

Cobre Panamá had a contract, had permits and had production. What it did not have was social legitimacy sufficient to survive a political crisis, and the instrument that brought it down was not an environmental authority but a constitutional court. When we assess jurisdictional risk in Chile, Argentina or Peru, this case is the reminder that constitutional review and public acceptance of title are part of the asset's risk, not background noise.

Sources: Law 407 of 2023; La Prensa on the Supreme Court ruling; MiAmbiente, delivery of the final comprehensive audit report (19 Jun 2026); National Energy Secretariat. Last reviewed: September 2026. General information, not legal advice.