What is the draft at Santo Tomás de Castilla and how overloaded is the port?

Santo Tomás de Castilla's operating draft is 10.5 m (2026), recently improved by dredging. Per La Hora, the port was designed for 1.2 million tonnes a year and processes around 15 million with no significant expansion in four decades; official statistics do not support that second figure: the CPN's Informe Estadístico Portuario records 8.76 million tonnes at Santo Tomás in 2025 and a peak of 9.96 million in 2021. The operational crisis of the fourth quarter of 2025 is said to have caused losses estimated at between US$38.6 million and US$82.7 million in that quarter alone.