Mining legal framework, royalties and investment viability
- Sectors and investment opportunities
- Mining, and its regulatory risk
- Audited
The Mining Act, Decree 48-97, sets statutory royalties at 1% (0.5% to the State and 0.5% to the municipality). Voluntary royalties were agreed from 2012 and in 2014 a reform to raise them to 5–10% failed (Plaza Pública). There is no citable count of licenses in force: the count of 1 reconnaissance / 117 exploration / 275 exploitation attributed to ACAFREMIN was withdrawn in the audit of 19 August 2026 because that PDF is a regional report on the western highlands with a Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM) cut-off of March 2013; the current mining cadastre must be requested from MEM. The dossier's honest conclusion: metal mining carries high social-license risk; the three flagship projects (Escobal, Cerro Blanco, Fénix) have each gone through suspension, annulment or sanctions, and it is not a routine entry sector for investors without an appetite for legal and social risk.
The research is written in English; quoted figures, source names and the titles of legal instruments stay in the language their source published them in.
Figures
- Statutory mining royalty
- 1% (0.5% State + 0.5% municipality)
- Voluntary royalties
- agreed since 2012
- Failed royalty reform
- proposed 5–10%
- Mining licenses in force
- no citable figure (previous count withdrawn in audit)
Caveat
Sources
Organizations named in the answer
Related records
This layer is research: read from public sources by the archive's own team, every claim cited with the date it was consulted, and audited where it is marked so. It has not entered the verified store — no figure here was fetched back from its source or stamped with a retrieval time — so it wears no red provenance numeral and never mixes with the verified figures.