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Saturday, September 12, 2026 · Guatemala CityQ7.6282 per US$+0.00%
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Back to the researchIn research — sources cited, not yet in the verified archive

In depth

The Escobal mine's suspension since 2017

Dossier
The record of foreign investment: real cases11-casos.md
Domain
Foreign investment, in figurescasos-inversion
Room
Economy/economia
Audited
Audited

Escobal's operations have been paused since 2017. The license was suspended by the 2018 ruling of the Constitutional Court, which made any restart conditional on completing prior consultation with the Xinka people under ILO Convention 169; the mine has been on care and maintenance ever since. The dossier's lesson is that a large-scale asset has gone nine years without operating because of an omitted consultation, which makes it the country's most-cited case of regulatory and social risk. The attribution of the suspension was corrected in verification against Pan American Silver's corporate page.

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

Start of the operating pausePan American Silver
20172017
Constitutional Court ruling suspending the licensePan American Silver
20182018
Years without operatinglectura del dossier
92017–2026

Caveat

the license's legal status to be confirmed with the Ministry of Energy and Mines (MEM); corporate source

Sources

Organizations named in the answer

  • Pan American SilverOwner of Escobal (it bought Tahoe Resources in February 2019): 264.5 Moz of proven and probable silver reserves, a 4,500 t/d plant, ~20 Moz a year in 2014-2017, in care and maintenance since 2017; it settled and issued a public apology in Garcia v. Tahoe (30 July 2019).Company case

Directory of organizations

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.