Cobre Panamá Mine: The 2023 Closure, the Donoso Rainforest, and a Conservation Turning Point

What the Cobre Panamá mine is

Cobre Panamá is an open-pit copper mine in the Donoso district of Colón province, on Panama’s Caribbean slope, and at the scale it reached it was the largest copper mine in Central America and one of the largest single copper operations anywhere in the region. The mine is operated by Minera Panamá S.A. (MPSA), a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company First Quantum Minerals, and it sat within a tract of lowland rainforest in a country whose economy and identity are otherwise bound up with conservation, the canal, and the protected-area estate described across this site’s nature pages. The geographic detail matters: this was not a mine on already-cleared industrial land but a large industrial operation dropped into closed tropical forest, which is the core of why it became the environmental flashpoint it did.

The mine’s economic weight was part of what made the confrontation so sharp. While Cobre Panamá was running it was a major asset of First Quantum Minerals, one of the world’s larger copper producers^[2], and at its peak represented on the order of 5% of Panama’s GDP^[1], so the question the mine forced, whether to accept a very large open-pit copper operation in the rainforest in exchange for revenue and jobs, was always going to be a contest between a concentrated, quantifiable economic interest and a dispersed, harder-to-quantify environmental one.

The 2023 crisis

The mine’s arc toward closure began in October 2023, when Panama’s National Assembly approved a revised concession contract for the operation as Bill 1100 and signed it into Law 406^[2]. The contract extended the mining concession by another twenty years (with an option to extend further), and that extension is what lit the fuse: the prospect of two more decades of open-pit copper mining in the Donoso rainforest produced some of the largest nationwide protests Panama had seen in years^[1]. Demonstrators blocked roads and shipping routes, and the movement drew in a broad cross-section of Panamanian society united less by party politics than by a single demand that the mine be shut.

The legal response followed fast. Alongside the protests, the legislature passed a metallic-mining moratorium (Bill 1110, on 3 November 2023)^[2], and the ultimate decision was handed to the courts. On 28 November 2023 the Plenary Session of Panama’s Supreme Court of Justice unanimously declared Law 406 unconstitutional, and President Cortizo then announced that the mine would close^[2]. Reporting at the time captured the result plainly: Minera Panamá, the First Quantum subsidiary, would have to close the Cobre Panamá mine after the country’s highest court unanimously ruled that the terms of its contract were unconstitutional^[1]. That ruling is the pivot of the whole story: it converted a contested industrial project into an operation under a judicial order to shut down.

Why a court closed a mine

The constitutional defect the Court identified was, at its core, about how the contract came into being. The reasoning turned on the procedure for awarding the concession: the argument the Court accepted was that, because the government had not carried out a competitive tendering process before awarding the contract to Minera Panamá, the concession was unconstitutional on its face^[1]. That is a procedural-constitutional finding rather than an environmental one in strict legal terms, but it cannot be separated from the environmental politics that forced the case onto the Court’s docket: without the protests, there is no political crisis, and without the crisis, the constitutional challenge does not arrive at a unanimous decision in a matter of weeks.

The legal chain is worth stating plainly because it is unusually complete. A concession contract (Law 406) signed in October 2023; mass protests through October and November; a legislative metallic-mining moratorium (Bill 1110) on 3 November; a unanimous Supreme Court ruling that Law 406 was unconstitutional on 28 November; and a presidential order to close the mine^[2]. In the space of roughly ten weeks, Central America’s largest copper mine went from holding a fresh twenty-year contract to operating under a closure order. That sequence is the reason the Cobre Panamá case is treated as a landmark in Latin American environmental law, not merely because a mine closed, but because it closed through a constitutional mechanism activated by sustained public pressure.

The environmental case

The environmental case against the mine was always the substantive fuel of the protest, even when the legal hook was procedural. The operation’s footprint sat in the Donoso rainforest, part of the broad Caribbean-slope forest corridor that links into Panama’s protected-area network and the wider Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, and the concern was that a large open-pit mine (with its forest clearance, its water consumption, and its tailings) was exactly the wrong kind of land use for that landscape. Protesters argued that Minera Panamá’s heavy water use, and alleged contamination of that water, was directly hurting local ecosystems^[1], and the reporting noted that the operation was seen as exacerbating a then-current drought and threatening migratory birds^[1]. The rainforest-ecology page sets the wider context for why dropping an open-pit mine into a functioning tropical forest is ecologically costly in ways that reclamation bonds do not fully repair.

The government’s own response to those concerns was to commission an independent environmental audit. The Ministerio de Ambiente (MiAmbiente) commissioned an integral audit of the Cobre Panamá project, carried out by the auditing firm SGS, whose 2026 final integral-audit report was delivered across fifteen tomos and twenty-one annexes covering the project’s ISA and seguimiento (follow-up) reporting across the 2020–2025 period^[3]. That audit is the authoritative record of what the mine’s environmental performance actually was across its operating life, and it is the document any serious assessment of the mine’s impact now has to engage with. The fact that the audit runs to fifteen volumes is itself an indicator of the scale and complexity of the environmental questions the operation raised.

Where the closure stands now

A court-ordered mine closure is not a light switch, and the practical reality is that Cobre Panamá has spent the period since late 2023 in a managed limbo rather than fully dismantled. The form that has taken is a formal preservation-and-safe-management plan, approved by the Panamanian government in May 2025, which governs how the idle operation is maintained, its environmental risks controlled, and its eventual disposition handled^[2]. That plan exists precisely because simply abandoning a large mine with tailings facilities and worked-out pits would create its own environmental disaster, so the closure has to be executed carefully and over time even after the decision to shut is final.

The dispute has also moved into international arbitration, with First Quantum pursuing claims against Panama over the cancellation of the concession^[2]. That arbitration is the commercial afterlife of the closure, the mechanism by which the company seeks compensation for an asset written off by a constitutional ruling, and it means the Cobre Panamá story is not yet fully closed in a legal or financial sense even though the operational decision to shut has been made. For anyone tracking the case, the two threads to watch are the implementation of the May 2025 preservation plan on the ground and the progress of the international arbitration on paper.

Why this matters for conservation in Panama

The Cobre Panamá case matters beyond the fate of a single mine because it established, in the clearest possible way, where Panama’s political and constitutional center of gravity sits when a large extractive project collides with its forest estate. A country that runs a freshwater canal dependent on a forested watershed, that has invested in a large protected-area estate, and that has built a global reputation on the strength of the Smithsonian’s tropical research is not a country whose public will quietly accept an open-pit copper mine in its rainforest, and in 2023 that proposition was tested and confirmed. The mine’s closure is, in that sense, a defining data point about what conservation means in Panama: not a fringe environmental preference but a mainstream political position with constitutional teeth.

The case also illustrates the recurring tradeoff at the heart of tropical conservation everywhere, just rendered at unusual scale. Copper is a real and growing input to the global economy, and the revenue and jobs a mine of this size generates are real too; the counterweight is that the Donoso forest, once cleared and converted, is not replaceable on any human timescale, and the water and biodiversity impacts persist after the mine closes. Panama came down on the conservation side of that tradeoff in this case, and the conservation-organizations page describes the NGO and institutional infrastructure (ANCON, MarViva, and the rest) that helped build the public case which produced that outcome.

What the closure settled

If you are trying to understand modern Panama, the Cobre Panamá mine is one of the events that defines the country’s current era, alongside the canal’s drought-driven draft limits and the Darién migration surge, and it is the one that most directly turned on conservation. If you are a visitor or a reader interested in Panama’s nature, the mine’s location in the Donoso rainforest is the point of contact between the country’s extractive economy and its forest heritage, and the closure is the reason that forest is not, for now, being converted into a larger pit. And if you are watching the case develop, the two questions to track are concrete: whether the May 2025 preservation plan is genuinely controlling the site’s environmental risks during the shutdown, and how the international arbitration between First Quantum and Panama resolves the financial aftermath. The Cobre Panamá story is not yet finished, but its central decision, that the country’s constitution and public will would not underwrite two more decades of open-pit copper mining in its rainforest, is settled, and it is one of the most significant conservation outcomes Panama has produced.

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Last reviewed: 2026-07-03