Barrick’s El Alto Project Faces a Tribunal With No Neutral Forum

On 27 September 2026, something broke inside Chile’s environmental judiciary. Ministers of the First Environmental Tribunal recused themselves after a decision in the El Alto case leaked before it was meant to see daylight, and the investigative outlet Bío Bío Chile put a single word on the situation: desastre.

The case at the centre of the collapse is a US$35 million Barrick Gold drilling campaign in one of the most litigated mining zones on the planet, the high Andes of Chile’s Atacama Region.

This is not merely a courtroom squabble. El Alto is a test of whether Chile’s environmental permitting system can credibly adjudicate a case involving a company with documented institutional ties to the very tribunals assigned to hear it. For anyone weighing exposure to Barrick, the project’s fate is now tangled with a question of forum neutrality that has no clean resolution in sight.

Here is what the sequence of events actually tells you: the specific risk vectors in play at El Alto, why the tribunal crisis compounds those risks rather than resolving them, and what the arc from 2013 to this month reveals about the regulatory environment surrounding Barrick’s ambitions in Huasco Alto.

What Pascua Lama’s closure actually established, and why it still matters

To understand why community challengers keep invoking a permanently closed mine, you have to follow what the Chilean courts actually found. The original Pascua Lama project, run by Barrick subsidiary Compañía Minera Nevada SpA, targeted a deposit estimated at roughly 18 million ounces of gold and 635 million ounces of silver across the same high-Andes ground now occupied by El Alto.

The closure did not happen in one blow. It escalated in four stages, each a distinct finding rather than a bureaucratic step.

1. 2013: Environmental authorities ordered construction halted after Barrick failed to complete its water management plan, discharged contaminated water into the Estrecho River, and concealed glacier monitoring data.
2. 2018: Chile’s Superintendencia del Medio Ambiente (SMA), the environmental enforcement regulator, ordered the total and permanent closure of the project.
3. 2020: The First Environmental Tribunal upheld that closure order.
4. February 2022: Chile’s Supreme Court ruled that drilling Barrick had carried out during the closure period was illegal and arbitrary.

That final ruling is the point most investors underweight. Between 2020 and 2021, Barrick drilled using platforms belonging to the very project it was legally obligated to shut down. The Supreme Court did not call this irregular. It called it illegal.

The Supreme Court established that the only activities permitted at the site were those directly leading to its mandated closure, and confirmed that Barrick had reactivated and in some cases structurally rehabilitated existing project platforms. Post-closure drilling was declared illegal and arbitrary.

This is the legal floor against which El Alto is being measured. It is not community rhetoric or a contested historical claim; it is an established judicial finding. When Diaguita communities argue that El Alto revives operations the Supreme Court already prohibited, they are pointing at a boundary the court drew in concrete. What you need to assess is whether El Alto’s structure genuinely clears that floor, or simply routes around it.

Corporate environmental accountability in Chile has been tested most visibly through the Escondida litigation, which established that documented non-compliance findings at the SMA level can carry reputational and legal consequences that outlast the specific regulatory proceeding and shape how future permit applications are scrutinised.

How El Alto is structured to look like a new project, not a reopening

Barrick’s answer to the closure ruling is architectural. El Alto advances not as a continuation of Pascua Lama but as a legally separate prospection project, with its own Declaración de Impacto Ambiental (DIA), an environmental impact declaration, and its own Resolución de Calificación Ambiental (RCA), the resulting environmental approval. In Chile’s system, that separation is what allows a new campaign to proceed on ground tied to a closed mine.

On its face, the framing is defensible. El Alto involves 62 diamond drilling boreholes across 43 platforms at roughly 4,000 metres above sea level in Alto del Carmen, a US$35 million investment supporting about 75 jobs per season over two summer seasons (September to May), with water use capped at 1.56 litres per second. Barrick’s DIA concludes the work will generate no significant environmental impacts.

Chile’s environmental permitting system has shown a recurring pattern of approvals granted at the regional evaluation stage that subsequently face sustained legal challenges, with the Collahuasi case illustrating how DIA and EIA approvals can be exposed to procedural vulnerabilities that only become visible once litigation begins.

The regional evaluation body agreed. On 20 January 2026, the Atacama Region’s Comisión de Evaluación Ambiental (Coeva) approved the DIA with nine votes in favour, one abstention, and none against. CORPROA, the regional development corporation, applauded the decision as “una clara señal para la inversión responsable,” a clear signal for responsible investment.

Barrick’s own position stresses separation at every turn: exploration only, no significant impact, no use of resources or infrastructure tied to the Pascua Lama closure, and any future mining subject to its own fresh permitting.

Then there is the sentence that complicates all of it. El Alto’s DIA states its objective is to assess the technical feasibility of mining extraction on the same land as the formerly closed operation.

Barrick’s South America government affairs director Marcelo Álvarez told DFMAS in April 2025 that El Alto’s purpose is to obtain geological and metallurgical knowledge to reevaluate future investment alternatives for the same concession area, framing the campaign as a vehicle for a Pascua Lama successor rather than a resumption of the closed mine.

What this tells you is the precise character of the risk you are pricing. This is not a frontal assault on the closure ruling. It is a new-project framing whose durability depends entirely on whether courts and regulators accept that framing under sustained scrutiny.

Why Diaguita communities and agricultural groups are in court, and what they are asking for

The opposition to El Alto is not a protest. It is a structured legal action with defined claimants and specific requests. Three organisations brought formal challenges before the First Environmental Tribunal in Antofagasta after the SEA’s executive director rejected their administrative appeals against El Alto’s RCA:

• Comunidad Indígena Diaguita Alta Cordillera, an Indigenous Diaguita community
• Comité Ambiental Comunal de Alto del Carmen, a communal environmental committee
• Comunidad Agrícola Diaguita Los Huascoaltinos, a Diaguita agricultural community

The challenges arrived through separate complaints, each with its own procedural identity:

1. R-163-2026
2. R-174-2026
3. R-187-2026
4. R-189-2026

What the communities are seeking comes in two stages. First, a temporary suspension of the RCA while the merits of the case are decided. Second, ultimately, annulment of the environmental approval altogether. On 17 July 2026, the tribunal admitted the Diaguita Alta Cordillera reclamation, and by 20 July 2026 multiple outlets confirmed the suspension request was before the tribunal with no ruling issued.

Operations, meanwhile, carry material real-world consequences. On 30 July 2026, an incident left 39 workers isolated at the site, prompting the tribunal to order a risk report on potential floods and overflows. That is a procedural measure reflecting heightened scrutiny, not a decision on the suspension itself.

Community representatives note the tribunal had held reports from Sernageomin, the geology and mining agency, and the Dirección General de Aguas, the water authority, since early August 2026, yet issued no ruling on precautionary measures. Litigants allege the delay may have been intentional.

Here is what that delay changes for you. A tribunal sitting on agency reports for weeks without ruling transforms a routine challenge into something that, to the litigants, resembles institutional foot-dragging. El Alto is not proceeding in a cleared legal environment. If you hold or are evaluating Barrick exposure, you have to account for the realistic possibility that the environmental authorisation could be suspended or annulled while drilling is underway.

The conflict-of-interest web: one rapporteur’s past employment and one judge’s marriage

Now the connections. The court-assigned rapporteur for the El Alto cases is Álvaro Funes Palacios, who holds a law degree from Universidad Católica del Norte and has served at the First Environmental Tribunal since October 2018. His role is to prepare and present cases to the tribunal’s ministers.

Before joining the tribunal, according to his LinkedIn profile, Funes spent five years as head of legal affairs at Compañía Minera Zaldívar, based in Antofagasta.

Barrick Gold holds a 50% stake in Compañía Minera Zaldívar.

The case assigned to Funes is R-174-2026, one of the El Alto challenges against a Barrick subsidiary.

Then the picture widens. At the Second Environmental Tribunal, the alternative forum, the presiding judge is married to the legal manager of Compañía Minera Zaldívar, the same company where Funes previously ran legal affairs.

Community attorney Bruno Barrientos argues that assigning this particular rapporteur to R-174-2026 was irregular, and that the irregularity compounds because the same official certified the judicial disqualifications during the September recusal crisis, despite other rapporteurs being available.

Bío Bío Chile characterised the situation as a “desastre en Tribunal Ambiental.”

What this assembly of connections tells you is not that bias has been proven. It is that the question has shifted. When the rapporteur on a Barrick case previously ran legal affairs for a Barrick-affiliated company, and the presiding judge at the alternative tribunal is married to that same company’s legal manager, the live issue is whether a neutral forum exists anywhere in Chile’s environmental judiciary for this specific case. Forum neutrality is a prerequisite for regulatory predictability. Without it, El Alto’s challenges may be remanded, delayed, or resolved in ways no party can plan around.

The September 2026 leak and the recusal cascade

On 27 September 2026, a decision in the El Alto case leaked before the scheduled court of appeals hearing on the related protection action against the SMA. The leak triggered recusals by the First Tribunal’s ministers, the event that pushed the case into open crisis. Community representatives flagged the timing, two days before the appeals hearing, as unlikely to be coincidental.

What the pattern from 2013 to 2026 signals for investors beyond this case

Step back from the procedure, and a pattern comes into focus. The arc from Pascua Lama’s first construction halt to this month’s tribunal crisis spans thirteen years of regulatory and legal engagement that has never reached a stable endpoint. That is the frame you should carry into any valuation of Barrick’s Huasco Alto exposure.

Three specific risk vectors deserve explicit weighting.

It helps to separate what is settled from what is not:

• Resolved: The Coeva approval was granted on 20 January 2026, and the SEA rejected the communities’ administrative appeals.
• Unresolved: The suspension request remains pending, no merits hearing has been scheduled, and tribunal forum neutrality is now in question.
• Underway regardless: Construction activity was reportedly proceeding despite unresolved proceedings, with works scheduled to commence September 2026.

Barrick’s strategic position sharpens the calculus. El Alto is explicitly a US$35 million information-gathering exercise, geological and metallurgical data meant to inform a potential successor to Pascua Lama and its 18 million ounces of gold and 635 million ounces of silver. If the project is suspended or annulled, the immediate loss is the exploration spend, not a production asset. But the door to any successor project closes with it.

The read you should take is this: the thirteen-year arc is not a story about one bad outcome. It is a pattern of regulatory engagement that has repeatedly failed to produce durable resolution. Treat El Alto as a routine exploration dispute and you are likely underpricing the systemic risk embedded in this geography, this company history, and this moment of judicial instability.

Barrick’s broader restructuring risk extends well beyond the Andes, with activist pressure on Nevada Gold Mines and potential asset separation creating a portfolio context in which the El Alto exposure sits alongside, rather than independently of, corporate-level strategic uncertainty.

What comes next for El Alto, and what a neutral forum would need to look like

As of 27 September 2026, the picture is a tribunal in recusal crisis, a suspension request still unresolved, and a court of appeals hearing recently scheduled. If you want to monitor this with precision rather than treating it as background noise, three near-term milestones are the ones to track, roughly in order of likely timing.

1. The First Tribunal’s ruling on the suspension request, the single decision that determines whether drilling continues uninterrupted.
2. The reassignment of cases following the rapporteur conflict-of-interest challenge, which will reveal whether a conflict-free forum can be constituted.
3. The court of appeals outcome on the protection action against the SMA, the thread that ties the leak to the broader proceedings.

The forum neutrality problem sits underneath all three. If both the First and Second Environmental Tribunals carry unresolved conflict-of-interest objections linked to Compañía Minera Zaldívar, then the question of which court can even hear these cases is itself unanswered.

No publicly accessible source confirms which tribunal, if any, can now hear El Alto challenges without a conflict-of-interest objection. That is not a procedural footnote. It is a structural condition that could force escalation toward Chile’s Supreme Court, extending the timeline before any regulatory certainty for Huasco Alto arrives.

That leaves the strategic ambiguity intact. Barrick has committed US$35 million to gather geological data it says will guide a decision on a successor to Pascua Lama and its 18 million ounce gold resource. If that data-gathering is legally interrupted, the question of whether Huasco Alto ever yields a viable successor stays open for the foreseeable future.

For readers assessing whether Barrick’s portfolio risk is concentrated or distributed, our dedicated guide to Barrick’s geopolitical risk exposure covers Reko Diq in Pakistan and African asset positions that sit alongside the Chilean exposure in the company’s growth pipeline.

This article is for informational purposes only and should not be considered financial advice. Investors should conduct their own research and consult with financial professionals before making investment decisions. These statements are speculative and subject to change based on market developments and the outcome of ongoing legal proceedings.