Phantom Ruling and Mass Recusal Paralyse Chile’s Environmental Court

All three judges of Chile’s First Environmental Tribunal recused themselves between 6:53 PM and 6:55 PM on 24 September 2026. That two-minute window followed something stranger: one day earlier, a ruling denying community protections against Barrick Gold‘s El Alto project had appeared on the tribunal’s own website, then vanished within hours, before any formal resolution existed in the case file.

The First Environmental Tribunal was not built to fail this way. It is a specialised court created under Chile’s Law No. 20.600 to guarantee judicial review of environmental decisions. Its credibility is the mechanism through which communities and investors alike expect predictable outcomes from Chile’s resource-extraction disputes.

When the institution itself collapses, that guarantee collapses with it. Here is what the record shows, what remains unanswered, and why both matter for anyone tracking how Chile governs its mining sector.

A ruling that should not have existed

Start with the announcement. On Wednesday, 23 September 2026, the First Environmental Tribunal’s own website published a notice stating that precautionary measure requests against the El Alto project had been denied.

Then the absence. No corresponding formal resolution existed in the official case file. The tribunal had not recorded, notified, or entered any such ruling. Legal representatives for the affected communities contacted the tribunal directly to ask why a decision was being publicised when it did not exist in the record.

Then the disappearance. Hours after it appeared, the notice was removed from the website.

The following day, all three sitting judges recused themselves at once. Alamiro Alfaro Zepeda, the tribunal president, along with associate judges Sandra Alvarez Torres and Marcelo Hernandez Rojas, were all certified as recused inside a two-minute span. Every one of them cited the same legal ground.

The sequence, laid out in order:

1. 23 September 2026: phantom ruling appears on the tribunal website, denying precautionary measures against El Alto.
2. 23 September 2026: the notice is removed hours later.
3. 24 September 2026: all three judges recuse themselves simultaneously, certified between 6:53 PM and 6:55 PM.
4. 25 September 2026: the tribunal secretary certifies transfer of the cases to the Second Environmental Tribunal in Santiago, under Article 10 of Law No. 20.600.

A ruling appeared before any formal record of it existed. That means someone with system access either published prematurely or acted more deliberately. The simultaneous recusal of all three judges on identical grounds does not tell you which. It closes the incident without explaining it.

What El Alto is, and why it sits on contested ground

This is not a routine permitting dispute. The El Alto project is a prospection venture operated by Compania Minera Nevada SpA, linked to Barrick Gold, in Alto del Carmen in Chile’s Atacama Region. It sits in the same highland territory as Pascua Lama, the Barrick gold project forcibly closed for environmental non-compliance.

The Pascua-Lama exploration history in the El Indio Belt is central to why regulators, communities, and investors treat Barrick’s return to the same highland zone with heightened scrutiny, given the forced closure and Supreme Court findings that preceded the El Alto application.

That history is why the community’s alarm carries weight. The First Environmental Tribunal previously confirmed the Pascua Lama closure order, and the Supreme Court upheld findings of non-compliance in 2022. BioBioChile framed the El Alto incident under the banner of “Pascua Lama 2.0,” capturing how observers read Barrick’s attempt to re-establish activity in the same sensitive zone.

The El Alto prospection phase involves roughly US$35 million in investment across 62 drilling surveys. The regulatory path to date has moved steadily against the community:

• 30 January 2026: the Comision de Evaluacion de la Region de Atacama approved the project’s environmental permit (RCA) by a 9-1 vote.
• 30 June 2026: the Servicio de Evaluacion Ambiental (SEA) director, Arturo Farias, rejected administrative appeals against the approval.
• Mid-July 2026: the First Environmental Tribunal admitted a judicial reclamation filed by the Comunidad Indigena Diaguita Alta Cordillera.
• Pending: a request to suspend the RCA through precautionary measures remained under study.

That last point is the crux. The precautionary suspension the community was waiting on was still live before the tribunal when the phantom ruling surfaced.

BioBioChile described the situation as “un hecho sin precedentes” (an unprecedented event) and a “desastre” (a disaster), framing it as an institutional failure without parallel in Chilean environmental courts.

The phantom ruling denied exactly the protections the community was awaiting. Its appearance online, if deliberate, would have advantaged one side of an active dispute. For a US$35 million project central to Barrick’s post-Pascua Lama strategy in the Andes, the conduct of this tribunal carries weight far beyond the immediate case.

What the community’s lawyers are alleging, and what remains unanswered

Attorney Karinna Fernandez, who represented Alto del Carmen residents in a related proceeding, has been the sharpest voice. She characterised the leak as a serious blow to public trust in the administration of justice, arguing it violated minimum standards of impartiality and due process.

Her central demand is directed upward.

Fernandez has publicly argued that Chile’s Supreme Court has an unavoidable duty to investigate these anomalies and act decisively to ensure environmental justice operates transparently and free from external pressure.

Community counsel, including Bruno Barrientos, legal representative of the Comunidad Indigena Diaguita Alta Cordillera, were among those who raised the discrepancy with the tribunal. They have pointed to the timing as the most significant detail, arguing that the publication was intended to influence the proceedings.

Weigh that allegation for what it is. It comes from counsel with a direct stake in the outcome. It is a serious claim by credible legal actors, but the technical cause of the phantom ruling remains unexplained by any neutral party.

What the official record does not yet establish

As of 27 September 2026, several questions remain open. Read them as unresolved facts, not accusations:

• Formal receipt of the transferred cases by the Second Environmental Tribunal in Santiago is unconfirmed. The transfer was certified, but acknowledgement has not been documented.
• The Supreme Court has issued no documented statement, investigation, or action.
• No new ruling, suspension, or statement from the SEA or the Superintendencia del Medio Ambiente (SMA) on El Alto’s RCA has been reported since the incident.
• No authoritative technical explanation for how an unauthorised resolution appeared on the court’s public system has been established.
• No statement from Barrick Gold responding to the judicial anomaly has been documented.

The tribunal’s ministerial panel, for its part, agreed to say nothing beyond what formally appears in the records, citing ongoing proceedings. For anyone tracking rule-of-law conditions in Chilean resource extraction, the absence of a response from above is as telling as the incident itself. Institutional accountability requires it.

What the institutional collapse means for Chile’s environmental court system

Law No. 20.600 created Chile’s environmental tribunals as specialised courts to guarantee access to environmental justice and judicial review of administrative decisions. Their entire function depends on institutional credibility. That is what makes a simultaneous full-bench recusal so serious.

Chile’s Law No. 20.600 established the environmental tribunals as specialised courts explicitly subject to Supreme Court superintendence, a design feature that makes the absence of any Supreme Court response to the El Alto incident particularly conspicuous.

Reporting characterises the event as without historical parallel in Chilean environmental courts. Article 10 of Law No. 20.600, the provision used to transfer the cases, was designed for a tribunal that cannot assemble its members, an incapacity mechanism. It was not built for institutional misconduct.

The incident exposes structural vulnerabilities in the design itself:

• A three-member bench functions as a single point of failure. If all three judges are compromised by the same event, the tribunal’s entire capacity collapses at once.
• All three recusals invoked identical grounds, meaning the compromise was uniform rather than isolated to one judge.
• No documented precedent exists to guide how long resolution will take after a full-bench transfer.

For investors and project developers operating under Chilean environmental law, El Alto now demonstrates that failure mode in operation. A full-bench recusal on misconduct-adjacent grounds can transfer an active case mid-stream, resetting timelines without any ruling on the merits. El Alto’s RCA remains legally in force, but the judicial review is now before a different tribunal in Santiago, and timeline uncertainty has increased without a substantive decision. No mining-industry body, market analyst, or Barrick Gold statement addressing the institutional breakdown has been documented as of the reporting date.

Mining accountability litigation in Chile has accelerated across multiple fronts in 2026, with cases against major operators exposing gaps between regulatory approval processes and judicial enforcement that the El Alto episode now places in sharper institutional relief.

The questions Chile’s Supreme Court now cannot avoid

Accountability sits, for now, in silence. As of 27 September 2026, the Supreme Court has issued no documented response to either the phantom ruling or the mass recusal, despite Fernandez’s public call for an investigation.

A credible investigation would need to answer three questions the recusals left open: how an unauthorised resolution appeared on the court’s public system in the first place; whether the timing of the publication was coincidental or deliberate; and what accountability mechanism applies when the compromised judges have already recused themselves and moved the case beyond their own reach.

Fernandez has framed the Supreme Court as holding an “unavoidable duty” to investigate the anomalies and ensure environmental justice operates free from external pressure.

The Supreme Court’s next move will determine whether El Alto is treated as an isolated procedural failure or as a signal that Chile’s environmental tribunal architecture needs structural examination. That distinction matters to every major resource project currently inside the Chilean environmental review system.

Governance concerns in Chilean mining have been escalating through 2026 across multiple institutional dimensions, with operators and community groups alike raising questions about whether oversight structures designed for routine permitting disputes can withstand politically and commercially pressured cases.

For now, the case sits with the Second Environmental Tribunal in Santiago, the RCA remains in force, and the precautionary measure request that triggered the whole episode has not been ruled on by any court. What to watch next:

• Formal receipt and acknowledgement of the transferred cases by the Second Environmental Tribunal.
• Any Supreme Court statement or announcement of an investigation.
• Any new ruling on El Alto’s precautionary measures.
• Any public response from Barrick Gold or a mining-industry body.

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.