You are Esperanza Quiroga-Tapia, 41, Director of Community Affairs at Bauxia Andes Resources in Lima. At dawn on 29 April 2026 a federation of 23 Andean communities suspended all company activity on its land and gave Bauxia ten working days to answer five conditions. Your chief executive wants your recommendation by Friday: how does Bauxia come to the table?
The situation
Bauxia is a Peruvian-Chilean bauxite and aluminium group: USD 2.1 billion of revenue in 2025, about 3,400 people and USD 780 million of senior secured debt due for refinancing in 2027. A development-finance institution holds 12% of that facility, under an environmental-and-social clause. The Quebrada Yanaorco haul road, which crosses the land of the Comunidad Campesina de Pampacolca (about 4,200 people), carries 71% of this year's bauxite to the port. Treasury reckons the balance sheet can absorb 14 days of blockade before the cash-sweep covenant breaches, in the middle of a bondholder roadshow that opened on Monday.
Pampacolca's asamblea voted to block the road by 874 to 121, with 67 abstentions. The next night the federation ratified the vote and sent the memorandum. Four of its five conditions go back to the 2019 consultation: held after the environmental assessment was already approved, on a 142-page Spanish document circulated three working days before the vote, and closed by an agreement signed by three representatives whose authority the federation now disputes. That agreement pays the comunidad PEN 1.8 million a year. Until it has an answer, the federation will not meet the company without outside guarantors.
Your own dashboard is grim: a social-licence index of 22 out of 100 (the band labelled "Withdrawal"), community trust at 18 and board confidence at 50. Augusto Marchena-Ríos, VP Operations, holds that the 2019 agreement is a signed contract and that reopening it under a blockade will bring the same demand to Bauxia's other three sites; he has the pleadings drafted. Javier Loayza, the bishop of Aplao, offered in February to convene talks. You have warned the executive committee in writing three times since November.