Mexico's environment agencies declared the Sonora River spill cleaned up without consulting affected communities, the Supreme Court ruled, and the government has since settled with the miner behind closed doors
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After the August 2014 spill of acidified copper sulfate from Grupo México's Buenavista del Cobre mine into the Bacanuchi and Sonora rivers, the federal environment enforcement agency PROFEPA signed a remediation agreement with the company, the environment ministry SEMARNAT declared the remediation goals met on 1 December 2016, and PROFEPA's Sonora office declared the cleanup trust's purposes fulfilled on 31 January 2017, after which the trust was dissolved and leftover funds returned to the company. On 15 January 2020 the Supreme Court's Second Chamber (amparo en revisión 640/2019) ruled that affected residents should have been consulted and allowed to participate in the agreement and in the resolutions that ended the cleanup, and that leaving them out violated their right to a healthy environment. In January 2026 SEMARNAT withdrew its 2023 criminal complaint against the company under a December 2025 deal negotiated by the Interior and Finance ministries; in May 2026 the affected communities warned that a federal district judge was about to rule on whether the Supreme Court judgment had been fulfilled on the basis of that deal, negotiated without them, and said the Interior Ministry had answered their transparency request by saying the agreement does not exist, though the company had already transferred 500 million pesos under it.
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