Guatemala's mine-safety record, obtained by public records request: one accident in twelve years

The Ministerio de Energía y Minas does not publish a mining accident record, a mine-inspection register or a list of the fines it imposes. Its statistical yearbook reports production, royalties, prices and mining's share of GDP, and has no chapter on the people doing the mining. The social security institute counts injuries only for affiliated workers, not by sector. So we filed a public-records request for all of it. The response is now on /guatemala and in Spanish at /es/guatemala, with a page per licence holder. The short version:

One accident on file

The ministry has one accident on file since 2014. Its inspection department lists a single licence with a registered accident: Marlin I, the gold mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán. On 14 April 2016, the floor of an underground stope gave way. Jaime Pérez, who was loading explosives on the level above, fell with it. His body was recovered three days later. The ministry's 39-page report of that rescue, which its own technicians joined, is its entire accident record for 2014 to 2026.

What the newspapers hold

The newspapers hold more. Four months after Marlin, on 14 August 2016, a boiler at the Pronico nickel plant in El Estor exploded and killed five workers: Yuni Sandoval Álvarez, Hamilton Milla Portillo, Enoc Ruano, Dalin Choc Prieto and Édgar Misael Coc Xol, as Prensa Libre and Soy502 reported.

On 3 October 2024, a hillside collapsed onto men digging gravel beside a road at Chuisalic, in Quiché. Seven were buried, and three bodies had been recovered when the search was still going two days later, according to Prensa Libre, Emisoras Unidas and AGN. On 8 May 2026, a rock face fell on two men digging sand at Yalijux, Senahú. One was pulled out alive, and the other was found dead five hours later, Prensa Libre reported. A year before Marlin, on 14 August 2015, a landslide at CGN's El Estor site buried an engineer. We could not find a report of how that ended.

None of these is in the ministry's record. A processing plant and two unlicensed pits sit outside the licences the ministry inspects, which is why its record does not hold them.

Inspections, but no findings

The ministry programmed about 180 inspections a year, and its lists say nothing about what they found. It sent eleven spreadsheets, one per year from 2016 to September 2026, listing 1,913 programmed inspections of 405 licences. Each row gives a scheduled month or a range of days, the licence, the holder, the municipality and a report number. There is no column for what the inspector found or what happened next, and nothing for 2014 or 2015.

The inspection programme changed shape in 2019. From 2016 to 2018, the top five licences took about a quarter of all visits. Marlin I was programmed 15, 14 and 15 times a year; Progreso VII Derivada (the El Tambor project) 15, 16 and 9; Escobal 5, 5 and 2. From 2019, the programme became one pass over the register: 249 visits for 226 licences that year, with the top five taking 5 to 8 percent. Over the whole period, 313 of the 334 exploitation licences on the current register were programmed at least once. 21 never were, and 14 of the 19 exploration licences never were.

The two most-visited mines are the two that stopped. Marlin I, where Goldcorp stopped mining on 31 May 2017, was still programmed 15 times in 2018 and once or twice a year since. Escobal, whose licence the courts suspended in July 2017 pending a consultation of the Xinka people, was programmed every year but two.

Fines without amounts

The ministry's fines have no amounts and mostly concern paperwork. For sanctions, it sent six yearly lists, 2021 to 2026, which it describes as the fines it has on record: 1,255 resolutions across 327 case files, naming the case file, the mine and the reason. 487 cite a missing production report and 456 an unpaid surface fee, three quarters of the list. 94 follow an inspection. 56 cite the mine-safety regulations, and those are recent: one in 2024, 19 in 2025, 25 in the first nine months of 2026. 36 are for illegal mining. Judging by the fines, the first thing the ministry asks of a mine is that the production report arrives and the fee is paid. No resolution carries an amount, a date or the holder's name.

The chronic files are small quarries and sand pits. Uyus has 22 resolutions in five years, La Libertad II 21, Carbón 12 19 and La Libertad I 18. The cancellations follow the pile. Two further one-page registers list 24 licences cancelled since 2015 and two suspended. La Libertad I, with 18 resolutions behind it, was cancelled in October 2025; El Vado, with 14, in July 2026.

Still missing

The licence list with tax IDs never arrived. The ministry's licence department says it sent the list to the ministry's own mailboxes. It was not among the attachments, and the fields it describes omit the tax ID. We have written back to ask for it.

How we asked

For the curious, here are the mechanics. In September 2026, we wrote to the ministry's public-information unit under Guatemala's public-records law, the Ley de Acceso a la Información Pública (Decreto 57-2008). We asked for four things: the current licence base with each holder's tax ID, the inspection register since 2014, the accident notices licence holders have filed since 2014, and the sanctions imposed since 2014. The unit logged it as UIPMEM-1513-2026. It answered on the first of October, inside the ten working days that law gives it, with Resolución UIP 1761-2026 and 19 files: eleven inspection spreadsheets, six resolution lists, one accident report and a ten-page cover letter carrying four unit letters. The files are archived unmodified with their hashes. Every page carries the request and resolution numbers, and every table on the country page sorts, so anyone can check the chain of custody with the ministry directly.

What the files add up to

Taken together, the files say more about the business of mining in Guatemala than about its safety. The ministry keeps careful track of which licences missed a production report or a surface fee, and it puts nearly every licence on an inspector's calendar. Its files don't say what those inspectors found or what any fine cost, and its accident file holds a single report. One death in twelve years is the ministry's count. The newspapers alone report at least nine more, at a plant and at pits its inspectors don't cover.