Mexico Wins Mining Arbitration as It Moves to End a Mine Blockade

MEXICO · BUSINESS

Two developments on the same day, a won arbitration and a blockade ruled illegal, offered Mexico a rare pair of favorable signals to the foreign mining companies that have grown wary of its legal and labour risks.

Mexico notched two wins for its mining-investment climate this week. An international tribunal threw out a long-running arbitration claim brought by Silver Bull Resources over a blockaded silver project, while a federal labour authority ordered protesters to lift an illegal blockade that had halted Orla Mining’s flagship gold mine.

Together, the outcomes touch the two risks that most worry foreign miners operating in the country: the security of their investments and their ability to keep mines running.

Mexico prevails in the Silver Bull mining arbitration

The arbitration tribunal, operating under the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, issued an award dated May 29 dismissing Silver Bull’s claim in its entirety, and ordered the company to pay roughly $998,000 toward Mexico’s legal costs. Silver Bull, listed in the United States and Canada, had filed the case in 2023 under the USMCA and its predecessor NAFTA, arguing that Mexico’s failure to act against an illegal blockade of its Sierra Mojada silver-zinc project in Coahuila, ongoing since September 2019, amounted to unlawful expropriation.

The company had sought hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. Importantly, the tribunal did not rule on the merits of that expropriation claim: it found it lacked jurisdiction and that the claim was time-barred, a procedural defeat for the company rather than a vindication of the blockade.

Silver Bull said it is weighing whether to seek annulment.

A second mining blockade ruled illegal

On the same stage of investor concern, Orla Mining said operations at its Camino Rojo gold mine in Zacatecas were set to resume within hours after Mexico’s Department of Federal Labour Conciliation ruled that a worker blockade, in place since June 1, was illegal and fell outside the collective-bargaining framework. The stoppage stemmed from a dispute over a productivity bonus and a profit-sharing payment known in Mexico as PTU; Orla said it had already paid the maximum profit share required by law.

The Vancouver-based company’s U.S.-listed shares rose about 1.8% before the market opened. Camino Rojo, an open-pit, heap-leach operation, produced 96,764 ounces of gold in 2025 and is guided to yield 110,000 to 120,000 ounces this year, roughly a third of Orla’s output, making any prolonged halt material to the company.

Why the rulings matter for foreign miners

Both episodes turn on the same underlying problem: site blockades that can shut a mine for weeks or, in Silver Bull’s case, years, and the question of how reliably Mexican authorities will enforce the law to clear them. For Mexico, the arbitration outcome removes a costly potential payout and signals that investor-state claims face high procedural hurdles, while the Orla ruling shows labour authorities willing to declare a blockade illegal quickly.

Yet the picture is mixed for the industry. Silver Bull’s project has been paralyzed for more than five years despite favorable domestic court rulings, underscoring how enforcement, not legal findings, is the binding constraint.

The Orla case also lands at a delicate moment, as the company pursues an $18.5bn all-stock merger with Equinox Gold that would create a major North American producer. For foreign capital weighing Mexican mining, the week offered reassurance on the rules and a reminder of how fragile day-to-day operations can be.

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