For over a month, protests against First Quantum Minerals, a Canadian mining company, have gripped Panama. The Vancouver-based First Quantum owns the country’s largest copper mine, Cobre Panama, through a subsidiary named Minera Panama. The generous terms of the company’s mining concessions, both in Panama and elsewhere, have seen it rise to become one of Canada’s largest miners.

Cobre Panama is an open-pit copper mine located in the Donso district of Colon Province, an area of bountiful biodiversity. It is the largest single private investment in Panamanian history. The mine comprises 5 percent of the country’s GDP and 75 percent of its export earnings. These facts, regularly publicized by First Quantum as evidence of the company’s importance to Panama’s economy, raise two important questions: If the mine generates so much wealth, why is it that Panamanians themselves see so little of the profits? And, is the generation of that supposed wealth worth the environmental risks?

First Quantum inherited the mine’s contract from another Canadian company, Petaquilla Gold, in 2013. Petaquilla had signed a contract with the Panamanian government in 1997, which the country’s supreme court ruled to be unconstitutional after Panama’s Environmental Advocacy Center (CIAM) filed a lawsuit against it. The lawsuit argued that “the concession was given without public bidding, without consultation with the communities and without a true environmental impact study.”