Team size: 30

What are the most significant cases, projects and/or transactions that you and your legal team have recently been involved in?

It has been an unusually demanding year, and most of what we worked on shared one feature: it is changing what Codelco is. We are no longer only a copper company, and the legal team has been at the centre of that shift.

I don’t see us as lawyers who appear at the end to sign off on a deal. We sit at the table from the outset, connecting the operational, financial, regulatory and reputational pieces so that these projects genuinely hold up. That is where we add the most value.

The clearest example is the lithium partnership between Codelco and SQM in the Salar de Atacama. We structured and negotiated the joint venture and its implementation — a public-private arrangement with very few precedents, one that turns Codelco into a major lithium producer while protecting the State’s long-term interest in a strategic resource.

In parallel, we designed the Joint Mining Plan with Anglo American, between Andina and Los Bronces — two neighbouring operations that had never worked together in this way. It is expected to generate more than US$5 bn. in additional value and reduce costs by roughly 15%, without requiring any new investment.

We also closed a set of agreements with BHP and Rio Tinto covering Project Anillo, Nuevo Cobre and Maricunga, which advance our exploration and growth pipeline, and we completed the sale of our mining assets in Ecuador.

There is also I-Pulse. We structured Codelco’s investment in this US-based company, the world leader in pulsed-power technology for industry, to help us move faster on efficiency, energy use and the environmental footprint of our operations. For me, that transaction says a great deal about where the legal function is heading — we are now part of the innovation conversation, not merely the paperwork.

And it was not only transactions. We led some highly public and sensitive litigation this year, including complex regulatory matters before the Contraloría General de la República (Comptroller General’s Office) and corporate disputes under real scrutiny, where the legal, institutional and reputational stakes were closely intertwined. Throughout all of it, the objective never changed: to be a partner the business brings in early, rather than a function it consults once the decision has already been made.

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crisis to ensure the organisation’s resilience?

The past twelve months have tested Codelco considerably. We were transforming across copper, lithium and critical minerals all at once, under heavy regulatory scrutiny and significant political visibility, while closing some of the largest transactions in the company’s recent history.

What I have learned is that instability exposes how an organisation makes decisions far more than it exposes its legal risks. Our role is not to make uncertainty disappear — that is rarely possible. It is to help the business decide well in spite of it.

My approach rests on three ideas. The first is straightforward: get involved early. Legal adds the most value when we help shape the strategy, not when we are handed a decision that has already been taken and asked to endorse it.

The second is knowing what genuinely matters. In a crisis there is enormous pressure to wait for certainty before acting, but a company of this size rarely has that luxury. So we cut through the noise: we set out the real options, we are candid about the legal, operational and reputational trade-offs, and we preserve as much room to manoeuvre as possible.

Something that has helped me navigate uncertainty is learning to tell a good decision from a bad one, and not only by its outcome. We cannot guarantee results, but we can guarantee that the decision-making process was sound — that we made the best possible call with the information available at the time. In an environment as unpredictable as ours, that distinction matters enormously: it keeps the team focused on what it can actually control.

The third is that none of this works in isolation. In an industry as regulated as mining, resilience comes from getting legal, operations, finance, sustainability, government affairs and communications to work together in real time — and legal usually ends up being the bridge between them.

This has held true in every difficult situation this year, from regulatory matters before the Contraloría General de la República (Comptroller General’s Office) to high-profile disputes and transactions under real public and political pressure. In those moments you rarely succeed by avoiding risk altogether. You succeed by understanding it, allocating it where it belongs, and allowing the company to keep moving forward with confidence.