Rio Tinto, the world’s second largest mining company, announced that it had temporarily suspended all work on a new metal processing plant in northern Peru, after activists threatened to invade company facilities in protest. Media reports did not make it clear who the “activists” were, but local community opposition to the project has been strong.

Reuters referred to the metal-testing plant as “key to a pre-feasibility study of [the company's] mammoth copper project, La Granja.”La Granja contains between 4 and 8 billion tons of copper, which Rio Tinto hopes to be extracting at a rate of 300,000 tons per year by 2014. The company continues with ore exploration at La Granja.

Peru is the world’s second largest producer of copper; neighboring Chile is the first.