What if blockades shut down Peru's southern copper belt?
Las Bambas plus the southern corridor is ~2% of world copper; an indefinite blockade tightens concentrate fast and lifts the metal and Freeport — the VIX/risk-parity deleveraging chain here is overbuilt for a localized supply story. Peru blockades in 2022-23 repeatedly shut Las Bambas yet copper moved on inventories, not equity vol. Transmission: China smelters (the key offtaker) scramble for Chilean/African units, widening TC/RCs. Forward: with Grasberg already impaired (Sep-2025), the concentrate market has no slack.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Indigenous road blockades indefinitely shut Las Bambas and the southern copper corridor amid political collapse. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.