Buenaventura's Muelle 13 nears restart as ANI settles $30m standoff

Colombia's National Infrastructure Agency (ANI) has signed a memorandum of understanding with Grupo Portuario that could return more than 50 vessel calls a year to Buenaventura's Muelle 13, the bulk terminal shuttered since January 2025.

The agreement, signed on October 31 by ANI president Ricardo Ayerbe Pino and Grupo Portuario representative Álvaro Rodríguez, sets out a process to resolve a legal dispute involving claims of roughly $30m. It also sketches a route towards reopening a facility the agency calls critical capacity at Colombia's principal Pacific gateway.

Why the terminal went dark

The closure wasn't commercial. In January 2025, Colombia's National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA) suspended operations at Muelle 13 after concluding that existing environmental management measures didn't adequately reflect the facility's activities and their impacts.

ANLA was blunt about the conditions for return. The suspension, the regulator said, could only be lifted once the terminal holds an environmental management and control instrument that meets applicable requirements.

So the MoU is one step, not the finish line. The paperwork with ANLA still has to align with what the environmental regulator demands.

What does the restart change for shippers?

For bulk cargo shippers on Colombia's Pacific coast, quite a lot. ANI estimates that restarting Muelle 13 would restore 50,000 tonnes of cargo storage capacity and make more than 70,000 sq m available for mineral stockpiling.

Put differently: a five-figure tonnage of storage and an area roughly the size of ten football pitches for mineral inventories come back into a market that has had to route around them for nearly a year.

The human dimension matters too. ANI expects resumed operations to support 500 direct jobs and 1,500 indirect ones — about 2,000 livelihoods tied to a single berth complex.

The money question

The roughly $30m in claims sits at the heart of the legal dispute the MoU now aims to untangle. The agreement establishes a resolution process rather than settling the figure outright, which means the commercial terms will take time to land.

For Grupo Portuario, a negotiated exit beats years of litigation over an asset that earns nothing while idle. For ANI, restoring capacity at Buenaventura supports a broader push to keep Colombian bulk exports, particularly minerals, flowing through national infrastructure rather than diverting to alternative gateways.

A cautious timeline

No reopening date appears in the agreement. The sequence is clear enough, though: settle the claims, satisfy ANLA's environmental management requirements, then resume operations.

Each step has a different owner. The legal settlement rests with ANI and Grupo Portuario; the environmental clearance rests entirely with ANLA, which suspended the terminal in the first place and holds the only key to lifting that suspension.

That division of labour suggests shippers shouldn't book Muelle 13 capacity just yet. A preliminary agreement to discuss a $30m dispute is progress, but it isn't a berth booking.

Still, the direction of travel favours reopening. Both the infrastructure agency and the operator have put signatures to a document whose stated purpose is restoring capacity at Colombia's main Pacific port — and if ANLA's requirements are met in the months ahead, Buenaventura could see its first Muelle 13 vessel call since the start of 2025.