Alfredo Enrione, director of the Center for Corporate Governance and Society at ESE Business School, responds to César Barros's analysis of corporate accidents. He disagrees that the El Teniente case was less predictable than La Polar, arguing that risk signals were evident in seismic data and Sernageomin reports.
In a letter published in La Tercera on March 22, 2026, Alfredo Enrione thanks César Barros for his reading of his essay and the comparison to the La Polar case, but adds a key nuance. Barros had concluded that El Teniente was “less predictable” than La Polar, but Enrione disagrees: “it is exactly the opposite, and that is the paradox that makes the tragedy even more disturbing.”He explains that in La Polar, the fraud was in the accounting books, requiring a keen eye to spot it. In contrast, at Codelco's El Teniente, “the signal was in the rock itself.” He cites existing seismic data, Sernageomin reports, and a rock burst in the Andesita zone in 2023 without fatalities, as an ignored warning.Enrione attributes the issue to an “architecture of incentives that punished production drops more than a worker's death.” He highlights the difference: in La Polar, the board missed signals in the balance sheet; at Codelco, the board “lacked the tools to inquire about signals the mountain had already emitted.” He concludes it is not a matter of honesty, but of design, fixable through reforms, not condemnations.
