Protestors will continue to strike in Cajamarca, until the government issues a statement declaring the Conga mining project to be ‘unfeasible’.

One day after Yanacocha issued a statement saying it was suspending the project, Gregorio Santos, regional president of Cajamarca, said the decision should come from the government, not the mining company.

"We have no official document. It is a statement from the mine without much background because they had suspended operations on November 24 and only had police agents in the area,” Santos said.

“This gives us no expectations, it tells us nothing. We can not say that this is a document issued by the government," he added, according to El Comercio.

Santos said the violence that had taken place during protests on Tuesday - which left eight people with bullet wounds - had not been caused by the protestors, and claimed it was a product of “the brutal reaction of a state that gets desperate when it doesn’t act in a timely manner.”

He also said protestors had been forced to carry out the strike, due to “the exclusion and discrimination occurring in the provinces.”

"If the state issues a statement today, this problem is solved today. If there had been timely action none of this would have happened," he said.