Vizsla Silver: The Path Forward at Panuco

Trevor Hall (0:18)

All right, wrapping up our second day here at the Beaver Creek Precious Metals Summit, and it's an important one. It's been a long time and for good reason that we are finally welcoming back in Mr. Michael Konnert, CEO of Vizsla Silver. They do trade on the TSX and the NYSE with VZLA.

Mike, it's a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Welcome back.

Michael Konnert (0:41)

Trevor, I'm very happy to be here. Thank you for having me. It's been too long and I'm glad to catch up with you.

Trevor Hall (0:46)

It's been a challenging year, I guess you could say.

Michael Konnert (0:50)

It has been.

Trevor Hall (0:51)

I did sit in on your presentation this morning. I believe, was this the first time you presented to an event since the spring?

Michael Konnert (0:59)

It is. How'd it go? I thought it went well. You were in the crowd. I was in the crowd. It felt good. It felt good to be out there talking to the investment community again. And I think it was also an important opportunity just to open it up, talking about the incident and the results of that with our team, in the sense that we're grieving as a team.

But, you know, we've also been very impressed, and maybe impressed isn't the right word, but, you know, the strength and the resilience of the team and the community, you know, as we move forward, you know, as we, you know, put focus on supporting the families, you know, has been, in any tragic event, there's, you know, there's glimmers of, you know, positivity, and I think that's, you know, one aspect of it, but, you know, it's a very difficult time for all of us at Vizsla Silver. And having talked to many shareholders throughout this week so far, I think a very difficult time for shareholders, not in a financial sense, but there's a sense of, you know, involvement or alignment with what we're doing as shareholders, and I think, you know, a lot of them, you know, felt that tragedy as well. So I guess what I'm saying is that there was, you know, a great deal of support, and we've been very fortunate to have that as Vizsla Silver. Yeah.

Trevor Hall (2:31)

I don't want to rehash what happened. I do want to talk about kind of the resiliency you and your team learned through all this. Nothing could prepare you for what had happened.

And I'm just kind of curious what, obviously, the rocks, Panuco hasn't changed, right? But a few things, dynamically, of how the company functions probably has changed. What need to be put in place moving forward to kind of move on and just have security that this type of thing will be mitigated from ever happening again?

Michael Konnert (3:06)

Yeah. I think if we're speaking about the project and moving the project forward, that's certainly something I'll expand on here. But I think for us as a company, it's also important just to find the right ways to support the families and support the communities and to work, as we have been from the very start with the relevant authority. So that's top of mind for us, of course. And as a result, we're in the process of establishing a foundation to support the families. I think that's going to be something we can talk about a little bit more in the future, but something that's really important for us as well. So there's that aspect. And then there's the actual practical aspect of how do we get back to work safely? How do we ensure something like this never happens again? And I think it's important to understand the backdrop of Mexico when that was happening and when that happened earlier in the year. It was a backdrop of fairly extreme cartel violence, not necessarily entirely preceding the event, but the event onwards and around the same time of the event was a kind of an extreme level there.

So that is to say that as Mexico continues to do what they're doing, which is intervene with the military, and they've been doing a great job with that, specifically in the region that we're in since January. We believe that there is visibility on a more stable environment there, but regardless of the exterior environment, we want to ensure that the project is very much secure. And the way that you do that in Mexico often, most commonly, has to do with involving the Mexican military in some degree, and then also having the availability to involve the National Guard and some other levels of federally available military slash law enforcement. And without going into too many of the details, and I think listeners will be comfortable with the idea that we can't explain all of the intricate details of a security plan publicly. The cooperation, collaboration that we've been fortunate enough to enjoy with the Mexican military has been excellent. And I see that being really quite important to how we move forward. In fact, I think that we'll be in a position where we're back on site.