Cerro de Pasco Corporation

Cerro de Pasco Corporation, foreign-owned Peruvian mining company. Cerro was founded in 1902 by an American syndicate composed, among others, of J. P. Morgan, Henry Clay Frick, and Darius Ogden Mills. It shortly came to control the majority of mines in Cerro de Pasco and Morococha, spearheading a general trend toward the denationalization of the Peruvian mining industry during the first three decades of the twentieth century. The labor force at Cerro was recruited from the surrounding peasantry and, at its peak prior to the depression, amounted to some 13,000 workers, or about 30 percent of the total mining proletariat in the country. Between 1916 and 1937 Cerro's gross earnings amounted to some $375 million, of which $207 million or (55 percent) was returned to the local economy and $169 million (45 percent) went abroad to pay for imports and as profits. As one of the largest multinational corporations operating in Peru during the twentieth century, Cerro not only had a huge impact on the national and local economy but also intervened directly and indirectly in both internal and external affairs, leading it to become a source of deep resentment to the Peruvian people prior to its nationalization in 1973 as Centromín.

See alsoMining: Modern .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dirk Kruijt and Menno Vellinga, Labor Relations and Multinational Corporations: The Cerro de Pasco Corporation in Peru (1902–1974) (1979).

Additional Bibliography

Jochamowitz, Luis. Hombres, minas y pozos: 1896–1996: Un siglo de minería y petróleo en el Perú. Lima: Sociedad Nacional de Minería y Petróle, 1996.

                                        Peter F. KlarÉn