140 141 cerro de pasco The greatest investment of the XXth century The Geology Department of Cerro had always been in charge of worldrenowned professionals such as Donald McLaughlin, a Californian geologist and engineer. His grandfather had also been a miner who settled in California, making a fortune after the gold rush of the mid-19th century. In addition to being an excellent professional, McLaughlin was a corporate officer and manager, as well as a prominent university professor. The early death of his father shocked a friend of his mother, none other than Phoebe Hearst, who paid for his education in Mining Engineering at the University of Berkeley and, later, having stood out among his peers, Geology at Harvard. The peculiarities of copper in mines in Alaska and Arizona had already caught his attention, and that led him to join Cerro de Pasco in 1919. When he encountered the central highlands, he described the Peruvian Andes as “a paradise for geologists and mountaineers”. His reports and a treatise on the geomorphology of the Altiplano gave him international fame from very early on, for which he was incorporated into Harvard as a full-time professor in 1925. The methods that he had put into practice at Cerro were taken to his classrooms, especially the record of observations in the mine and another for the evaluation of structural problems that became the standard among the students of that academic institution. In 1941 he was hired by his other alma mater, Berkeley, as dean of the School of Mines to turn it into the School of Engineering. During that transit, he briefly returned to Peru to become general manager and Vice President of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation. Upon his return to Berkeley, he was appointed to the position of President and CEO of the famous Homestake Mine, but never set aside what became his true passion: teaching. Among McLaughlin’s main assistants in Peru there was a young man named Hugh Exton McKinstry, who later became one of the main geology experts in the world with the publication of his book “Geology of Mines”. In it he delved in the greatest detail into a series of research techniques and exploration systems in the search for minerals. This was a comprehensive treatise on the profession, covering all topics that might be of interest to geologists and mining engineers, from field observations to laboratory studies. For decades this extensive textbook was considered the bible of geology at Harvard, the university that published it. “McKinstry was a geologist for Casapalca. This was the same position that I had some years later. He walked through the same places, used my same office, and sat at my same desk. Of course, there was no point of comparison between us”, smiles Mr. Alberto Manrique. This position allowed the Peruvian to have access to the company’s files, many of them signed by these two masters of the profession. “I remember some letters in which McLaughlin, as Chief Geologist, told McKinstry, Division Geologist at Casapalca, that his accounts were no good, that he had to add the expenses of the last trips. And I was surprised to see the manuscript letters of these two authorities discussing such mundane things”. In those files you could also find handwritten traces of maps and the drafts of the documents that, at that time, were already circulating as a method in the classrooms of the best universities. If there is something that mining professionals in Peru acknowledge, it is that Cerro was a great school for them. And, truth be told, not only was it here, but its methods and philosophy were embraced by professionals from different corners of the world. Among the Peruvian geologists, in addition to Mr. Alberto Benavides de la Quintana, there are former directors of that department such as Jaime Fernandez Concha and Ulrich Petersen, who had replaced Hans Hosberg in that position when in 1967 he succeeded H. Willis Higgs in the management of the Sierra Division in Peru. right– The company's geologists carry out their activities in the vicinity of the Morococha mine.
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