74 75 cerro de pasco The greatest investment of the XXth century the excitement of auto racing. What’s more, he was a collector of racing cars that he himself competed in the first world car races. The engineer had established his residence on the Côte d’Azur, and went on to build and patent new designs of carburettors for racing cars and, of course, he attracted attention in European society, always at the wheel of his favourite powerful Mercedes Benz cars. On learning that Casapalca’s low prices and mismanagement had put the company on the brink of bankruptcy, Johnston decided to return in 1909 and take the helm of the company as president. For the next four years he lived between the mines and the smelter, achieving a rebirth for the company by investing his own equity and loans from different banks. By virtue of this financing, it was able to install more modern equipment in the metal smelter, including a special line for copper, and to acquire dozens more mines. Thanks to his dedication and strategic planning, the company managed to position itself once again among the top mining companies in the country but, when he was in Lima, about to accompany his Peruvian son Antenor Johnston Torres to continue his studies in Europe, death came to him on May 8, 1913. Six years later, when Minera Casapalca sat down to negotiate with Copper, it was clear that it aimed only to sell at the best possible price. With this purchase, Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation would establish itself as being by far as the largest mining company on Peruvian soil and in South America. The new worker Although the gringos brought knowledge, the latest technology and a comprehensive model of mining development, one of the problems they had not anticipated was the possible shortage of labour. As economic historian Heraclio Bonilla points out in “El Minero de los Andes”, the main difficulty of the company was that there was no working class in Peru and that in the mountains, especially in the communities, small-scale agriculture was deeply rooted as were ancestral customs such as communal work, and breaking the chain of mutual aid also implied self-harm and social rejection. In some way, the Andean communities had been unscathed by the slavery model of the coastal haciendas, which first capitalised on the strength of the blacks and then on the industriousness of the Asians. Thus, the Andean people preferred to work for the mine only when their lands were lying fallow in order to obtain additional income, but without ensuring their permanence. Also, at the beginning of the century, their difficulties in adapting culturally to the rigours of schedules and the practices of industrial work became evident. As we saw earlier, initially the company replicated the national miners’ policy of “enganche”, based on wage advances to force workers to stay longer at their jobs, but this practice was rejected as inefficient. Then it decided to stimulate the offer by raising wages and established salary scales according to the skills and capacities of each applicant. It should be noted that then, the Right– It would take little time for the Peruvian workers to begin to specialise. This was especially applicable for those working at the smelter and on the railroad.
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