Routes, Roads, and Silver Trade in Cerro de Pasco, 1820-1860: The Internal Market in Nineteenth-Century Peru

Historians have studied the formation and dynamics of the internal market in Latin America, and particularly in the Andes, although mostly for colonial times.¹ In the case of nineteenth-century Peru, the study of the routes and roads that linked the internal market has just begun.² In the nine-teenth century, before the arrival of the railroad, most overland trade in Peru utilized an extensive muleteer system. Tracing this market and transport system offers a way to explore the role of merchants, muleteers, and traders, as well as the trading connections and circuits, that gave the domestic market its form and coherence.

The system of transport and markets was intimately linked with one of the central export sectors of nineteenth-century Peru: mining. Andean mining had been an extremely important economic activity since pre-Columbian times, and during the colonial era it developed strong links with the world market.³ Recent studies have emphasized the powerful connections of mining with domestic markets, the role that silver merchants and other entrepreneurs played in controlling the mining trade, and the role of Indian labor in the Andean mining system.⁴ Those works mostly have focused on Potosí during the colonial era. This essay, by contrast, will deal with the mining center of Cerro de Pasco and its regional market during the national period, the area that was called Lower Peru during colonial times.

Specifically, this study will focus on the internal face of an essential export sector: silver. The study of export economies in nineteenth-century Latin America has concentrated mostly on their external dimensions, particularly their links with external markets; the trading companies— national or foreign—involved in them; and the urban elites related to them. But to ship commodities to external markets, these goods first had to be brought to port, to the cities that were the nexis of the export business. What were the networks that brought export commodities to the ports and trading cities? What were the conditions under which internal trade was conducted? What was the impact of these internal transportation and trading networks on the evolution of the domestic economy and social structure?

This essay will address these questions with specific reference to the Cerro de Pasco region and to the trade and transport routes of silver in the nineteenth century, principally between 1820 and 1860. At the beginning of the century, seven official smelting houses were transforming raw silver metal (plata piña) into silver bars. They were located in Pasco, Lima, Puno, Trujillo, Arequipa, Ayacucho, and Tacna.⁵ The largest was Cerro de Pasco, producing on average 233,672 marcs of silver bars per year between 1820 and 1860, with an approximate value of 1,986,212 pesos per year. This was 59.6 percent of the national mining production.⁶ At the national level, silver mining produced on average 391,965 marcs per year, or 3,331,692.5 pesos.⁷

This estimate of the value of silver production is based on the highest price for which the Lima Mint bought silver bars, although local prices of silver metal were lower and international prices higher. While the Lima Mint during those years paid a highest price of 8.5 pesos per marc, or 8 pesos 4 reales, in the London market silver was purchased at between 9.8 and 10 pesos per marc, or 59 to 62 pennies per ounce.⁸ On the local side, for example in Hualgayoc, a mining center in Peru’s northern sierras, silver was bought at 6 pesos 2 reales per marc in 1827,⁹ These different price levels reflect different market logics. One is that of the local mining center, isolated in the Andean sierra; another one that of Cerro de Pasco, the largest and richest mining center in nineteenth-century Peru; and these communities certainly differ from Lima, the capital and the most important commercial center of the country, as well as from London, Paris, Hamburg, or later, New York, the international centers of the world silver trade. Thus the market orientation of mining is especially evident if mining means silver or gold production, since gold and silver are and historically were commodities important to the area.¹⁰

The common idea that Peruvian silver mining experienced a decline in the nineteenth century is misleading. Silver mining recovered its colonial dimensions very quickly after the devastation of the wars of independence, and even experienced a boom in the 1840s; production reached 514,588 marcs with a value of 4,373,998 pesos in 1842. This period of economic recovery, and even growth, stretched from the end of the independence wars to 1850—that is, the first half of the century—and was greatest in Cerro de Pasco, where production during the 1840s boom period rose well above the colonial level.¹¹ After the 1850s mining declined until the 1890s, except for a short period of growth in the 1870s.

Mining, then, and especially silver mining, was the most important commercial activity in Peru before the guano age, which started only in 1847 when guano first became Peru’s largest export commodity.¹² And even during the guano boom, silver mining was the activity that developed the largest commercial network in the internal, inland economy. The impact of mining on the internal economy lasted longer during the nineteenth century and was less subject to booms and busts. Thus, while the guano trade lasted from 1841 to 1878 and generated some 700 million soles, silver production continued throughout the century and generated some 384 million soles, more than half as much as the guano revenues.¹³ While guano generated more revenues, silver was a steadier export commodity.

Studies of the domestic impact of the guano trade have evaluated its contribution to national economic development. Jonathan Levin sustains the enclave thesis: that this export sector existed almost independently of the domestic economy, providing no development stimulus. The economist Shane Hunt argues that the return value of guano exports was high; furthermore, domestic demand expanded during the guano boom because of the growth of government revenues and expenditures and the earnings of a domestic business sector. Nevertheless, the inelasticity of domestic production did not permit a larger response to these stimuli.¹⁴

Hunt himself recognizes that the guano export economy generated no domestic transportation system and, indeed, almost no production costs.¹⁵ The opposite was true of the Andean mining economy: it generated a complex transportation system (although one that evolved out of the traditional sistema de arriería, or muleteering) and in general involved relatively high production costs. What’s more, guano collection was an offshore or coastal activity. Silver mining was focused mostly in the Andean highlands. For silver to reach the ports, an internal system of trading and transportation was needed. These geographic factors therefore fostered the development of a much larger internal market than did the guano trade. One hypothesis flowing from this comparison, then, is that the influence of silver production on national development was greater than that of guano, which retained its almost exclusively external market orientation. It is left to future studies to follow up on this hypothesis.

The internal market that silver mining encouraged was based on a muleteering trade that connected Cerro de Pasco and various mining centers with other productive zones—river basins, valleys of the sierra, the coast, and the Peruvian ceja de selva (the semitropical eastern slopes of the Andes). Silver was traded in the form of raw metal or, in lesser amounts, coins, which were exchanged for other goods such as domestic liquor (extracted from grapes or, later, sugarcane), cereals (fundamentally wheat), mercury, mining inputs, and textiles.¹⁶ The importance of these internal trade networks and transportation systems in the making of an internal market in pre-railroad Peru can be demonstrated by focusing first on the control that merchants wielded over mining production.¹⁷ Second, the routes and roads that formed the infrastructure had a distinctive role. Accounts from contemporary travelers portray in detail the characteristics of these routes, which linked Cerro de Pasco with surrounding areas. Instead of relying on general macroeconomic data, as the works of Levin and Hunt largely have, this study will present primary data obtained in local or national archives and related particularly to the Ministry of Finance.

Merchants and Control of the Silver Trade

In 1821 Dionicio de Viscarra wrote to the minister of state, Hipólito Unanue, about the internal silver trade. First he described the relations between merchants, rescatadores or bolicheros, as he called them, and the peons or busconeros in the mines. Later he referred to the relations between these same merchants and the mine owners in Cerro de Pasco.

Elsewhere in the same document he added:

These references give an image of a group of mineworkers and mine owners tightly controlled by merchants who provided them with mining materials (azogues, tools) and consumer goods (brandy, cloth, wheat), which sometimes were produced for mass and lower-class consumption (aguardiente, for example). Merchants also provided the mine owners with the necessary credit to keep the mining work going. Such credit was sometimes only enough to cover the unavoidable expenses of working the mines. Mining production offered no opportunity for large capital accumulation, at least according to Viscarra’s report. Finally, the merchants fixed or controlled the selling price of silver, and the miners did not have “another way to sell their alhaja under more favorable conditions.”

The strategic importance of the merchants, as this and other documents attest, was a familiar element in Peruvian and, in general, Andean mining that had its roots in colonial times.¹⁹ In 1833, therefore, the trading system seemed substantially unchanged from colonial times. On June 11, for example, the central government decreed, “silver bars can be sent without restriction to the Lima Mint by persons who so desire, although they shall bring with them coupons [guías].”²⁰ Earlier that year Francisco Quirós, the prefect of Junín province, based at Cerro de Pasco, expressed his pride in the measures he had recently taken to facilitate the trade between Lima and Cerro de Pasco, in which silver bars were running in one direction and “other merchandise,” especially consumer goods and mining inputs, in the opposite one. Quirós reported to the minister of finance:

Around 1844 the silver trade reached its height, “being the entire production of this mining center the quantity of twenty and four thousand marcs per month approximately, and delivering at least half of this to the city of Lima.”²² The merchants, however, clearly had established dominance over mining production by fixing the purchase price of silver. Despite a government decree settling “the piña price to eight pesos one real,” the merchants, “because of the scarcity of money circulation, tend to pay below the current price if it is paid in good money [moneda de buena ley, silver money of legal standard], so this kind of contract is preferred by the majority of the miners.”²³ The merchants also controlled the circulation process of silver ore, pastes, bars, and coins. Their dominance of mining production was a constant from 1821, the year of the Viscarra report and also of Peruvian independence, to the middle of the century.²⁴

In 1844 the merchants also were turning to new mechanisms to retain that control. Faced with a lack of currency in the mining center while virtually monopolizing the stock of monedas de buena ley, the merchants once again imposed their low prices on the purchase of silver metal, later obtaining a large profit when they sold the metal bars at the Mint House in Lima.²⁵

That same year the prefect of Cerro de Pasco, J. J. Salcedo, recognized that the merchants’ role was indispensable to the functioning of the mining economy in that region of the country. Without traders and merchant houses, he believed, no mining would have existed in Peru, or it would have gained only minor proportions. At the outset of his tenure as prefect, Salcedo had acknowledged that a decline had taken place in mining activity as a result of the antagonism between Lima merchants and Cerro de Pasco miners. But later, after the involvement of some local merchants at his insistence, mining recovered.

The reference strongly suggests a decrease in the silver trade’s tax burden. But it also gives insight into the commercial relationship between Cerro de Pasco and Lima. The trade arrangement for the silver bars coming out of the Cerro de Pasco mines was negotiated in Lima. Close contact was thereby established between Lima, the distribution center of commodities and money for the whole country, and Cerro de Pasco, the largest mining center in the central highlands. The merchants and the muleteer traders played a major role in maintaining this contact as they plied the routes between the ports and the capital city; and the contact itself opened the internal market to the international one.

The testimony of Prefect Salcedo, however, also suggests an alternative route in the Cerro de Pasco silver trade. The merchants Villate, Cavieses, Argumanis, Larco, Lequerica, and Matheus were transporting silver bars for export from Cerro de Pasco to the port of Huacho, about one hundred miles north of Lima, without entering the capital. This concession from Prefect Salcedo permitted them to orient their business directly to the export point, but forced them to pay in advance a tax of four reales per marc that was exported, equivalent to 6 percent of the value of silver. Salcedo’s move to allow Cerro de Pasco merchants a new and more direct connection with the port of Huacho also gave rise to renewed competition among merchants for control of the silver trade. Some Lima merchants stood to lose business under these new arrangements.

The purchase of silver in the mining centers, its trade for consumer goods, and its transport via mule trains to the ports fostered an internal circulation process that established linkages with other economic activities of the region. Its regional location thereby allowed silver mining to evolve as an export sector at the same time that it stimulated and assimilated into the internal economy. The export, or external circulation, of silver could not have taken place without a previous internal circulation process.

The Cerro de Pasco-Lima Route

Data reflecting the amount and frequency of silver deliveries from Cerro de Pasco to Lima reveal the contours of this trade, which, in spite of some competition, remained the most important flow of silver in the country during the nineteenth century. In 1826, for example, 164,223 marcs of silver arrived in Lima from Cerro de Pasco.²⁷ In 1843, in the midst of the greatest mining boom of the century, 201,456 marcs arrived in Lima from Cerro de Pasco.²⁸ And in 1886, immediately after the war with Chile and with the railroad already transporting the bulk of the silver production, the figure was 62,954 marcs.²⁹ The sources for these data are not exactly the same, so the numbers are not necessarily comparable. But the amounts are large enough to establish the Cerro de Pasco-Lima connection’s preeminence throughout the century. With regard to the frequency of the silver deliveries, an ordinance of 1861 declared “that a contingent going from Pasco to Lima may leave every 15 days” carrying the silver bars produced in the mining center, which merchants in Lima would buy with minted silver or silver coins.³⁰

The Swiss traveler Johann Jakob von Tschudi, who visited Peru between 1838 and 1842, best describes this trade in commenting on the trails and roads that left Cerro de Pasco.

The route between Lima and Cerro de Pasco was the official route of silver. This axis connected the great mining center and the country’s administrative, political, and commercial capital, where, according to José Abeleyra in 1844, “at least half” of Cerro de Pasco’s mining production was destined.³² The convoys of silver left Cerro de Pasco heading south through the Bombón pampa and descended the gorge of La Viuda to the Chillón valley approaching Lima. In Llangas or Santa Rosa de Quives, some 25 miles from Lima in the valley, the loads were exchanged, silver bars for minted silver or coins. The distance between Cerro de Pasco and Lima is about 186 miles, a ten-day mule trip at an average 18.6 miles per day. Only near the end of the journey did the actual exchange take place, the formal sale having been completed beforehand, either by the merchant houses at the Lima Mint or in Cerro de Pasco. The journey ended when the caravan entered the city of Lima.

The amount and the value of silver circulating between Cerro de Pasco and Lima can be roughly calculated, taking into consideration Abeleyra’s 50 percent claim. In 1820 the silver production of the official smelting house in Cerro de Pasco was about 312,000 marcs. In 1830 it was 95,000 marcs, and in 1840 it was 307,000 marcs.³³ The amount of silver transported from Cerro de Pasco to Lima thus can be estimated at 156,000 marcs in 1820, 47,500 marcs in 1830, and 153,500 marcs in 1840.

Estimating 120 kilograms as the normal load a mule could carry, transporting these quantities of silver would have required some 299 mules in 1820, 91 in 1830, and 295 in 1840. If, according to the ordinances of 1861, a transport convoy left the mining center every 15 days, that convoy would have comprised 12 mules in 1820, 4 in 1830, and again 12 in 1840. Here the calculation becomes somewhat problematic; it would have been impossible to dispatch a convoy as small as 4 mules. It is more likely that convoys of 8 mules departed once a month. But for general purposes it is reasonable to say that every 15 days, according to the 1820 and 1840 data, a convoy of 12 mules left Cerro de Pasco for Lima carrying 1,440 kilograms of silver with an approximate value of 50,000 pesos.

Documentary evidence supports these calculations. According to the records of the Lima Mint (Casa de Moneda), 66 silver bars arrived from Cerro de Pasco in May 1836 with a total weight of 11,220 marcs (2,513 kilograms) and an approximate value of 89,760 pesos. They were transported by 3 muleteers (arrieros) in 4 deliveries that used some 21 mules. Furthermore, according to this record, every 15 days, an average of 10 mules left Cerro de Pasco, transporting 1,304.5 kilograms of silver with an approximate value of 45,000 pesos.³⁴

Tschudi notes that the arrieros of the Cerro de Pasco-Lima route were based in the villages of Obrajillo and Canta. Obrajillo, whose name indicates the presence of an old colonial textile workshop (obraje), and Canta, a village of farmers and herders, both stood at the upper end of the Chillón valley.³⁵ The village of Yauli also was an important center for arriería in the central Peruvian sierra. There, the Indian or mestizo arrieros did not always use mules but also horses, llamas, or alpacas for carrying goods through the regional networks. Thus even the word arriero does not exactly describe these Andean peasant traders. In this case Harneros or troperos are the most appropriate terms, and the terms that actually were used in earlier eras and are still used today.³⁶

There was also a certain division of labor among the different beasts of burden. Mules were used for long-distance or interregional trade, while llamas were appropriated for local transportation.³⁷ Even in the mining centers, llamas were used to carry mineral ores from the mines to the haciendas de beneficio (mineral-refining mills), whereas mules transported the metal bars. Horses were ridden by the mine managers and supervisors and used for pulling millstones and crushing the silver-mercury amalgama. Oxcarts or horse carts were scarce in that rugged terrain, although they were numerous in the low valleys and ravines (quebradas), on the flat roads, and in cities like Lima, Jauja, or Huancayo.

The use of mules, llamas, or horses also depended on their availability. Llamas were more plentiful because the herding of llamas and alpacas was a venerable tradition in the Andean sierras. The use of these animals in mining-related transport therefore also indicates the enormous role that peasant economies and peasant communities played in supplying the nineteenth-century mining centers.³⁸

In addition to the Lima connection that followed the Chillón valley, the route connecting Cerro de Pasco with Huacho and other coastal ports was another link to the international market. Huacho was a minor export port that also maintained a heavy intercoastal trade with Lima.³⁹ In 1825 a Mr. Tudor, an English commercial agent linked with the establishment of the Steam Engine Company in Cerro de Pasco, took this route there from Huacho and described all the incidents, places, haciendas, mines, and mining mills he encountered during the trip.⁴⁰

Prefect Salcedo in 1844 was stimulating the silver trade between Cerro de Pasco and Huacho with this route, which followed the Huaura valley. The merchants and mine owners in Cerro de Pasco sent 35,870 marcs of silver to Huacho in 1844 via ibis route. The amount represents an estimated 280,000 pesos in commercial value and the use of some 70 mules over the course of the year. This is also the route used by the mule trader and merchant Patricio Ginez between 1820 and 1826 to deliver to Cerro de Pasco mercury, domestic and foreign textiles, and grape liquor, trading them for silver metal.⁴¹

Tschudi mentions this route, indicating that in 1838 “a contraband of 85,000 marcs of silver was taken to the port of Huacho and put safely on board a small schooner.”⁴² Thus the Huacho route was evidently a practical alternative for moving silver to the ports. It was nevertheless a route of lesser importance than the connector between Cerro de Pasco and Lima.

Interior Routes and the Domestic Market

Apart from these two routes toward the coast and the ports, the routes of the interior show the articulation of the mining center with regions that contributed to an important domestic production and an internal market. These routes connected Cerro de Pasco with the city of Huánuco to the east, with Huánuco el Viejo and Huaraz to the north, and with the towns of Tarma and Jauja and the Mantaro valley to the south. Tschudi recorded his acute observations of these different localities in the 1840s.

The route from Cerro de Pasco to Tarma indeed was one of the most important roads in the network that tied Cerro de Pasco with its regional environment.⁴⁴ It connected the great mining center with two of the most extensive and fertile valleys of the central sierra, Mantaro and Tarma.⁴⁵ This route represented a clear articulation of the Cerro de Pasco mining production with the interior economy.⁴⁶

This is the route, or, so to speak, the socioeconomic regional space, in which another mule trader, Francisco de Paula Otero, developed his enterprise. Otero was a powerful muleteer and merchant who traded some 3,200 jugs of grape liquor per year and a similar number of fanegas of wheat, apart from other minor items, with a total yearly value of some 52,000 pesos.⁴⁷ His trading territory embraced Cerro de Pasco in the north and Puquio, in the department of Ayacucho, in the south. This region, in the core of the Peruvian Andes, included at its heart the Mantaro valley, with its one hundred thousand hectares of very fertile lowlands. The silver from the northern mining center circulated through the regional economy, irrigating it like the river waters did the crop fields. The trains of mules following the routes Tschudi mentioned traveled on from Tarma to Puquio. Tarma was de Paula Otero’s place of residence. On the route from Tarma to Puquio he developed his business with the small muleteers Manuel Palacios and Mariano Reinoso, among others, carrying silver metal from one side and various agricultural commodities from the other.⁴⁸

Another example, although on a smaller scale, is that of an Italian merchant from Cerro de Pasco, Luis Cardona. Cardona in 1828 sent over the Cerro de Pasco-Tarma route loads of fruit and green barley (the latter used as livestock fodder), as well as 448 marcs of plata piña with an approximate value of four thousand pesos, which were confiscated by internal customs agents because he had not paid the necessary fiscal duties. Cardona was not, however, the transporter of these commodities; that job was done by the mule trader Tomás Valdez, a native and resident of Canta living at that time on the hacienda Matuchaca. Valdez transported the goods with “a mule and two wooden baskets.”⁴⁹

Fortunately, some studies exist about the rural life and agrarian structure of the Tarma and Mantaro valleys, as well as others on the Yanamarca valley, a smaller valley between the cities of Tarma and Jauja.⁵⁰ On the basis of these studies it can be said that generally a very large part of the agricultural and pastoral production of the landed and peasant economies in these valleys went to the mining area of Cerro de Pasco. Other important markets included Lima and Huancayo. Until 1847, at least, that production consisted of meat, wool, and other staples such as wheat, corn, and potatoes; coca, grape, and sugarcane liquor; and finally, after 1847, coffee, which was cultivated in the tropical areas of the Amazon forest, especially in the Chanchamayo valley. This region had just been “recovered” by the Peruvian government from the Ashaninka Indians, who had controlled it since the rebellion of Juan Santos Atahualpa (1742-1755).⁵¹

Around 1870, according to Fiona Wilson’s study, 120,000 arrobas of sugarcane liquor were traded from the San Ramón valley, bordering the Amazonian region southeast of Tarma. Of this total, 60,000 arrobas went west to the Mantaro valley, 40,000 to Tarma, and 20,000 to the mining areas of Cerro de Pasco and Huarochirí.⁵² The tropical San Ramón valley had displaced the valleys of lea and Pisco, on the Peruvian coast, as provider of liquor to the central sierra. The alcoholic basis of this beverage had also changed from grape liquor to sugarcane liquor (from aguardiente de uva to cañazo). The Peruvian sociologist Nelson Manrique’s studies also mention sugarcane liquor coming from Pariahuanca to be traded in the city of Huancayo.⁵³

Again according to Wilson’s figures, 120,000 arrobas of sugarcane liquor in volume amount to about 6.5 million marcs, 20 times more than the amount of silver metal extracted from Cerro de Pasco in those years. In terms of prices, that of sugarcane liquor was 160 times lower than the price of the silver marc. The economic production of the San Ramón valley, therefore, considering only the sugarcane liquor trade, would have had the value of 350,000 pesos per year, while the silver trade in Cerro de Pasco would have had the value of 2 million pesos, or almost six times the value of sugarcane liquor production in San Ramón.⁵⁴ Both areas nevertheless represented two poles of economic development in the region, and both were developing trade relations that constituted an internal market. Trade in commodities such as sugarcane or grape liquor, moreover, was significant in this market in nineteenth-century Peru because of the high domestic consumption of these two beverages, especially among the Indian peasant worker population. Another commodity of similar if not greater importance was coca leaves, for which, unfortunately, little primary documentation has been uncovered.⁵⁵

Tschudi completes the picture of the convergence of routes in Cerro de Pasco with reference to the town market.

Another traveler of the same period, the Englishman Archibald Smith, makes a similar reference when he itemizes some of the most widely consumed goods: potatoes, alcaser (green barley to feed livestock), maize, wheat, onions, cabbages, various kinds of lettuce, flowers—“for the use of chapels and churches”—besides “a great variety of fruits, [with the market also] full of good and fresh meat and other provisions in abundance.”⁵⁷

These and other accounts provide a basis for tracing the routes to Cerro de Pasco in the first half of the nineteenth century (see map). Oroya was a significant crossroads for the central sierra trade market. From this mining town and peasant community,

Finally, referring to the road from Cerro de Pasco to Tarma, Tschudi adds:

Tschudi’s descriptions of this landscape compare favorably with the testimonies of other nineteenth-century travelers. Two whose accounts are especially fruitful in their accuracy and detail are Mariano de Rivero y Ustáriz and the Italian traveler Antonio Raimondi.⁶⁰ Rivero y Ustáriz, general director of mining between 1826 and 1829, personally visited Cerro de Pasco in 1827, writing a report and preparing a map of the city “and its surrounding areas” that same year.⁶¹ Raimondi traveled throughout Peru several times in his 40-year residence there.

Methodologically it would be preferable to use the accounts of arrieros or llarneros to gain a precise picture of the road conditions and the routes of trade and transportation. Such testimonies, unfortunately, are scattered, and not descriptive at all. Travelers, by contrast, are very observant, and they portray in detail the roads and the incidents of their journeys. The obvious reason in this case is that the travelers were almost always foreigners, amazed by the discoveries they were making on these, their first trips to (for them) unknown regions of the Andes. The mestizo or Indian muleteers, accustomed to their routine trips, knew perfectly the areas they were traveling and were not surprised by them. Furthermore, they did not write, while the foreign traveler had the aim of producing a literary or scientific testament to the trip.⁶² Thus, for the historian of today the surprised newcomer left vivid accounts and descriptions of the Andean roads, while the frequent traveler, the person who knew well the landscape and the locales, left only scattered records.

The Rivero and Raimondi Accounts

According to Rivero’s observations, three roads radiated from Cerro de Pasco: one toward the northwest called “el camino de Tusi”; another to the northeast, “el camino de Huánuco”; and the third to the south, “el camino de Lima.” It was this one that later divided into a southeast path, the route to Lima, and a southwest path to Tarma, Jauja, and Huancayo. Describing this last road, Rivero mentions the old Inca trail that was still in use.

Rivero refers later to the “existence also of an underground aqueduct that goes from the Racracancha grassland to Tambo-Inga, a palace of the ancient Incas, whose ruins are over a hill that divides the plains; that aqueduct was used to channel water when the Inca king came to visit the towns.”⁶⁴ Nelson Manrique has noted that in the nineteenth century the Inca road that passed through the city of Huancayo was still in nearly perfect condition. Indeed, the city of Huancayo stood where it did because it was situated “on both sides of the Inca road, the famous highway that united longitudinally the empire.”⁶⁵ Some primary documents also contain references to the use of the Inca highway system—in colonial times called el camino Real (the royal road)—especially near Lima, climbing toward the Andes. Thus the miner José Manuel Días Rojas observed in 1832 that “those roads [are] tiring and dangerous, and these [the ones based on the Inca trail] very flat and well known.”⁶⁶

In this way, the fantastic system of Inca imperial roads—more than 14,000 miles long, according to John Hyslop—was still in use in the nineteenth century, at least in some places.⁶⁷ Those segments, moreover, were better and safer than the rest of the roads, paths, and tracks that linked Cerro de Pasco with its agricultural and pastoral hinterland; and some segments continued to be used as in Inca times without major improvements or repairs. A pre-Hispanic material heritage therefore was still the infrastructure for trading in the nineteenth century. In reference to the Cerro de Pasco routes, Rivero stated:

Only an hour’s walk from the mining center one left behind the puna weather of Pasco and Yauricocha, both more than 14,190 feet above sea level, and reached the threshold of more temperate Andean valleys. It is easy to understand the strong connections between the mining center and these cabeceras de valles (valley heads), from which most of its food staples came. The head of the Yanahuanca and Huallaga valleys, for example, led to the city of Huánuco, which Rivero mentions.

If Tschudi’s account emphasized silver’s exit routes to the coast (the Lima route) and those that connected with the interior (the Tarma route), Rivero traced the links with Huánuco and the agrarian production of the Huallaga valley.⁷⁰ The narratives of the Italian traveler Antonio Raimondi provide another contrasting perspective on the roads that connected Cerro de Pasco with its surrounding agricultural areas.⁷¹ Raimondi visited the central sierra and the Cerro de Pasco area principally in 1852, 1855, 1857, 1867, and 1885. His accounts of his journeys follow chronologically those of Rivero (1826-1829) and Tschudi (1838-1842).

In his 1852 and 1855 journals Raimondi does not make many references to the regional roads; but those notebooks nevertheless formed the basis for later comparisons and observations. His 1857 trip took him from Lima to Cerro de Pasco, and his description clearly notes the many stops a traveler or a muleteer had to make before arriving at the mining center.

In 1857 Raimondi went first to the pampa of Amancaes, leaving Lima from the Portada de Guía. His first stop was the hacienda Caballero and its tambo (trading post). From there he followed the path of the Río Seco for about 3 leagues (some 15 kilometers, or 9.4 miles), then passed through a narrow ravine where “one has to climb a hilltop and later enter the Chillón River valley.” Five leagues from the hacienda Caballero he reached Alcacoto, a small hamlet; and half a league farther he arrived in Yangas, or Santa Rosa de Quives, according to Raimondi “only a small town.” From Yangas he went to Navancocha, where the valley divided into two branches. Four leagues farther he found the village of Yaso. From Yaso it was a short trip to Obrajillo and thence to Ascalón, where Raimondi crossed the pass of La Viuda, 14,850 feet above sea level, the valley’s highest point. This took him out of the Chillón valley and into the altiplano, on the high plateau of Bombón or Junín.

As Raimondi describes it, close to Palcamayo “at the right side of the road there is a mine of high-quality coal, which is highly esteemed in Cerro de Pasco, where there is a lot of consumption of it because it gives a good flame. ⁷² He followed the road until eventually arriving in Huayllay, “where in its surroundings there are many mines of silver-bearing lead and also of pavonado [the common name for gray copper and similar minerals] and pacos [oxidized minerals], some of which are being exploited at the present time to good profit.”⁷³ Finally, not far from Huayllay was, and still is, a thermal spring. From there,

In 1867 Raimondi described a different route to Cerro de Pasco. This time he traversed the Mantaro valley, taking the route from Huancayo to Jauja. From Jauja he went to Tarma, passing the ruins of the great pre-Hispanic warehouses of Tarmatambo. Raimondi observed that in 1855 this had been a bad road but now, in 1867, it was a good one, a result of the commercial boom in the city of Tarma and the economic prostration of Jauja. Tarma was by then the leading urban center en la ceja de montaña and the receiving point for the expanding agricultural production of the San Ramón valley. In 1885 Raimondi would acknowledge the sources of this boom: a flourishing of economic activities on the “mountain” of Chanchamayo, especially the production of aguardiente de caña.⁷⁵ In 1867, from Tarma,

Around 1867, therefore, almost at the beginning of the Peruvian railroad era, the road between Huaypacha and Junín was in terrible condition, barely serving to link the mining town with the commercial and agricultural center. The road between Jauja and Tarma, on the other hand, was very good. Raimondi also comments that from the hamlet of Chacamarca, a league before Junín, the road was “completely flat and in good condition.” Thus some roads were being abandoned and would soon disappear, while others were gaining importance and rapidly being improved. It is notable that today there is no road between the old mining town of Huaypacha, now called Malpaso, and Junín.⁷⁷ What Raimondi was perceiving then was the beginning of a trend that would continue well into the twentieth century.

From Junín in 1867 the tireless traveler did not take the busy road through Carhuamayo and the tambo of Ninacaca, along the northeast side of Junín (Chinchaycocha) Lake. Instead he followed the other side of the lake to the village of Ondores. On the way he found several small hamlets with large Indian families who shared their dwellings with various domesticated animals, including dogs and guinea pigs.⁷⁸ Every hamlet had a deposit of champa, camelid manure that served as fuel. From Ondores, Raimondi continued to the salt mine of San Bias and to the small Indian village of Pary.⁷⁹ One league from Pary was the bridge over the original source of the Mantara River, and from there “the road was straight and flat” from Pasco to Vico to Cerro de Pasco.

From Cerro de Pasco Raimondi took the route north toward Ambo and later Huánuco, roads that Mariano de Rivero had traveled many times some 40 years earlier. “From Ambo to Huánuco the road is almost flat and very pleasant; it could even be considered as a promenade among beautiful haciendas cultivated with sugarcane,” Raimondi observes.⁸⁰ Afterward he returned to the mining center not through the “previous straight road” but through the village of Huácar, where he noted many fruit orchards (muchas huertas de frutales); Antapilca, a “miserable little village”; the hacienda Pucabamba; the estancia Viscas; and the lake of Alcacocha. From Alcacocha it was only two leagues to Cerro de Pasco.

The return trip to Lima took Raimondi through the Chancay valley, descending from the highest mountains of the Andes to the smooth plains of the coastal strip. While still on the altiplano this route passed through Rancas, a pastoral Indian community; the hacienda Conoc, whose “main output is livestock for wool (ganado lanar) and [which] is also very productive, having a secure market in the nearby city of Cerro de Pasco where a lot of meat is consumed,” and the Indian peasant communities of Huichaycocha and Pacaraos.⁸¹

Raimondi made his final observation about the routes to Cerro de Pasco in 1885, confirming what Rivero had said half a century before. The mining center could be reached via four gorges: from the south (Quiulacocha), the northwest (Rumiallana), the northeast (Pucayacu)—“from where the road to Huánuco goes”—and the east (Tullurauca). But this last “joins with the previous one in the place called La Quinua, two leagues of distance from Cerro de Pasco.”⁸² Raimondi concluded with this assessment: the mining center of Cerro de Pasco was located 52 leagues from Lima, where barley was “the only crop that is cultivated and is used as fodder for the beasts”; and the pit coal exploited nearby, in Huayllay and Rancas, was an important mining input there.⁸³

In sum, the routes and roads this traveler took on his way to Cerro de Pasco passed through a variety of settlements, from haciendas and tambos to villages, pueblos mineral to Indian communities. Apart from the mining centers, all the settlements were agricultural or pastoral. These pedestrian highways thereby sustained a web of internal economic relationships within a broader economic fabric, linked through the muleteer trade to the main regional export activity, silver production. Some of these circuits were frequently traveled, such as the road to Lima; some virtually abandoned, such as the way from Huaypacha to Junín.⁸⁴ The principal ones were the basis for the Cerro de Pasco silver trade; the marginal trails were the paths of contraband or of the illegal silver trade.

The principal routes linked Cerro de Pasco with Lima through the Chillón valley; with the valleys of Tarma and Jauja through Junín and Carhuamayo; with the Huallaga valley through the city of Huánuco; and with northern Peru through the Yanahuanca valley to Huánuco Pampa and Huaraz. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the geographer Germán Stiglich described again these historic thoroughfares that connected the most important nineteenth-century mining center with its trading partners. For Stiglich, the pattern of the Cerro de Pasco mining trade was very simple. Only three main cities had strong ties with the mining center: Lima, “que dista 52 leguas” (52 leagues away); Tarma, “que dista 18 leguas”; and Huánuco, “que dista 23 leguas.”⁸⁵ And so it remained for Cerro de Pasco in its regional context until a new trader appeared on the scene. This trader created its own routes, overwhelming the paths previously walked by muleteers and merchants, porters and travelers. The newcomer was a huge and noisy machine, making its entry into Peruvian history: the railroad. But that is another story.⁸⁶

The Value of Regional Trade

The trade that circulated over the nineteenth-century routes that Rivero, Tschudi, and Raimondi have described might be quantified with reference to the goods going to Cerro de Pasco to be exchanged for silver metal or silver coins. It can be assumed that the total value of silver production in Cerro de Pasco had to be traded for other goods and services, including labor, minus the profits of the mine owners and, more important, those of the silver merchants. There is, then, a direct relation between the amount of silver production and the amount of the regional trade.

The historian Magdalena Chocano, analyzing Cerro de Pasco’s regional trade at the end of the colonial period, presents data from Internal Customs records that show the regional distribution of the trade before and including 1819 (see table 1). According to Chocano’s data, clearly 79 percent of the goods entering Cerro de Pasco that year came from Lima.⁸⁷ But these data are imperfect because they do not include several kinds of goods that did not pay the alcabala, the colonial sales tax. Such goods included food staples like potatoes, bread, corn, and wheat. A clear sign of the limitation of Chocano’s sources emerges in comparing the total value of this trade (302,666 pesos) with the value of Cerro de Pasco silver production in the same year (1,523,416 pesos). The regional trade would amount to only 19.8 percent of the value of silver.

Chocano’s studies nevertheless are very useful for showing the Cerro de Pasco trade network, the regional articulation of localities where goods were exchanged for silver that put mining areas in contact with other economic activities, such as agriculture, herding, and craft production. Thus Cerro de Pasco received goods from communities as near as Tarma and Cajatambo and as far away as Salta and Lambayeque.

In 1849 the Cerro de Pasco correspondent for the Lima newspaper El Comercio elaborated a geography of the regional trade that converged in the mining city.⁸⁸ The values listed by this correspondent exceed those presented by Chocano (see table 2). The total trade with Cerro de Pasco, according to this source, was 2.5 million pesos, or 92.5 percent of the previous year’s silver production.⁸⁹ This much higher figure reflects not only the growth of regional trade in the intervening years but also a likely change in the nature and patterns of that trade. It is probable that from 1819 to 1849 the relative importance of some areas grew more than others, changing the directions and dimensions of the regional flows in agricultural, pastoral, or artisanal goods. In any case, both references reinforce the image of a large trade network, a regional market in the making, either following or driven by a healthy mining economy that produced the vital commodity, silver. This regional trade network presupposed the routes and the roads, the infrastructural support, on which this trade was based.

Some Propositions About the Internal Market

What are the tentative conclusions to take from these accounts of the internal makeup of Peru’s silver economy? First, the predominance of silver merchants over mining producers is clear. Profits came mostly from exchange rather than from production. The merchants’ control hinged on two mechanisms: control of credit and the supply of mining inputs and consumer goods, and control of market prices. Merchants obtained the silver metal at low prices and supplied the mining inputs and consumer goods at high prices. The silver trade, furthermore, was based mostly on the exchange of goods for goods, silver metal for various commodities, without actual cash purchases. Merchants sent the silver bars to the government mints and obtained cash for them; but this money did not generally return to the mining centers. What did return were goods and mining inputs, brought in by the merchants via the muleteer system. And the prices of these goods and inputs once again were manipulated by the merchants.

Silver therefore was not fully realized as a commodity, at least not from the mine owners’ perspective. The miners exchanged silver for goods and inputs. The relative concentration of money in the merchants’ hands deprived the miners of investment capital.⁹⁰ A dependent relationship developed between miner and merchant, and a similar one between merchant and muleteer.

Muleteering (arriería) is the practical example of this study’s general proposition, that commercial and transport activities predominated over productive ones in the central sierra and its mining economy. Whether agents of commercial houses or independent operators, these regional traders carried the silver and the exchange goods over the roads between the mining centers and the distribution centers for various commodities, such as Lima; between coastal export outlets and interior agricultural and pastoral areas.

These propositions suggest that future research should focus in more detail on the role of the largest commercial houses, especially those of Lima, in the marketing, financing, and production of the mining economy in the central sierra. The merchants developed a comprehensive, reliable network of contacts and distribution. They aimed to reach all the mining centers, trying always to control the prices of both incoming consumer and mining goods and outgoing silver metal. They worked with the muleteers who plied the mining routes. In this way the merchants contributed to the creation of a market, albeit a controlled and coercive one.

The silver trade in some respects had a greater significance in developing a domestic market and economy than did guano. Guano production was localized on the coast and some islands, so its regional and geographic impact was not as extensive as that of silver, whose production centers were deep in the country’s interior. While the wealth and capital generated by guano production surpassed that of silver, especially during its boom years after the 1850s, silver arguably provided a greater stimulus to the development of Peru’s internal economy. Silver thus could be said to have had a greater qualitative impact on the economy in general, compared to the more purely quantitative impact of guano.

The silver trade routes to the inter-Andean valleys, the Mantaro and the Huallaga, were especially important to that market because they connected the central mining area of Cerro de Pasco with agricultural and pastoral producing areas. A complete system of routes and roads and a transportation system based on mules and llamas thereby took shape.

The interior routes basically formed three axes. One was the Mantaro valley and neighboring areas, including the most important cities of Huancayo, Jauja, and Tarma and the Amazon tributaries at La Merced, San Ramón, and Chanchamayo. From here came aguardiente, coffee, and coca. Another was the Huallaga valley and the city of Huánuco, also producing sugarcane and coca, as well as grains, vegetables, and fruit. The third was the northern route, much less important, to Huánuco El Viejo and Huaraz, arriving at the Santa River valley. Along these regional axes— or sometimes avoiding them—traders both legal and illegal connected Cerro de Pasco with some 20 cities and towns in late colonial times, 14 or more local sources in 1849 (see tables 1 and 2).

The accounts of travelers who followed the trade routes at different times fill out in rich detail the picture of the internal market organized by the silver trade. They describe all the localities they passed, the haciendas, estancias, towns, Indian villages, and peasant communities; the types of landscape and production found there; and the links established with these suppliers as well as “mineral towns,” suppliers of mining inputs, and peasant Indian communities, suppliers of livestock, pack animals, and other products. They also convey the state of those roads and the conditions of transportation in nineteenth-century Peru before the advent of the railroad.

These narratives attest to the enduring presence of these routes and roads; the occasional peaks of use for some, during agricultural booms; the deterioration and abandonment of others. Yet it was over these routes and governed by those trading conditions that the greatest mining center in nineteenth-century Peru was linked to its regional context and gave rise to the favorable environment in which the internal market flourished.

An earlier version of this paper was submitted, at the kind request of Rory Miller, to the symposium “Regional Approaches to Peruvian History,” 46th International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, July 1988, and was written while the author was a Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University. I thank especially Steve Haber for his help and support during my stay at Stanford. The present version was written under the auspices of the Latin American Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I thank the three anonymous HAHR referees for their comments and criticism and my wife, Susan C. Stokes, for her invaluable help. I also thank Nicanor Domínguez for preparing the map.