Simón I. Patiño

Simón Ituri Patiño (born June 1, 1862 in Cochabamba , † April 20, 1947 in Buenos Aires ). The Bolivian tin baron was considered one of the richest men of his time.

He married Albina Rodríguez Ocampo (* 1873, † 1953) in 1889, their children were Graziella, Elena, Luzmilla, René and Antenor Patiño Rodríguez .

Growing up in poor conditions, the mestizo started out as a mining apprentice. He later worked for a small business selling mining equipment. A customer had no money to pay and offered him a deed of ownership over a mine. Out of pity he accepted, to the displeasure of his boss, who fired him. The mine, which at first appeared worthless, turned out to be a "gold mine" as Patiño discovered a tin ore vein. With great skill, he then quickly expanded the business. As early as 1924 he owned 50 percent of the national production and controlled the European processing of Bolivian tin, the large deposits of which had been exploited since 1899. Simón I. Patiño operated a vertical economic integration of the tin industry. In 1919 he took control of William, Harvey & Co., Ltd. in Liverpool . On June 5, 1924, he founded “Patiño Mines & Enterprises Consolidated Inc.” with British capital. headquartered in Delaware . With this he acquired Williams Harvey & Co. in 1929. In 1934 he gained control of the Consolidated Tin Smelters Limited , which was created from the merger of Williams Harvey , Cornish Tin Smelting and Eastern Smelting and produced 40 percent of the tin. He eventually controlled eight tin production sites. While other tin barons like Carlos Victor Aramayo and Mauricio Hochschild spent most of their time in Bolivia, Patiño mostly lived in Europe.

From 1926 to 1947 he was the Bolivian envoy in Paris, and from July 6 to 15, 1938, delegate of the government of Germán Busch Becerra to the Évian Conference . After his death, large parts of his property were nationalized during the Bolivian Revolution of 1952.

For health reasons, he never moved into his retirement home, the Palacio Portales , built in the style of eclecticism . The magnificent villa can still be viewed in Cochabamba today.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ The small encyclopedia , Encyclios-Verlag, Zurich, 1950, volume 2, page 326
2. ↑ Eduardo R. Quiroga, 2. The historical evolution of mining in Bolivia (PDF; 169 kB), p. 129
3. ↑ Jens Streckert: The capital of Latin America. A History of Latin Americans in the Paris of the Third Republic (1870-1940) . Böhlau, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna 2013, pp. 146-149 .

Web links

• Tin Barons - Their Rise and Fall. Sven Schaller. In: Quetzal, January 2009

predecessor	Office	successor
Félix Avelino Aramayo	Bolivian envoy in Paris from 1926 to 1947	Jorge Ortiz Linares