Diario El Comercio

“El Comercio” -controlled by the Miró Quesada and García Miro families- is the most important newspaper in Perú and the most prominent among all the newspapers that the group publishes.

In the presidential elections of 2006 and 2011, according to diverse political analyses of the time, the newspaper “El Comercio” supported the candidates Alan García and Keiko Fujimori, both right-wing, against the nationalist Ollanta Humala, who eventually won at the last hurdle. This support was most evident in the 2011 campaign, when the Nobel Prize for Literature winner, Mario Vargas Llosa, resigned as a newspaper columnist through a letter in which he said that “El Comercio” had become a "propaganda machine for the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori”

Key facts

Audience Share

Missing Data

Ownership Type

Private

Geographic Coverage

National coverage

Content Type

Paid content

Data Publicly Available

ownership data is easily available from other sources, e. g. public registries etc.

2 ♥

Media Companies / Groups

Grupo El Comercio (hoy Vigenta Inversiones S.A.)

Ownership

Voting Rights

168 shareholders with a right to vote

Individual Owner

José Alejandro Graña Miró Quesada

4.6%

Group / Individual Owner

Enriqueta Graña Miró Quesada

Peruvian (1950), member of the Miró Quesada family, José Graña’s little sister and linked to the largest construction company in Perú: Graña & Montero (see interests of Jose Alejandro Grana Miró Quesada). Has not held public office nor has any registered political affiliation.

4.6%

Alfonso Miró Quesada de la Fuente ‘Foncho’

Peruvian (1934), member of the Miró Quesada family and member of the board at Editora El Comercio S.A. He has not held public office and he has been dedicated to cultural activity for nearly his entire life. No registered political affiliation. His nephew-in-law is Juan José Garrido Koechlin, director of the newspaper Perú21.

4.2%

Media Companies / Groups

Grupo El Comercio (hoy Vigenta Inversiones S.A.)

Facts

General Information

Founding Year

1839

Founder

Manuel Amunátegui (chileno) y Alejandro Villota (argentino)

Affiliated Interests Founder

The two founders of the newspaper “El Comercio” arrived in Perú in the 19th century, during the wars of independence in South America. Amunátegui served in the military of the Spanish crown and Villota served in the liberation army of José de San Martín.

Ceo

José Antonio García Miró Miro Quesada

Affiliated Interests Ceo

Has held the position of Chairman of the “Empresa Editora El Comercio” since 2005. During his tenure, the group has become the largest media corporation in the country and also elected its first editor-in-chief outside the Miró Quesada family: the economist Fritz du Bois in 2013. No registered political affiliation.

Editor-In-Chief

Fernando Berckemeyer Olaechea

Affiliated Interests Editor-In-Chief

Peruvian lawyer born in 1978 who holds a master's degree from Harvard University. He is a member of one of the most traditional families in Lima. He is currently only the second editor-in-chief at “El Comercio” who does not come from the Miró Quesada family. He took office in 2014 after the death of the economist Fritz du Bois. He was editor of the Editorial section from 2012. He is a known liberal in the political and economic spheres. He appears in the top 30 in the annual survey on power in Perú and is first in the written press section (2016), both produced by the magazine “Semana Económica (Economy Week).” Prior to joining “El Comercio,” Berckemeyer was a partner in one of the most important tax law firms in Lima: the “Olaechea de Lima” studio (owned by his maternal family and managed by his uncle José Antonio Olaechea Álvarez Calderón). Another of his uncles, Pedro Olaechea Álvarez Calderón, was director of Confiep and Adex, the two largest business associations in the country. He is currently a congressman in President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s party (2016-2021).

Other Important People

Milagros Miró Quesada Martens, César Pardo Figueroa Turner, Enrique Pasquel Rodríguez, Martha Meier Miró Quesada

Affiliated Interests other important people

Milagros Miró Quesada Martens de Rodríguez Larraín

Vicepresidenta del directorio de Vigenta Inversiones. Joined the Board in 1998. She is married to the lawyer Emilio Rodríguez-Larraín, shareholder and chairman of the Peruvian airline Lan Perú).

César Pardo Figueroa

Gerente general de Vigenta Inversiones. Is an engineer who has held the position for 20 years and is also a director of the other subsidiaries in the “El Comercio” group.

Enrique Pasquel Rodríguez

Subdirector del diario El Comercio. Is a lawyer. He studied Law at the Pontifical Universidad Católica del Perú at the same time as Fernando Berckemeyer. Between 2011 and 2012 he worked at the Aramburú Heudebert & Asociados studio (specialized in tax, mining and gas), one of the partners of which is the lawyer Fernando Berckemeyer Conroy, father of the current director of “El Comercio”. When Berckemeyer was named head of the Editorial section of the newspaper in 2012, he took Pasquel as his deputy editor. Between 2007 and 2011, Pasquel worked at the specialized authority for the elimination of bureaucratic barriers, unfair competition and dumping at the National Institute for the Defense of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property (Indecopi) as a civil servant. Between 2005 and 2008 he was a researcher at the “Instituto Libertad y Democracia (Institute of Liberty and Democracy)” (ILD), the NGO founded by the economist Hernando de Soto. In 2016, he appeared in the written press top 10 in the annual survey on the power in Perú, produced by the magazine “Semana Económica (Economy Week).” In his opinion columns, Pasquel considers himself liberal.

Martha Meier Miro Quesada

Exeditora de El Comercio. Ran for Congress in 2000 for a political party linked to former President Alberto Fujimori (imprisoned for human rights violations and corruption). She was a member of the board of directors at “El Comercio” until early 2000. Her cousin Alejandro Miró Quesada Cisneros, then director of the newspaper, accused her of leading a minority sector of shareholders to pressure him to step down during the fall of the Fujimori regime. This case reached the Inter-American Press Association. After that Meier ended up withdrawing from the media. In 2008, she returned to the newspaper as editor of the weekend edition, being well-known in her public affiliation with Fujimori in the elections between Keiko Fujimori and Ollanta Humala in 2011. That same year, Nobel prize in Literature winner Mario Vargas Llosa resigned as columnist of the newspaper through a letter in which he considered that Meier had turned the newspaper into a "propaganda machine for the candidacy of Keiko Fujimori". He remained in office for six years, until he was dismissed for the second time in 2015 by decision of the current director Fernando Berckemeyer.