Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 110
Business uncertainty was the worst deterrent that undermined my work at CGL and it
limited our ability to entrench and build the operation steadily. Personal long term
planning was rendered captive to sociopolitical events beyond most people’s control. It
affected not just me but every other person in Bolivia involved in value creation. It is one
explanation of why I said at the outset of this book that it matters very much where the
person with a dream sets out to pursue it. It is undoubtedly difficult for people who have
not had the experience of dealing with business environments as unpredictable as
Bolivia’s to understand how just staying open is a triumph. To have survived all these
years as one continuous entity is a great tribute to the superb leadership of my brother
Chris and subsequent CGL management teams.
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THE MINING COUNTRY.
Over the years I have found out that a key ingredient in human personal development is
the presence of role models for our endeavors. My son Cid, since an early age, has
become a model as I see him progress through life. I admire both my brothers for their
accomplishments. My father was always my main example. In addition to my admiration
for him, while in Bolivia I began to pay attention to another overshadowing business
hero whose life’s achievements impressed me deeply.
Picking up with my statements on Chapter 2 about Bolivia’s fame as a world-class
mining country and the decline of the precious metals boom at the turn of the 18 th
Century, it must be noted that the search for valuable metals never totally ended. Since
the American Civil War the industrial revolution created an ever-increasing demand for
non-ferrous metals that heretofore had not had a large commercial market. Late in the
19 th and early in the 20 th Century, wars in Europe and in the Far East accelerated the
demand for new metals. Some of these, such as copper, tin, zinc, antimony, wolfram
and lead were known to exist in Bolivia.
The lure of mineral riches was a powerful force attracting prospectors from many
different places. Following this attraction in the late 1880s, a young man from the
Cochabamba valleys went to the mining town of Oruro, high in the Andes, in search of a
job and his destiny. His name was Simon I. Patino. After a few years of self-taught
apprenticeship in the mining logistics business, he found employment as a clerk in a
supply house owned by a German merchant named Hermann Fricke. In the course of
buying minerals and selling supplies, he became well acquainted with a miner by the
name of Sergio Oporto, who was one of Mr. Fricke’s customers. Mr. Oporto, now well
known to Mr. Patino, ran out of credit because of the poor performance of his mine.
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