www.elcomercio.pe

Elcomercio.pe is the most popular news website in Peru. It was launched on January 15th 1997 and had a record 77,000 visits to the site that same day. In 2015, nearly 20 years later, the monthly average is almost 21 million users, with peaks reaching up to 25 million, according to IABPerú. From its beginning until the end of 2006, under the direction of the journalist Juan Carlos Luján Zavala, the website dedicated itself to reproducing the content of the printed format, but also to collecting local news stories from a political impact, from international agencies or from other sources of credibile information. Between 2007 and 2015, Luján was replaced by Fabricio Torres del Águila, a former sports journalist and television reporter and producer at Frecuencia Latina (now Latina). In that period, the audience of elcomercio.pe began to grow in number based on entertainment, sports and other stories originating from social networks, leaving the serious content aside that had characterized this website in its early years. The current manager of the website department of “El Comercio” is Carlos Salas, former editor of the sports section of “El Comercio.”

Key facts

Audience Share

Missing Data

Ownership Type

Private

Geographic Coverage

National coverage

Content Type

Free 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 Peru: 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

1997

Founder

Empresa Editora El Comercio S.A.

Affiliated Interests Founder

The group “El Comercio” or “Ecomedia” -controlled by the peruvian families “Miró Quesada” and “García Miro”- is the largest media holding company in Peru and is among the 170 most important companies in the list produced by the publication "Peru: The top 100,000 companies in 2015." The group attracts the largest audience through the country's oldest newspaper (“El Comercio”), the most-watched free-to-view television channel (América Televisión), its cable news channel (Canal N), the best-selling popular newspaper in Latin America (El Trome) and the digital versions of their printed formats that lead the ratings in web traffic analysis. They also own the newspapers Perú21 and Correo (political tabloids), Gestión (economy), El Bocón & Depor (sport) and the Publimetro franchise that is distributed free of charge.

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 Peru 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 (Vicepresidenta del directorio de Vigenta Inversiones), César Pardo Figueroa Turner (Gerente general de Vigenta Inversiones), Enrique Pasquel Rodríguez (Subdirector del diario El Comercio), Martha Meier Miró Quesada (Exeditora de El Comercio)

Affiliated Interests other important people

Milagros Miró Quesada Martens de Rodríguez Larraín

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

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

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 Peru, produced by the magazine “Semana Económica (Economy Week).” In his opinion columns, Pasquel considers himself liberal.

Martha Meier Miro Quesada

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.