Abstract

This article characterizes and analyzes quantitatively and qualitatively the mortality processes developed in Chuquicamata between 1915 and 1923, a stage under the management of the Guggenheim family. For this purpose, a valuable unpublished documentary file found in the ruins of the abandoned camp is used. The file contains the record of the dead who are buried in the Chuquicamata cemetery. Thus, we will be able to characterize and analyze 2,353 cases corresponding to deaths for the selected period, seeing the correlations of the factors or causes of death, the periods, frequencies and their impact according to gender. In this way, the modes of health care, the labor singulari ties and the environmental characteristics of the camp are also characterized, which in one way or another intervened in the indicators that determined the quality of life and the processes that extinguished it. We can see that, with the industrial inauguration of Chuquicamata by the Guggenheims, an increase in the scale of production was stimu-lated and it became the largest copper mine in the world, a milestone that was possible thanks to a new technological and procedural reality that altered the environment, also giving rise to a sociobiological metabolism in the new community that had to inhabit the mineral and subsidize with its biology a foreign mining project.