The Savior

In the shade of a chilly, barren mountain called India Muerto (Dead Indian), 9,000 feet up in the northern Chilean Andes, lies the world's newest major find of copper ore. The discovery, says Roy H. Glover, board chairman of Anaconda Co., "is the greatest and most important development in copper mining in Chile since the initiation in 1914 of Chuquicamata" --and famed Chuquicamata is the world's biggest copper ore body. Last week Chile's President Carlos Ibanez gave Anaconda* an official go-ahead to spend $53 million toward making Indio Muerto an active producer for the booming international copper market.

Indio Muerto was explored and found promising four years ago. Anaconda quietly bought it, but felt little incentive to mine it: the Chilean government was taking a discouraging 85% of taxable income. Then, last May, Chile voted a new tax law that takes 75% of taxable income at the present production rate, but drops as output rises, sinking to 50% when production is doubled. With new incentive, Anaconda's subsidiary, the Andes Copper Mining Co., drilled enough exploratory holes at Indio Muerto to block out 78 million tons of high-grade ore (1.6% copper).

The new mine will go into production in four or five years, just in time to replace the company's dying Potrerillos mine. It thus promises not only to increase Chile's total output of about 450,000 tons of copper a year, but will head off an actual decrease. Out of satisfaction and relief, the company last week renamed the mine El Salvador--The Savior.

* The company's name comes from its parent roine in Butte, Mont., christened thus by its discoverer, who, while searching for something novel and mellifluous, read a Horace Greeley editorial in the New York Tribune enthusiastically describing the Union Army in the Civil War as encircling the Southern forces "like a giant anaconda."

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