1 Nuevo Sol 175 years of El Comercio Newspaper

El Comercio, founded in Lima on May 4, 1839 by Manuel Amunátegui and Alejandro Villota, is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Peru and among the oldest in Latin America. It launched just eight years after Peruvian independence, at a moment when the young republic was still consolidating its institutions — and has survived wars, coups, military censorship under Velasco Alvarado in the early 1970s, and the economic chaos of the late 1980s.

The Velasco government's forced expropriation of the press in 1974 shuttered El Comercio's independent editorial voice for nearly a decade — a detail that gives a commemorative issue in its honor a quietly pointed political dimension.