This book presents the biography of the extraordinary Spanish industrialist and entrepreneur Eduardo Barreiros, who was a conquistador. He conquered markets, not peoples, and these conquests began in his own country, Spain, not in Mexico or in Peru, where men such as Cortés and Pizarro made their names. Barreiros's triumphs included exports in countries as far removed and as far apart as Egypt and Venezuela and Portugal and Germany. Barreiros came to maturity in the 1950s, when the regime in Franco's Spain was almost as hostile to private enterprise as Communist ministers would have been. Succ ... More

This book presents the biography of the extraordinary Spanish industrialist and entrepreneur Eduardo Barreiros, who was a conquistador. He conquered markets, not peoples, and these conquests began in his own country, Spain, not in Mexico or in Peru, where men such as Cortés and Pizarro made their names. Barreiros's triumphs included exports in countries as far removed and as far apart as Egypt and Venezuela and Portugal and Germany. Barreiros came to maturity in the 1950s, when the regime in Franco's Spain was almost as hostile to private enterprise as Communist ministers would have been. Successive Spanish ministers of industry, Suanzes in particular but also Sirvent and the alleged modernizer López Bravo, spurned independent entrepreneurs, and were still advocates of national syndicalism, which, in practice, was a kind of bureaucratic statism. Barreiros, who, with his brothers, created a large industrial empire from nothing in ten years, proved that these great men were mistaken. He was a motor manufacturer and made trucks, tractors, buses, and, finally, saloon cars. The later life of Barreiros had its frustrations as well as its triumphs.