Mariano Egaña

Mariano Egaña Fabre ( born June 15, 1793 in Santiago de Chile, † June 24, 1846 ) was a Chilean politician. In 1823 he served as a member of the Government Junta for three weeks as head of state of his country.

Mariano Egaña studied after school law at the Real Universidad de San Felipe and left the university in 1811 as an attorney.

In 1810, when the Chilean independence movement arose against the Napoleonic - Spanish troops, the young Mariano supported this movement just like his father, Juan Egaña Risco. In 1813 he took over for the Chilean government junta, the Office of Secretary of the Interior, until he was captured by the Spaniards after the battle of Rancagua and banished with several other revolutionaries on the Juan Fernandez Islands in the Pacific.

1817, when the Chileans were victorious at the Battle of Chacabuco, the exiles were able to return to the mainland, in the following years, Mariano Egaña worked under the Director Supremo Bernardo O'Higgins in the financial sector and in the Municipality of Santiago de Chile. After the fall of O'Higgins he provided under Ramon Freire y Serrano temporarily the post of Interior and Minister of Marine. During the three-week reign of the junta of Deputies in August 1823 Mariano Egaña represented the provincial capital Santiago and served as a member of the collective governance, to Ramón Freire abberief the junta appointed by him again, and even ruled as sole Director Supremo.

The brilliant lawyer Egaña stood as a head behind some of the reforms of the Liberals under Freire, including electoral reform and the opening of primary schools and the abolition of corporal punishment. In 1824 he was sent as Minister Plenipotentiary to Europe to reach from the UK to recognize the Chilean independence by the European powers and negotiate a debt relief for the public finances in some European creditors. In 1829 he returned to Chile.

There he found the liberal- federalist government plunged the country into civil war, emerged the conservative centralists under José Joaquín Prieto Vial victorious from the. Mariano Egaña was lucky, no pronounced federalist and also at the time of bitter controversy to have been out of the country, and so he was able to stay under the Conservative government in important offices.

Thus, the new government appointed him to the Supreme Court of the country. From 1831 he represented his hometown of Santiago in the Chilean Senate, and in 1833 he sat in the Commission which drew up the Constitution of 1833, in which he took great influence. In the Peruvian- Bolivian Konföderationskrieg between the Chilean government and the Peruvian- Bolivian Confederation, which also Ramón Freire stood to the side, to return to power in his home, Mariano Egaña officially declared the war as a diplomatic representative of Chile.