Vicuña Larraín, Francisco Ramón (c. 1775–1849)

Francisco Ramón Vicuña Larraín (b. c. 1775; d. 13 January 1849), Chilean Liberal politician. A prominent personality in the congresses and governments of the 1820s, Vicuña Larraín was president of the Senate in 1829 and in that capacity was the first to become acting president of the republic while President Francisco Antonio Pinto (1775–1858) recuperated from an illness (July 1829). In September 1829 an irregularity in the election of the vice president by congress (which selected a Liberal in spite of the fact that a Conservative had won a plurality of votes) provoked the successful Conservative rebellion that over the next few months destroyed the Liberal regime and inaugurated a long period of Conservative hegemony (1830–1857). Vicuña Larraín, who continued as acting president following Pinto's final withdrawal from office, was powerless to stem the tide: on 7 November 1829 a public tumult in Santiago forced him to hand power over to a junta headed by General Ramón Freire (1787–1851). With the presidential sash hidden in a hat, Vicuña Larraín withdrew to Valparaíso and from there to Coquimbo, where he was captured when the province fell into Conservative hands. He was the brother of Manuel Vicuña Larraín (1777?–1843), first archbishop of Santiago; father of the Liberal politician Pedro Félix Vicuña Aguirre (1806–1874); and grandfather of the brilliant writer-politician Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1831–1886).

See alsoChile: The Nineteenth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Diego Barras Arana, Historia general de Chile (1884–1902), vol. 15.

Additional Bibliography

Vicuña, Carlos. Biografía de don Francisco Ramón de Vicuña y Larraín: Conferencia leída en la Sociedad Chilena de Historia y Geografía. Santiago de Chile: Imp. Universitaria, 1913.

                                      Simon Collier