Pérez Salas, Francisco Antonio (1764–1828)

Francisco Antonio Pérez Salas (b. 1764; d. 10 November 1828), Chilean patriot politician. Pérez was named municipal procurador (attorney) in 1801, and was several times a member of the cabildo (municipal government) of Santiago in the last years of the colonial period. He was one of the more obdurate creole opponents of the last Spanish governor, Francisco Antonio García Carrasco (1742–1813). In 1810 he became an adviser of the first national junta, and figured thereafter in a number of public roles.

Pérez played his most important political part in 1813, following the departure of José Miguel Carrera (1785–1821) to take command of the patriot forces in the south at the start of the wars of independence. In April 1813 he was appointed a member of a three-man governing junta, and remained so until September of that year, when, much afflicted by the death of his wife, he withdrew. The junta's reforms during this period included the establishment of a new Instituto Nacional (for secondary and higher education) and the National Library. When Carrera seized power again in July 1813, he confined Pérez to San Felipe de Aconcagua.

During the Spanish reconquest of Chile (1814–1817) he was banished to Juan Fernández (an island prison for exiled political prisoners). After the liberation of Chile in 1817, Pérez served as a member of Bernardo O'Higgins's nominated senate (1818–1822).

See alsoChile: The Nineteenth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Additional Bibliography

Collier, Simon, and William F. Sater. A History of Chile, 1808–1994. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Stuven, Ana María. La seducción de un orden: Las elites y la construcción de Chile en las polémicas culturales y políticas del siglo XIX. Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2000.

                                        Simon Collier